SSD Performance In Crysis 2, World Of Warcraft, And Civilization V

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There are a ton of terms used to quantify storage performance. If you're a gamer, you have to be wondering how such dry terminology can apply to having fun. Rather than telling you, we're going to dissect three popular titles to show you instead.

Loading Levels In Crysis 2

Loading a level is actually more storage-intensive than launching the game. This makes sense, since you aren't loading lots of graphics data until you start playing the game itself.

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Overall StatisticsCrysis 2: Level Loading
Elapsed Time00:58
Read Operations9 493
Write Operations395
Data Read755.01 MB
Data Written26.49 MB
Disk Busy Time2.27 s
Average Data Rate345.00 MB/s

When we load the last level in Crysis 2 (A Walk in the Park), our Vertex 3 has to read more than three-quarters of a gigabyte. Almost all of the operations are sequential in nature, but the majority of them occur at a 128 KB transfer size. That's a large enough chunk of data that there's no bottleneck imposed by little tiny transfers, as there was before. In short, you'll see a substantial speed-up loading a level on a SSD compared to a hard drive.

I/O Trends:

  • 46% of all operations are 128 KB in transfer size
  • 50% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
  • 15% of all operations occur at a queue depth of two
  • 10% of all operations occur at a queue depth of three
  • 75% of all operations are sequential

Seek Distance

QD

Transfer Size