SSD Real-world performance gain is negligible compared with HDD

[xeledon20005]

He doesn't know where the bottleneck is getting a faster SSD probably won't help.

I've heard people saying SSD gives a better experience in skyrim but i'm not sure what he was expecting.

The tone of his post was not I need help I don't think this is working properly. It just comes off as complaining which isn't the best way to get help. I know I was even reluctant to post after I read it because this will turn into a mud slinging troll thread in no time.

Agreed seems like we need to kick this troll back under the bridge.

 

[Makaveli]

Okay here's game on the SSD :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-PVtUPdPzM&feature=youtu.be

Here it is on the HDD :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3P9av6TCW8&feature=youtu.be

Framerate is lowered to 25fps by the video converter for some reason, the hitching looks worse at 60fps.

Here is I/O during gameplay:

image hosting imageshack

As for the countless trolls in this thread, I really don't need to respond to you people. I'm not making this thread so some random people on a forum who think they know more than they actually do can give their generic advice of "Update your drivers, check your temps, etc...", I'm writing it so that if someone searching on the net wants to see if an SSD will fix his in-game data-streaming stutters, he will stumble upon this thread and think twice.

Oh and one last note, I know what my specs are and what their limitations are and I constantly monitor their usage, so I don't really need some newbies teaching me about network lag and CPU bottlenecks.

This should have been the original post.

"will SSD fix in-game data-streaming stutters in Skyrim" this a better thread title

The way this was created is the reason you are getting the responses you are, if you stick around you will find there is alot of knowledge on this forum and people willing to help.

Your issue is specific to one game.

The real world gains are apparent when doing stuff that is I/O intensive.

I'm going to assume this is a priority game for you and you have done your research before you purchased the SSD.

I would like to know more about Skyrim and SSD's performance can you post any other links that you may have gotten any other information to base your purchase on?

 

[sm625]

Simply loading a game isnt much of a real world test. That's just a bunch of simple sequential reads that any disk can handle. How about trying to browse an ebay page while your game is loading, and a video is playing off to the side.

How about when you've got 12 tabs open and a few other programs running, and all the sudden you need to go someplace and you want to actually be able to save and get out of all your work, go to their website and go to google maps and do all that as fast as possible so you can get out the door. Times like that are when you notice the lag an HDD creates. And if you dont notice it, then whatever. You probably dont notice a pile of bird poop on your window either.

 

[Falafil]

This should have been the original post.

"will SSD fix in-game data-streaming stutters in Skyrim" this a better thread title

The way this was created is the reason you are getting the responses you are, if you stick around you will find there is alot of knowledge on this forum and people willing to help.

Your issue is specific to one game.

The real world gains are apparent when doing stuff that is I/O intensive.

I'm going to assume this is a priority game for you and you have done your research before you purchased the SSD.

I would like to know more about Skyrim and SSD's performance can you post any other links that you may have gotten any other information to base your purchase on?

I just gave one example. There are other games, like Mass Effect (intermittent in-game loading screens are no faster on the SSD than on the HDD).

Skyrim: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/445773-will-running-skyrim-off-an-ssd-improve-gameplay/

 

[Falafil]

Simply loading a game isnt much of a real world test. That's just a bunch of simple sequential reads that any disk can handle. How about trying to browse an ebay page while your game is loading, and a video is playing off to the side.

How about when you've got 12 tabs open and a few other programs running, and all the sudden you need to go someplace and you want to actually be able to save and get out of all your work, go to their website and go to google maps and do all that as fast as possible so you can get out the door. Times like that are when you notice the lag an HDD creates. And if you dont notice it, then whatever. You probably dont notice a pile of bird poop on your window either.

Well as others on this thread have already mentioned, SSD's would come in handy when opening multiple programs at the same time or opening a hundred browser tabs, but the main concern for expensive performance PC's is games.

 

[Makaveli]

but the main concern for expensive performance PC's is games.

That varies per person. While I play games on my rig I do far more work related stuff now than I did previously.

Anyone that builds a super expensive pc to just play games and does nothing else well its your money but your better off with a console if gaming playing is your only priority.

 

[Cerb]

But load times were never really a concern to me, what I bought the SSD for was to eliminate the loading stutter/hiccups/hitching in games where data is streamed while playing rather than being fully loaded into RAM in the pre-game loading screen. And there was not a single improvement over the HDD. The load stutter was still there, and I checked and double checked drive usage during these periods and the SSD would send data at the same speed the HDD did.

That's because the HDD was never the bottleneck. The game being designed for a console was the problem. The stuttering is more caused by waiting on CPU/GPU communication, and/or the CPU time overhead of managing the VRAM.

I think SSD's are like the Emperor's new clothes, either they are not what they claim to be, or all programmers and game developers place some restrictions to prevent you from taking advantage of your SSD. Either way, SSD's are not worth the money.

Here's what happens:
1. Somebody gets a new build with an SSD, and attributes the smoother performance all to the SSD.
2. Somebody with too little RAM gets an SSD, and does get a massive improvement...that would have been 90% negated just by having more RAM for Windows to cache files in. The people who say, "xGB RAM is enough," until somebody shows a game using more than that all by itself fall into this category (you really want 50-100% more, so there's tons of file cache space).

SSDs are good, but they only take care of the times when HDDs would be slowing you down. I wouldn't mind having a big one in my desktop, but I'm still using an HDD, because it's not really a problem, and I like not having to manage multiple drives, which I have done in the past for disk performance reasons.

Me and BFG10K try to play devil's advocate around here, a lot, but we can only try to depress so many zealots.

 

[nanaki333]

just curious... what's the rest of your system look like? also, is ahci enabled in your bios so that ssd can perform like it was meant to?

 

[Topweasel]

Me and BFG10K try to play devil's advocate around here, a lot, but we can only try to depress so many zealots.

Some people hold onto an idea and refuse to let it go. Last year on this forum I tried to explain to a user, that was wondering if he should replace his Raid 0 V-Raptor setup for what others were suggesting, a single SSD plugged into a Sata II port, might not be worth it. I got burned in the towns center with all the towns people chanting "random access time" over and over, regardless of the fact that his read and write times would be faster right off the bat since the SSD would be capped at ~270MB/s.

 

[pcslookout]

Some people hold onto an idea and refuse to let it go. Last year on this forum I tried to explain to a user, that was wondering if he should replace his Raid 0 V-Raptor setup for what others were suggesting, a single SSD plugged into a Sata II port, might not be worth it. I got burned in the towns center with all the towns people chanting "random access time" over and over, regardless of the fact that his read and write times would be faster right off the bat since the SSD would be capped at ~270MB/s.

Yep I saw that.

This is why I use a better forum now for most of my advice and laugh at all the people here.

 

[Makaveli]

That's because the HDD was never the bottleneck. The game being designed for a console was the problem. The stuttering is more caused by waiting on CPU/GPU communication, and/or the CPU time overhead of managing the VRAM.

This is what I was thinking was the issue I don't believe its an I/O bottleneck, and SSD is much faster than an HDD. So if he switched and didn't notice a difference it should be obvious the issue was not a hard drive bottleneck its somewhere else in the chain.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Some people hold onto an idea and refuse to let it go. Last year on this forum I tried to explain to a user, that was wondering if he should replace his Raid 0 V-Raptor setup for what others were suggesting, a single SSD plugged into a Sata II port, might not be worth it. I got burned in the towns center with all the towns people chanting "random access time" over and over, regardless of the fact that his read and write times would be faster right off the bat since the SSD would be capped at ~270MB/s.

Well those people were correct if the SSD was replacing his system/OS/Programs drive. Those seq. write/reads don't really matter for general use where as random access does.

From what I've seen, SSDs don't benefit in games too much outside a few scenarios where as there are other bottlenecks elsewhere in the game that could be more of the problem e.g server latency to GPU limitations etc.

 

[Batmeat]

Yes great proof, I'm convinced. One video showing only something remotely related to video games, where there's a Crysis playing in the background while some guy is jumping on a trampoline holding a ton of SSD's.

And another video showing half boot time? The thread is about gameplay, and I never said that loading times didn't improve, I said they were not something that made you go "wow!". I get even better windows boot times than on that video, plus I already said that my game load times are the same as the others posted on youtube.

Did you even finish watching the second video? Showed an increase of 11% loading Farcry, not Crisis.

Also, I failed to find the specs of your system. What are they?
Lastly, I did mention there can be other causes to your problem, of which can be determined by specs of your computer and what your connection speed is as well as your ISP. I don't play Skyrim so I can't really comment on its online capability ( does it even have any)?

 

[beginner99]

Certainly the internet is full of garbage, and it is unfortunately there my decision to buy an SSD was made. You would read people saying:
"Mmmm... my SSD is so lightning fast! I don't know how I lived without it! Everything is so much more responsive!" (note the use of the word "responsive" in a vague manner without explaining what is precisely meant by it).
"Yes after using the SSD everything in Skyrim became butter smooth! No more load hiccups! I can't believe I used to play Skyrim without an SSD! You should try it!" (and no visual proof of this is given)
"I used to wait 10 minutes for my Call of Duty game to load, now it loads in only like 2 seconds!" (and no visual proof of this is given)

I think SSD's are like the Emperor's new clothes, either they are not what they claim to be, or all programmers and game developers place some restrictions to prevent you from taking advantage of your SSD. Either way, SSD's are not worth the money.

Well SSDs certainly can't fix broken Games and Game engines like Skyrim or STALKER COP. The latter stutters like shit too regardless if it is on an 5400 rpm drive or ssd. If you woudl have asked here:

"Will an SSD fix stuttering in Skyrim?" i'm sure most would have told you no.

SSD has little benefit for gaming. It's about usability of the OS when doing actual work, actual multi-tasking. I also like faster boot times because when you play around like with OCing that can matter a lot...

 

[Topweasel]

Well those people were correct if the SSD was replacing his system/OS/Programs drive. Those seq. write/reads don't really matter for general use where as random access does.

From what I've seen, SSDs don't benefit in games too much outside a few scenarios where as there are other bottlenecks elsewhere in the game that could be more of the problem e.g server latency to GPU limitations etc.

Not wanting to restart that conversation. But the point wasn't whether SSD would be better. It was the suggestion that it might not be worth it. Sure would random access performance be better and noticeable. I never even fought that. But that isn't the only that affects performance and most of the time it's probably better to upgrade memory. Specially when using Windows 7. I put 32GB into my new system last year and Windows 7 precaches to 20GB of that. 32GB is probably overkill for 90% of the people even in the forum but again that was at the time only $200. Again even that doesn't remove everything that would be sped up by an SSD. But overall a couple of minor tweaks to the system would have been easier than uprooting a users whole storage system from raid to an SSD just for a random access time increase and probably a significant drop in read/write performance.

 

[Makaveli]

Well SSDs certainly can't fix broken Games and Game engines like Skyrim or STALKER COP. The latter stutters like shit too regardless if it is on an 5400 rpm drive or ssd. If you woudl have asked here:

"Will an SSD fix stuttering in Skyrim?" i'm sure most would have told you no.

SSD has little benefit for gaming. It's about usability of the OS when doing actual work, actual multi-tasking. I also like faster boot times because when you play around like with OCing that can matter a lot...

Agreed,

Had the poster did alittle more research I think he would have seen this. I think its abit of buyers remorse now cause it did nothing for skyrim so he felt like he wasted his money. But to say the increase isn't there over and HD because of one game is totally false and misleading.

 

[mrpiggy]

Try the same HDD vs SSD game-opening/level-loading test while running an antivirus scan and downloading files from the Internet in the background at the same time. One will piss you off less. Sometimes things don't have to "wow" you to make it a worthwhile upgrade. It's not the competition of SSD to HDD best-case scenarios that make a real difference (and pure, non-thrashing sequential reads are always a best-case for HDD's). It's the lessening of the impact in "worst-case" scenarios that makes SSD's worthwhile.

 

[Lifted]

My own experience 20 minutes ago with a Samsung 840 500GB SSD...

I was creating an ISO from about 12,000 files in 600 folders totaling ~4.2GB. These files were on the SSD, and the ISO was being created on the same SSD. I've done this in the past with HDD's, and would read & write from/to 2 different drives because otherwise it would take ages using a single drive (and still took ages using 2 drives if there were a lot of smallish files). Today, reading a writing to a single drive, I was getting 120MB/s read & write, simultaneously... entire operation took ~ 30 seconds.

I <3 my SSD. :wub::wub::wub:

 

[Bill Brasky]

Did you even finish watching the second video? Showed an increase of 11% loading Farcry, not Crisis.

Also, I failed to find the specs of your system. What are they?Lastly, I did mention there can be other causes to your problem, of which can be determined by specs of your computer and what your connection speed is as well as your ISP. I don't play Skyrim so I can't really comment on its online capability ( does it even have any)?

Honestly, the posts in this thread are irrelevant without the rest of his system. Did I miss it?

 

[Makaveli]

Honestly, the posts in this thread are irrelevant without the rest of his system. Did I miss it?

He didn't post it and looks like he created this thread and ran cause he didn't like the answers he was getting.

 

[Enigma102083]

When I get home I'm going to post video of my computer loading WAAAAAY faster in the League of Legends loading screen than the other players.

 

[MrK6]

This thread is filled with teenage angst and little data. OP should post his full system specs and then what he was trying to change/upgrade/accomplish with buying a new SSD. Honestly, he even do any of his own homework comparing before and after times so I'm not expecting much.

That said, I'm always one of the first if not the first to load in BF3 or any other online game, and it's been that way ever since I got an Intel G2 over three years ago.

 

[Blain]

I bought a top-of-the-line SSD, the Samsung 840 series,

I think SSD's are like the Emperor's new clothes, either they are not what they claim to be, or all programmers and game developers place some restrictions to prevent you from taking advantage of your SSD. Either way, SSD's are not worth the money.

* Did you buy a straight 840 or 840 Pro SSD?
* What capacity is the 840?
* How much are you selling the sub-par SSD for?
* Are you taking PayPal?

 

[KingerXI]

I think you must have another problem. I don't feel like reading all the prior posts, so I apologize if I am repeating. Did you do a fresh install of Windows? Which version of Windows? Did you set to ahcu? Do you have SATA 6? Have you done all chipset updates? Did you Google "SSD tweaks" and do all those suggestions? Have you done all driver and Windows updates? I assure you... if you have the right hardware and get the optimized for an SSD, they are a HUGE upgrade to a spinner.

 

[Jeff7181]

SSD's are faster than HDD's. That's a fact. The question is, will you notice? If your computer doesn't boot faster with a SSD, either you have a crap SSD or a misconfiguration. Assuming you don't have a misconfiguration and you have a good quality SSD, if you still don't notice a difference, then you weren't storage I/O bound to begin with and shouldn't expect any improvement.