SSDs and framerates(or the perception thereof)

[taltamir]

In theory your FPS shouldn't be affected (but there are badly designed games out there)

the biggest improvement from an SSD is in load times, install times, and texture popping reduction. All three of those show tremendous benefit with an SSD. Also, FYI: Texture popping should not affect your FPS, but still greatly affect the smoothness of the image.

You should not install ALL your games to the SSD. Only a select few that actually benefit from it should go on the SSD. Most of your games should remain on the spindle drive.
Also your OS should go on the SSD... it will eat up a good portion of it but make you enjoy general computing a lot more.
That being said, if you really want to focus entirely on gaming, then keeping the os on a spindle disk and dedicating a 60GB drive to games will help you have more of a GPU budget.

I would wait for the G3 drives though.

 

[Mogadon]

There was a thread on the Armed Assault 2 forums about improving your performance in the game, it's a bit of a computer killer.

It turns out, after much relatively scientific investigation, that if you have a decent CPU and GPU an SSD provides the single greatest performance improvements. This is not in load times but in game FPS, apparently to do with virtual memory use and being that the OS and virtual memory are on an SSD this helps majorly.

From my less scientific testing, ie. I played the game a bit before I got an SSD and then played it a bit after I got an SSD, it certainly seemed to be much smoother. Pre-SSD the game, on decent video settings, was characterized by intermittent pauses every 10 / 15 seconds, post-SSD there was no such thing, and that's with the game actually being installed on a Seagate 250GB 7200.12 rather than the SSD itself.

I have no idea what effects you'll see in other games, of course you'll benefit greatly in load times with games actually installed on the SSD.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

You should not install ALL your games to the SSD. Only a select few that actually benefit from it should go on the SSD. Most of your games should remain on the spindle drive.

I was thinking I'd put my top multiplayer shooters(BF2 and 3 when it comes ) to get a leg up on everyone with maploads, and also if I play another MMORPG such as The Old Republic, put it on the SSD too in order to reduce zone loading time or "seamless" loading stuttering.

I guess that would only leave single player games to divert to HDD. Of course, right now I'm only using like 80GB and there are some games I have on there now I wouldn't likely put back after getting SSD.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

From my less scientific testing, ie. I played the game a bit before I got an SSD and then played it a bit after I got an SSD, it certainly seemed to be much smoother. Pre-SSD the game, on decent video settings, was characterized by intermittent pauses every 10 / 15 seconds, post-SSD there was no such thing, and that's with the game actually being installed on a Seagate 250GB 7200.12 rather than the SSD itself.

That's interesting - is it possible that there are some kind of Windows processes loading in the background that make a game stutter?

 

[taltamir]

From my less scientific testing, ie. I played the game a bit before I got an SSD and then played it a bit after I got an SSD, it certainly seemed to be much smoother. Pre-SSD the game, on decent video settings, was characterized by intermittent pauses every 10 / 15 seconds, post-SSD there was no such thing, and that's with the game actually being installed on a Seagate 250GB 7200.12 rather than the SSD itself.

did you install your OS on the SSD? if so it would certainly explain it. the game and the OS had to compete for the HDD's limited resources. Now the OS resides on a difference drive.
I actually found HUGE performance increases back in spindle drive days by installing my games on a spindle drive completely seperate than the OS... and if you want to use something like bit torrent (for completely legal purposes, and yes those exist, in fact over 90% of bit torrent traffic is legal) then it better go on a third drive yet (or turn it off while you play games and have it download to the gaming HDD).
Also, copying form one partition of a drive to another partition on the same drive is murder on its performance

and if the OS stutters for any reason you can bet your game stutters too.

However, I am not sure if this can be fairly attributed to having an SSD. from my experience I believe you would have gotten rid of those stutters by using a second HDD dedicated to games (and maybe storage).

 

[Mogadon]

That's interesting - is it possible that there are some kind of Windows processes loading in the background that make a game stutter?

I think Armed Assault 2 might be one of those games that Taltamir mentioned, as in not so well designed. From my basic understanding it caches information to virtual memory by default hence you get the bottleneck of the storage device and you see an SSD making so much difference. Even if you have enough RAM to not have to use virtual memory the application uses it anyway.

I'll try and find the thread so I can link to it, my understanding of the architecture is somewhat limited (unfortunately I don't have enough time to play games and dissect their underlying architecture as well).

 

[Mogadon]

did you install your OS on the SSD? if so it would certainly explain it. the game and the OS had to compete for the HDD's limited resources. Now the OS resides on a difference drive.
I actually found HUGE performance increases back in spindle drive days by installing my games on a spindle drive completely seperate than the OS... and if you want to use something like bit torrent (for completely legal purposes, and yes those exist, in fact over 90% of bit torrent traffic is legal) then it better go on a third drive yet (or turn it off while you play games and have it download to the gaming HDD).
Also, copying form one partition of a drive to another partition on the same drive is murder on its performance

and if the OS stutters for any reason you can bet your game stutters too.

However, I am not sure if this can be fairly attributed to having an SSD. from my experience I believe you would have gotten rid of those stutters by using a second HDD dedicated to games (and maybe storage).

Yes I did, but I used to have a separate drive for my OS before. Pre-SSD days I had 3 spindle drives in my main box:

OS
Games
Local storage

I'll see if I can dig up that thread I was referring to.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

did you install your OS on the SSD? if so it would certainly explain it. the game and the OS had to compete for the HDD's limited resources. Now the OS resides on a difference drive.
I actually found HUGE performance increases back in spindle drive days by installing my games on a spindle drive completely seperate than the OS... and if you want to use something like bit torrent (for completely legal purposes, and yes those exist, in fact over 90% of bit torrent traffic is legal) then it better go on a third drive yet (or turn it off while you play games and have it download to the gaming HDD).
Also, copying form one partition of a drive to another partition on the same drive is murder on its performance

and if the OS stutters for any reason you can bet your game stutters too.

However, I am not sure if this can be fairly attributed to having an SSD. from my experience I believe you would have gotten rid of those stutters by using a second HDD dedicated to games (and maybe storage).

This is probably a silly way to look at it but; based on the above, does this mean that having two major resource using programs(ie, one the OS and the other a game) on separate HDDs or separate SSDs functions like a poor man's RAID?

Because if so, then that might justify me saving some money now by getting a smaller SSD for OS now, and then when they finally go down a bit more, get another one for game installs later. As of right now I was really trying to convince myself to get 120GB so I could hold everything on it.

 

[taltamir]

This is probably a silly way to look at it but; based on the above, does this mean that having two major resource using programs(ie, one the OS and the other a game) on separate HDDs or separate SSDs functions like a poor man's RAID?

More than that, I would say it is actually better than RAID.
Sure, in some ways it is inferior to RAID0, while in others it is quite superior.

If you had 3 spindle drives in RAID0 you might get 3x the speed... but if you were to run a heavy torrent you would find your game and OS stuttering due to HDD delays.
In effect, having a dedicated drive works as a sort of "quality of service" for drive access. It ensures your OS and games remain smooth and responsive.

On the other hand, if you were to just try to copy one huge file sequentially with nothing else running, you would get better performance with RAID0.

but having multiple separate drives is easier than raid0, and a lot more reliable.

Because if so, then that might justify me saving some money now by getting a smaller SSD for OS now, and then when they finally go down a bit more, get another one for game installs later. As of right now I was really trying to convince myself to get 120GB so I could hold everything on it.

An excellent idea, not only would all the above points stand. But RAID0 prevents TRIM, so by having two SSDs you would avoid that.
Furthermore, you could confine torrents to your older, less valuable drive to conserve writes on your newer, more expensive one.

Yes I did, but I used to have a separate drive for my OS before. Pre-SSD days I had 3 spindle drives in my main box:

OS
Games
Local storage

I'll see if I can dig up that thread I was referring to.

how odd... then there must have been something more going on. Maybe your anti virus was especially aggressive, or did you have an overly aggressive defragmenter?

 

[Mogadon]

This is probably a silly way to look at it but; based on the above, does this mean that having two major resource using programs(ie, one the OS and the other a game) on separate HDDs or separate SSDs functions like a poor man's RAID?

Because if so, then that might justify me saving some money now by getting a smaller SSD for OS now, and then when they finally go down a bit more, get another one for game installs later. As of right now I was really trying to convince myself to get 120GB so I could hold everything on it.

Not RAID as such it's just that you are able to access two separate drives simultaneously, if everything's on one drive requests have to be queued.

For a basic analogy it's like if you have two people trying to access two separate things from the same filing cabinet one has to wait for the other. If you have two filing cabinets and person one gets their crap from cabinet one and person two gets their crap from cabinet two they can do that simultaneously.

 

[strep3241]

I found out why I was getting low FPS in BFBC2. It was the overclock. As soon as I put it back to stock settings with turbo enabled, I was getting in the 70's and 80's. So either I had a setting wrong or SSD's just don't like overclocking for some reason.

Take a look at this pic:
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/5246/27684398.png

Anything look wrong?

 

[Zap]

I found out why I was getting low FPS in BFBC2. It was the overclock. As soon as I put it back to stock settings with turbo enabled, I was getting in the 70's and 80's. So either I had a setting wrong or SSD's just don't like overclocking for some reason.

If overclocking kills performance, then it wasn't a stable overclock.

 

[strep3241]

Well according to Intel Burn Test, it was. There is obviously something wrong somewhere.

Even it wasn't stable, I wouldn't think it would kill performance. I just figured it would crash while under load.

 

[strep3241]

Update, I am now overclocked to 3.2ghz and the frame rates are fine in BC2. The only thing I did was leave the memory multiplier set to auto which makes the ram run at 1280.

I still think there is something wrong with the settings. When I try to run Linx, it will not do anything once I am overclocked. No matter how long I let it run, it will not do anything. But if I run it at stock settings, it works fine.

So there may be still something that is wrong, I just don't know what it is. But I am suspecting memory.

 

[taltamir]

Well according to Intel Burn Test, it was.

passing a test does not mean it is a stable overclock...

Perform burn test X:
Pass: Overclock stability is unknown
Fail: Overclock proven to be unstable.

We perform several burn tests, if all of them pass then we STILL don't have scientific proof that the overclock is stable, but we are assuming that it is until we see otherwise. It is not uncommon for you to pass every single type of burn test and still see issues with a specific program or game. Which prove it was not a stable overclock after all.