SSD - The ultimate performance enhancer?
tummy_yummy
Join Date: 2013-05-01 Member: 185073Members, Reinforced - Gold, WC 2013 - Supporter
Join Date: 2013-05-01 Member: 185073Members, Reinforced - Gold, WC 2013 - Supporter
I'm running an i7 920, 16GB of RAM, GTX 670.
Frame rate in Mar 2013: ~80fps
Dec 2013: ~70fps
Jun 2014: ~45fps
Aug 2014: ~25fps by myself in tram looking at a wall...
My tummy was genuinely gurgling with frustration - why was the game performing so badly? Why was it degrading over time?
I read matso's post about dynamic loading and freeing of game assets, and how this would often result in disk i/o - very interesting post, but at the time I didn't make the connection. One day NS2 took 15 minutes to load and then I realised my old HDD was dying - it must have been getting gradually worse for months, and finally kicked the bucket. Bought a new SSD (Windows was already running off a dedicated SSD system drive), and now not only does the game take 8 seconds to load, but I've been getting *silky smooth* performance (~90fps, min 60).
Now this was just 1 week ago, i.e. latest release, and matso/CDT have already attempted to address this problem directly by making the loading/caching/freeing of resources a bit less aggressive, but this seems to me to be a pretty strong indication that there's a lot of unnecessary disk i/o going on mid-frame. I'm pretty sure that I controlled for most other factors (gfx drivers up to date, no change to system drive, no change to game settings) and it really seems to be the change to SSD that yielded this improvement.
So the main point I want to make is this: if you want the game to run well, don't compromise on the storage. No amount of RAM will save you. Buy an SSD.
Frame rate in Mar 2013: ~80fps
Dec 2013: ~70fps
Jun 2014: ~45fps
Aug 2014: ~25fps by myself in tram looking at a wall...
My tummy was genuinely gurgling with frustration - why was the game performing so badly? Why was it degrading over time?
I read matso's post about dynamic loading and freeing of game assets, and how this would often result in disk i/o - very interesting post, but at the time I didn't make the connection. One day NS2 took 15 minutes to load and then I realised my old HDD was dying - it must have been getting gradually worse for months, and finally kicked the bucket. Bought a new SSD (Windows was already running off a dedicated SSD system drive), and now not only does the game take 8 seconds to load, but I've been getting *silky smooth* performance (~90fps, min 60).
Now this was just 1 week ago, i.e. latest release, and matso/CDT have already attempted to address this problem directly by making the loading/caching/freeing of resources a bit less aggressive, but this seems to me to be a pretty strong indication that there's a lot of unnecessary disk i/o going on mid-frame. I'm pretty sure that I controlled for most other factors (gfx drivers up to date, no change to system drive, no change to game settings) and it really seems to be the change to SSD that yielded this improvement.
So the main point I want to make is this: if you want the game to run well, don't compromise on the storage. No amount of RAM will save you. Buy an SSD.
Comments
It totally is. When windows loads quicker than ns2 does, that is awesome (I load ns2 in about 10-15 seconds).
So it would seem logical to conclude that it would mostly improve startup times, but also FPS jitter/stutter. So yeah it is an all out war against the machine with having a top of the line CPU(OC?)/GPU/Mem/HDD(SSD) etc... A complete package for maximum performance. NS2 is quite demanding on all of those, compared to other games that look similar but have less to do in terms of script loading I guess...
On a 7200RPM samsung Spinpoint 1Tb I load maps in at about 1-1.5minute. But with that 16Gb of Ram after the initial loading of stuff I seem to load maps in at around 20-30s on a normal HDD so memory does help. That undead HDD you had was totally screwing you over man :P
Not that ns2 isnt making useless harddisk calls.
A ssd still gives much more speed then a hybrid but the hybrid offers the enormous amount of diskspace in reasonable price, the ssd lacks.
the amount of change in fps you're seeing isn't due to the difference between optical drives and ssds. i'm running ns2 on a regular optical drive and i idle at around 180 fps. having a broken hdd may have been wreaking all sorts of havoc on your system, actively slowing down your cpu maybe.
what it comes down to:
if you want the game and maps to load up faster, get an ssd.
if you want your fps to increase 95% of the time you need to upgrade your video card or cpu.
if your computer is broken, then your computer is broken, and all bets are off. you should fix it.
so there.
But, yeah, SSDs. They're great. They're cheap. They make a huge difference. HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) are not optical. They are magnetic. Trying to run the filesystem from an optical drive would be hilariously slow.
Hmm this REALLY makes me wonder if NS2 caused my SSD to die...
I had a 240gb SSD with the OS and NS2 installed on it. Played the game fine for like 6-8 months after I built my rig, then all of a sudden I started having crashes with I/O error messages.
At the time I attributed the problem to my GFX drivers, which I upgraded to the 14.6 betas for watchdogs... I wiped my SSD, reinstalled Win7, my old drivers (14.4) and my games, (minus Watchdogs since it ran poorly without the driver update) and things worked ok for a week or two before I started having crashes again, all while playing NS2. (and they were frequently followed by an I/O error message, and the occasional explorer crash)
The last crash I had on that SSD was during a game of NS2... It crashed, I got an I/O error message, then explorer crashed and I had to shut down... After that it was dead.
Since then I re-installed everything to my HDD, and things worked fine for awhile... No more crashes at all. Until about a week ago I had another crash with another I/O error. I uninstalled NS2 and (regretfully) haven't played it since, and have experienced no more crashes or problems.
My SSD was less than a year old, could it really have been NS2 that killed it? This kind of has me worried to try the game again since I'd be royally screwed if my HDD died.
SSD caching makes my 5400 RPM laptop drive load faster than most people with 7200 RPM desktop drives. Still doesn't match the performance of just having an SSD, but it is more cost-efficient.
If it was, your ssd had a pre-existing issue. I have had the same ssd for 2 years, and it was mid end when I got. I have reinstalled windows probably 5 times (personal reasons) and played 1350 hours on it. It has 11.53 TB of writes and smart data shows it to still be great.
If your ssd died it obviously had issues. I just doubt ns2 is what killed it.
Also @coolitic yes caching SSDs are faster then hybrid disks, but hybrid disks are faster then standard harddisks.
Without full pre-loading, you may have a bit of hitching here and there but average frame rate is still unaffected.
this is correct, not sure why i was saying optical.
nope.
ssds just die quicker than hdds.
The only thing I observed that I wasn't expecting was this: The game is clearly hitting the disk a lot during gameplay, as evidenced by the huge frame rate increase when changing from my really bad HDD to SSD. Why resources aren't just retained in RAM but are instead loaded from the disk over and over again in real time is a question for the CDT guys, but it seems to me that any user who is not RAM constrained would experience some marginal improvement in performance if the game always pre-loaded everything and never had to do disk access in-game.
Its paging a lot I assume because the game is very close to hitting 2GB in ram as is. Which ya know, is the normal limit for most folk on 32bit systems.. Sadly not all play on 64b yet.
The 3gb switch does close to nothing in terms of performance on a gaming system.
32b has a 4GB limit. Using the 3GB switch would make the OS grab 1GB and the apps 3GB rather then 2/2. However... this is 4GB IN TOTAL. Basicly part of your memory is assigned to adress your nice 1GB video card.
Ive seen memory up to 1GB 'disapear' like this which means the OS grabs the other 1GB leaving just 2 for the OS.
I don't have SSD and i frequently load to maps faster than those with one, i'd like to say how good fps i have but seeing how NS2 can so easily drag it down to really low numbers from 200, how does one even know anymore..