Hard Data Proves: SSDs Improve Game Performance
Hard Data Proves: SSDs Improve Game Performance
Posted 09/15/2010 at 12:35pm
| by Loyd Case
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Having an SSD will load games faster. But your in-game experience will also be improved. The numbers don’t lie.
Hard core gamers know by now that Windows and games will load faster if you’re running from an SSD. Did you know your gameplay will improve, too? Intel has the numbers to prove it.
Adam Lake from Intel’s Visual Computing Group and Glen Miner from game developer Digital Extremes gave an animated talk about the impact of solid state drives on both the gaming experience and how SSDs improve productivity during the game development process. First, let’s look at playing games.
Halting States
First up was Lake, who has worked with game development for years, inside and outside of Intel. He noted that modern game engines continuously stream data to the system. Games today are too large for the assets of a level to be fully cached on a modern graphics card. Main memory is also a limiting factor – not everyone has 12 gigabytes on their PCs.
As you move through the virtual world, the game is making guesses as to where you’ll navigate next. It has some information, like an overall map of the level, or where the next turn might be on a virtual race course. So it will stream in assets – textures, model data, level-of-detail information and sound files – ahead of time.
If the game guesses wrong, however, it has to reload the new data. Think of this as a kind of game engine cache miss – except that it has to go back to system storage to load the right data. Glen Miner calls this the “valley of despair” for a game engine – it doesn’t have the data, needs to get the data and the only thing that can happen is for the game action to come to a grinding halt.
Gamers will see this as brief pauses in the game – something Adam Lake called “hitching.” One example used was a full resolution, uncompressed video capture from an Intel 920 system with a GeForce 295 GTX of an Assassin’s Creed II playthrough. As the character runs through the world, you could clearly see the hitching of the character as new assets would stream in. Another game exhibiting similar behavior is Demigod, a PC only title – so you can’t blame this behavior on bad console ports.
Intel captured storage traces during gameplay – data about reads from the storage medium while the game was being played. Note that they were using 10,000RPM Velociraptor hard drives, so these weren’t slow drives by any means. The company noticed that the hitches corresponded in time with high levels of disk activity – the game was going to disk, finding the needed data and loading it.
This chart shows pointers to the peaks of high disk activity. Every time this would happen, the scene would briefly freeze – only for a moment, but enough to be jarring. In Assassin’s Creed II, the character could actually get through the level faster.
So now we have hard data proving SSDs are better for gaming. What about game development?
More Productivity in a Flash
Glen Miner discussed issues with game development and storage. Individual programmer and artist workstations have relatively small amounts of local storage, and check in their ongoing work onto servers. Some servers are tagged as build servers, and either optimize layouts or handle the frequent trial builds of a game.
Digital Extremes is a multiplatform studio – most of its development efforts are focused on console game titles. However, coders and artists use PCs as their primary development platform.
Touching on just one issue, when games are ready to be mastered to disc (which can happen often during testing), the layout is optimized for most efficient streaming. Servers handle the optimization process. When transferring this optimization process from hard drives to SSDs, Digital Extremes saw a better than 2x speedup in the process.
The speedup in the software build process was even greater, while other speedups were less. But Miner estimates that overall productivity throughput doubled by simply adding SSDs to user workstations and key servers allocated to compute-intensive apps. So although SSDs are pricey, the gains in development productivity more than outweighed the cost.
For more news from this year's Intel Developer Forum, click here!
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Lhot
September 16, 2010 at 7:52am
....well I guess we won't know till 10 years is up...just sayin... :)
Btw, myn old WD 36Gb Raptor is still running and its 9 years old atm :)
BouJhi
September 15, 2010 at 10:05pm
hey guys,
I have my laptop right, its an asus G60-jx, it features an i5 with a nvidia GTS 360m, 64 bit and the like.
My thing is, Im a college student, so i need the portability (and a car) so thats why im on a laptop. Ill upgrade to desktop when i can, but for now its this...
can i take out my HDD and replace it with a SSD? i dont really need the 500 GBs, cause i have a 1.5 TB external, and im only using about 256 GBs right now.
If I could, I would replace it in a heartbeat.
ill check back tommorow. and ill post this on other forums. Thanks!
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Scatmanbrandt
September 15, 2010 at 11:40pm
Yes it is very likey you can simply replace your HDD with an SSD but do to price it depends on if you really need one. I got an Intel X-25M for free once but due to drivers issues I couldn't use it in my laptop (Alienware M7700) because all the ata drivers were corrupted and I didn't have a second one for a raid. Any decent SSD will set you back $150+ where as you can get a really fast hard drive for 1/3 of that.
One last thing, my boss at 7-Eleven is an engineer at LSI (COS) and they have been doing alot of tests on SSD's, thats how I got mine for free, and he says that SSD's are still in a bad state. The flash memory can go bad quickly when you do a lot of writes and caching, which Windows does every millisecond or so, so if you do use it don't get it as a primary drive for booting the OS because it will go bad. That's just my 2 cents worth, in short; It should work, don't use it as a boot drive if your laptop supports 2 drives, don't get Crucial or OCZ because they are the worst right now.
mesiah
September 16, 2010 at 2:04am
Everything I read in your post is 100% backwards from every professional review I have ever seen about SSDs. First... your boss at 7-Eleven is an engineer at lsi? He must be the lowest paid engineer of all time if he is running a 7-eleven on his time off. But that is beside the point.
While SSDs have not been in the mainstream for very long, flash memory itsself has. The engineers that design SSDs know how many times they can write to a chip before it begins to fail. They also know how often the average computer writes to the hard drive. Based on those numbers, intel and other manufacturers are claiming at least a 10 year life span. Some manufacturers are actually warrantying their product for 10 years.
As for not using your SSD as a system drive, that is terrible advice. SSDs strong suit is lightning fast random reads and writes. If you are just using it to store data and movies you aren't going to get even a fraction of the performance increase your drive has to offer. While it is true that your OS is constantly writing to the drive, most SSDs today have complex software and work in conjunction with the OS to make sure that all parts of the drive are wearing equally and date is being stored efficiently.
Last, advising against using ocz drives seems to fly in the face of every comparison. OCZ has proven that they are dedicated to perfecting SSD technology. They are working closely with the controller manufacturers and constantly releasing firmware revisions. They were one of the first companies to start using the barefoot and sandforce controllers instead of the lousy jmicron and samsung setups that are the primary reason why SSDs got such a bad rap in the past.
I have been using an intel x25M for about a year now, and I will never go back to a conventional system drive. It is lightning fast and 100% trouble free. My system starts up almost instantly and games load in the blink of an eye. Don't believe this guys misinformation.
chigasakigaijin
September 15, 2010 at 6:36pm
I've been waiting for SSD prices to drop to a certain price point. Then I read this report, get all jazzed up to pick up an SSD, check Newegg for the 5th time this week(!) and lo and behold, the G.Skill 120GB SSD is at $235 on a ShellShocker deal with no need for a rebate!
I...finally...pulled...the...trigger...
Bring it baby!
Here's the link...I think it's only a deal for tonight: http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx?cm_sp=ShellShocker-_-20-231-378-_-09152010
chigasakigaijin
Silencer
September 16, 2010 at 3:03am
...they'll be twice as big for half as much. Then I'll get one too.
chigasakigaijin
September 16, 2010 at 7:22am
I determined that 120GB would get me my OS and all the games I'm currently playing, plus all of my frequently used apps, plus space for an MMO and a few expansions. The beauty of steam is the ability to redownload a purchased game whenever you want to start playing it again. That being said, my system only has a 240GB HD as it is, so I'm gonna be set for the forseeable future. And I've waited 3 months already while the sweet spot went from 80GB SSD to 120GB SSD.
I'm ready to feel the burn :)
Silencer
September 17, 2010 at 3:47am
You might want to update your motherboard's BIOS. I'm sure you'll love it!
chigasakigaijin
September 18, 2010 at 3:33pm
Thanks for the tip! Headed over to MB manufacturer website now.
chigasakigaijin
marz26
September 15, 2010 at 4:30pm
I like what I hear/read, and am now considering upgrading to a SSD more than I was before reading the article. I do however have one more question. How does it affect performance of online games (if at all)? Will it help load zones and scenery faster or is that all still on memory/internet speed...etc...?
Please enlighten me, because if there is a considerable increase for MMORPG's I will probably go to frys and get me a new drive tomorrow!!
mesiah
September 16, 2010 at 2:30am
Loading zones faster yes, loading scenery faster, not necessarily. Because most mmo game worlds are simply massive, most systems would choke and die if the game tried to render every single thing as far as the eye could see. Because of that, in most mmos you will notice scenery like trees and bushes pop up on the screen where there were none before as you get close. This generally isn't caused by hard drive delays, but instead it has to do with how far out the game chooses to render detailed objects. Usually major objects in the distance are rendered with increasing detail as you approach them, but smaller objects are left out entirely. In some games you can change this setting.
As for load times, I don't play WoW anymore but I used to and I can tell you that the first time I logged in after installing an SSD, I almost fell out of my chair. My old system used to take roughly 45 seconds from when I clicked the button to enter the game world and when everything was loaded and ready to play. After the SSD it took roughly 5 seconds. I didn't notice as dramatic of an effect on the other mmo I played at the time (final fantasy xi.) Either way, if you have the extra cash to throw around and you already have a high end video card, I would say an SSD is a no brainer. (Spend the money on a video card first though)
Lhot
September 15, 2010 at 3:01pm
....the question in my mind is will they survive as long as, let's say a Velociraptor. or even the 'old as dirt' 2.1 and 1.2 GB HDD's in an old Hp Vectra, I have in a closet somewhere....they both work and check disk shows them both still fine.
Reading between the lines of the various SSD reviews....it seems to me that noone is sticking their neck out about SSD longevity. Maybe you guys and gals could whip up some looping test on a Velociraptor and the best SSD (SLC I would assume) and just let it run till one or the other dies. Like maybe write zeros to them over and over.
No matter which one survived the longest...it'll still make a great story, especially if a camera and some form of fire extinguisher are handy when one or the other fails. WD has a 5year warranty on their Velociraptors, and from all the reviews I've read about SSD's....I'm not seeing that length of warranty for SSD's...and we ALL know that for down to earth trustable facts.... "Only the Shadow KNOWS" ..... and of course MaxPC.
P.S. I think Gordon IS the Shadow :)
P.P.S. I'd bet your readers would like to see Gordon in some superhero costume equivalent to his computer prowess. Just make sure one of his powers ISN'T.... killing the guy who came up with this idea. :)
Bullwinkle J Moose
September 15, 2010 at 1:23pm
I wuz over at OCZ Forums a couple of weeks back looking for info on the hardware encryption of Sandforce SSD's and wuz SHOCKED by the number of bricked VERTEX 2 drives that revert back to old data and ignore new data after shutdown or reboot!
Who is covering this story as it unfolds anyway???
Cy-Kill
September 15, 2010 at 1:21pm
Shouldn't that title read:
Hard Data Proves
And, not:
Hard Date Proves
wlballplayer
September 15, 2010 at 1:16pm
well i am actually thinking of getting an SSD now. more than double my performance :) it's definitely an upgrade. lets not forget that you should only upgrade if it improves your performance by the double. Ex. dualcore to quad yes. but not dual core to triple... you will be wasting money.
korosu
September 15, 2010 at 2:25pm
An SSD might double your performance over a hard drive, but don't fool yourself into thinking a quad core CPU will double your performance over dual core. Maybe it will be double if the quad has a much higher clock speed, or if you're using video transcoding as your benchmark.
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