Benchmarks of Meltdown and Spectre Updates Suggest Big Slow Down for SSDs

Megalith

Megalith

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TechSpot has published four pages of insight on how the OS and motherboard patches for Meltdown and Spectre could affect your desktop system. While the primary concern for many is CPU performance, the hits to SSDs are also noteworthy: results show up to 40% degradation for processes such as sequential read and write.

Horrible storage performance aside we consistently saw less than a 5% reduction in gaming performance, you’re looking at around a 3-4% drop for the most part when CPU limited, less when GPU limited. SSD performance doesn’t impact frame rates. We’ve seen this when comparing slow hard drives with ultra-snappy SSDs, so there’s really nothing to gain there. Where a drop in storage performance can hurt is with game load times.
 
Well, what else is there waiting to be discovered that hits performance?
 
Talk about cherry picking the data. I had to hunt for the MASSIVE 40% loss. 40% loss on 4k random reads/writes. The rest showed almost no problems, and what they sweep under the rug for the narrative, some performance marks improved...
 
nightanole said:
Talk about cherry picking the data. I had to hunt for the MASSIVE 40% loss. 40% loss on 4k random reads/writes. The rest showed almost no problems, and what they sweep under the rug for the narrative, some performance marks improved...
Click to expand...

And that one 40% is enough for me to be pissed off. Any form of I/O speed loss you're -going- to notice. Not like that particular transfer is some golden unicorn or some such.
 
Check out PCPer's testing; 960 EVO and Optane 900P performance increased while 960 Pro performance decreased. Note the improvement from the latest Windows 10 fast ring build - looks like they're getting some good work done with low latency NVMe.
 
I just tested my 950 Pro with the latest MS patch OS build 16299.192 and my 4KiB Q8T8 score its 400 points slower with the update, here's a picture of my 950 Pro CDM scores the one on the left is without the update and the one on the right is with.
CDM before and after patch!.JPG
 
Everything seems to bench faster or the same for me after the patch, both framerate-wise and SSD-wise.
 
MMitch said:
Including BIOS patch? It seems that's where the loss is... and since most of us won't even get that BIOS patch...
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I'm doubting MSI is going to bother doing a BIOS patch on a motherboard from 2013, unfortunately.
 
UrielDagda said:
I'm doubting MSI is going to bother doing a BIOS patch on a motherboard from 2013, unfortunately.
Click to expand...

I'm on the same boat with my 2500K, so I guess we can assume we're still vulnerable (mitigated?)...
The point I'm interested is the extra ressource that will be needed for all cloud services (Steam / PSN / etc... even Netflix?)... Will we see price hikes because they need 30% more HW ?
 
nightanole said:
Talk about cherry picking the data. I had to hunt for the MASSIVE 40% loss. 40% loss on 4k random reads/writes. The rest showed almost no problems, and what they sweep under the rug for the narrative, some performance marks improved...
Click to expand...
A great deal of read/writes is random so that's a big number to consider.
 
I think it is still too early to say "omg 111!!!~111!!! intel has nerf'd my computer with their stupid bug(s)... but it is also way to early to say they haven't nerf'd your computer with their stupid bug(s)..

at least for me... the ick factor is high.. I'm not sure if I can ever truly trust the current hardware ever again really... I didn't trust it that much to start with.. I won't bank on my smrt phone, I use a VPN when at starbucks ...etc.. but since AFAIK.. the jist of these bug(s) are basically not fixable fully but these updates (windows) and hypothetical bios patches (i'm not holding my breath on a bios patch for my Gigabyte Z87 motherboard or my wife's Z77 motherboard) .. just are mitigating the underlying flaw until someone comes up with a new way to exploit it..

none of these early test really prove **** anyways as fixes for some of the problems have yet to be made available.. so can't say for sure what the actual hits are until all of the patches / updates are out.

I was looking to upgrade ... but not now... not until more is more clear about how this is going to play out...
 
at least AMD fanbois had some hope for a few days/weeks before we found out its really a nothing burger for the most part. :D
 
nightanole said:
Talk about cherry picking the data. I had to hunt for the MASSIVE 40% loss. 40% loss on 4k random reads/writes. The rest showed almost no problems, and what they sweep under the rug for the narrative, some performance marks improved...
Click to expand...
4K random is the most important benchmark for desktop use. How much will this impact non-synthetic tests is the question.
 
atarione said:
at least for me... the ick factor is high.. I'm not sure if I can ever truly trust the current hardware ever again really... I didn't trust it that much to start with...
Click to expand...

Hardware security has been getting worse. About 5 or so years ago I bought a refurb linksys router from a reputable site that had a firmware worm that started joining in a DDOS. Firmware updates didnt fix it - had to toss the thing in the garbage. I won't buy anything refurb that connects to the internet anymore, but apparently that isn't going to be enough.

Hardware is going to have to change to become more programmable at the loss of performance. Problem is, performance sells, nobody cares that your hardware is secure if it is slow as all hell.
 
Try this Simulator with a HDD and then with a SSD. After that test you will not say again a HDD is equal to a SSD in gaming, there are are worlds in between them. It only needs an app that reads far more than ordinary games to show the limits of HHD I/O.

http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com it's free too, no need to buy any module for testinh, 2 airplanes and a map are for free, like in real free beer !

Also, it's a great VR experienmce, best VR I ever had, and it easily tilts any GPU available today. CPU should clearly be beyond 4G, better 5G and a few cores to spare ;)


My HDD can't even sync my ETH Wallet, sigh, those days are gone, HDD's are for cold storage only, all the rest is SSD arena.


Framerates are not the concern, what is more disturbing with HDD is plain stutter.
 
I'm really curious to see results for storage performance that include NVDIMMs, since (to my understanding) they don't use the typical storage communication paths in the CPU. While we are obviously concerned with the impact to home computing, the real hit is probably going to be felt at the datacenters. I think those benchmarks will be more telling.
 
BitMaster said:
Try this Simulator with a HDD and then with a SSD. After that test you will not say again a HDD is equal to a SSD in gaming, there are are worlds in between them. It only needs an app that reads far more than ordinary games to show the limits of HHD I/O.

http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com it's free too, no need to buy any module for testinh, 2 airplanes and a map are for free, like in real free beer !

Also, it's a great VR experienmce, best VR I ever had, and it easily tilts any GPU available today. CPU should clearly be beyond 4G, better 5G and a few cores to spare ;)


My HDD can't even sync my ETH Wallet, sigh, those days are gone, HDD's are for cold storage only, all the rest is SSD arena.


Framerates are not the concern, what is more disturbing with HDD is plain stutter.
Click to expand...
One game doesn't make the rule, it is still an exception to it. RAM speeds don't matter for gaming...unless you're playing a bunch of demanding RTS games. That doesn't mean you should build a rig around one or two games, especially if you have no intentions of playing them regularly.
 
BigJayDogg3 said:
One game doesn't make the rule, it is still an exception to it. RAM speeds don't matter for gaming...unless you're playing a bunch of demanding RTS games. That doesn't mean you should build a rig around one or two games, especially if you have no intentions of playing them regularly.
Click to expand...

My game-rig is built around DCS in mind, everything else is secondary as I have other PC's for other purposes. I also doubt RAM speed doesnt matter, I also maintain a few Ryzen, those need fast RAM for best performance . My rig loves fast RAM too, I have very few problems with performance in DCS whereas many others have, some have Track-IR stutter, general stutter, bsod, etc..., having similar rigs "5G-32gb-1080ti"
I must add, I regularly serve the hw-troubleshoot section of the said forum with help, thus I know pretty much what makes sense and what not. for DCS.

For my WorldOfWarships I dont need any of those high end parts, that runs on my MBP 15" quite well.
 
testing optane 900p after Win10 meltdown "patch"... 70% reduction in IO speed :( :( (4k random reads) and 50% reduction for 4k writes...
 
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BitMaster said:
Try this Simulator with a HDD and then with a SSD. After that test you will not say again a HDD is equal to a SSD in gaming, there are are worlds in between them. It only needs an app that reads far more than ordinary games to show the limits of HHD I/O.

http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com it's free too, no need to buy any module for testinh, 2 airplanes and a map are for free, like in real free beer !

Also, it's a great VR experienmce, best VR I ever had, and it easily tilts any GPU available today. CPU should clearly be beyond 4G, better 5G and a few cores to spare ;)


My HDD can't even sync my ETH Wallet, sigh, those days are gone, HDD's are for cold storage only, all the rest is SSD arena.


Framerates are not the concern, what is more disturbing with HDD is plain stutter.
Click to expand...

Wait what !? HDD can't sync a local wallet ? Did I miss something LOL !?
I just synced BTC / LTC / DOGE / VTC all at once from encrypted slow HDD (granted BTC took around 2 days but that's the size of the thing...)

Yes it's nice to have a speedy SSD but in no way (my 2 cents) is it a requirement... at least I hope... would be stupid.
 
So what happens if intel releases fixed cpu's and one were to claim the warranty on their cpu? I'm sure they will make more x299's :cautious:
 
MMitch said:
Wait what !? HDD can't sync a local wallet ? Did I miss something LOL !?
I just synced BTC / LTC / DOGE / VTC all at once from encrypted slow HDD (granted BTC took around 2 days but that's the size of the thing...)

Yes it's nice to have a speedy SSD but in no way (my 2 cents) is it a requirement... at least I hope... would be stupid.[/QUOTmy eth wallet didnt sync, so I went to google and forums and read about it. There are many forum posts regarding that matter and all in the end say, use a ssd. I did that and it synced.
That is my experience with eth.
Click to expand...

btc core wallet does fine on my 2tb-hdd, it just takes for ever to sync from zero. my other wallets are half/half, ssd/hdd. Only eth made such stress. It could be that the net was congested while i did my sync and was better when i moved to ssd, that could also be, no way i can tell.
 
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