State of SSD Gaming?

VladDracule

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 5, 2007
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Hello all,

Im looking at getting myself a new Clevo to replace my old one. I saw a chart somewhere suggesting that the Samsung 840 Evo 120 gb drive was the top performing (i cant find the chart again :mad:)

Has there been any improvements in the gaming/SSD combo area? I know the last time i did research on the topic (fairly recently) it should very little improvement to gaming performance except in games that had long load times. Is this still the case?
 
SSDs don't have much effect on gaming performance outside of load times, but overall system responsiveness is phenomenal. It's not even a question anymore, honestly. Get yourself at least a 250GB SSD and enjoy how much more amazing your machine can be.
 
I still don't know why some people associate SSDs with higher FPS... once the game is loaded into the RAM, it's run off of the RAM.
 
I still don't know why some people associate SSDs with higher FPS... once the game is loaded into the RAM, it's run off of the RAM.

I never suggested that it was associated with FPS. However what i could see it affect is small in-game load times. The entire games assets cannot be loaded into RAM, (VRAM especially) due to the size of them, and a faster read time on a drive should theoretically decrease the time in-game loading takes. To what degree is a different story
 
I still don't know why some people associate SSDs with higher FPS... once the game is loaded into the RAM, it's run off of the RAM.
That's not completely true. Many games stream textures into the engine or use disk caching. Having a slow drive can drastically reduce performance in these titles. But in some games storage speed plays little role in performance. So the correct answer is, it depends.
 
I never suggested that it was associated with FPS. However what i could see it affect is small in-game load times. The entire games assets cannot be loaded into RAM, (VRAM especially) due to the size of them, and a faster read time on a drive should theoretically decrease the time in-game loading takes. To what degree is a different story

Performance in games is associated with FPS. Loading times is not necessarily associated with performance.

Edit: If it doesn't fit in the VRAM, it first spills over to main system RAM, or it compresses the image first. Both of which cause major FPS drops already. I shudder to think of VRAM spilling over to the hard drive, regardless of SSD or HDD. And no, what is required for the game at that instant is loaded entirely into the RAM. Only if there is insufficient RAM does it begin to use the pagefile, but if you're at that point, you should be looking at a RAM upgrade. An SSD will only bandaid the problem, not cure it.

That's not completely true. Many games stream textures into the engine or use disk caching. Having a slow drive can drastically reduce performance in these titles. But in some games storage speed plays little role in performance. So the correct answer is, it depends.

Many games, or a rare few? Open area games (like GTA and Tomb Raider) I can understand, but it's just loading the next part of the map. It will only slow down for the duration of the loading, then go right back up to speed again.
 
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Any system you use frequently should have an SSD. Booting, load times, overall responsiveness is greatly improved.
 
Any system you use frequently should have an SSD. Booting, load times, overall responsiveness is greatly improved.

I simply can never go back to spinners. Having a machine that is SSD-only for every day use and gaming has completely spoiled me. :D
 
There are useful things game developers can do when they can rely upon the presence of an SSD, but they aren't generally hugely-useful things, and they can't rely on any consumer having one.

I haven't seen anyone do any thorough testing as to how games that do a lot of resource streaming are impacted by SSDs, but that data might be interesting. It might also not matter much depending on how much work a given game does asynchronously and what their resource prefetch policies are.
 
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Im not questioning whether or not i should get an SSD its the size. The laptop will have both an SSD and a HDD but if gaming showed improvements with SSD's i would get a larger SSD to facilitate installing games on it. I dont use enough applications in windows alone to need larger than a 120gb if all my data is on the HDD but thats different if games were there
 
Don't even bother with 128GB SSD's anymore if you can afford it. You want 256GB or higher for a multitude of reasons.
 
Don't even bother with 128GB SSD's anymore if you can afford it. You want 256GB or higher for a multitude of reasons.

I use a 128 gb SSD on my desktop. and its not even 50% full. I have 0 reason to run a larger SSD. Certain applications dont even utilize and SSD to show much of an improvement which means those go on the HDD. In fact that are areas where SSDs are at a disadvantage in the areas of video and photoediting
 
Performance in games is associated with FPS. Loading times is not necessarily associated with performance.
I would argue texture pop-in is a major performance issue, though how often it's caused by the engine limiting render distance versus slow load times from disk I can't say.
I use a 128 gb SSD on my desktop. and its not even 50% full. I have 0 reason to run a larger SSD. Certain applications dont even utilize and SSD to show much of an improvement which means those go on the HDD. In fact that are areas where SSDs are at a disadvantage in the areas of video and photoediting
I'm not sure what you're playing, but OS + 1 game would have a 128GB SSD more than half full. (A stock Win7 install is what, ~40GB?) Hell, I have my 960GB over half full and there's 0 music or video on it, just games.

The price points today make it sub-optimal to get anything less than 240/256GB, which can be had for around $100. The 128GB drives are more expensive per GB that I've seen. Note that this is a recent change, it 128 was the sweet spot fairly recently.
 
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I'm not sure what you're playing, but OS + 1 game would have a 128GB SSD more than half full. (A stock Win7 install is what, ~40GB?) Hell, I have my 960GB over half full and there's 0 music or video on it, just games.

The price points today make it sub-optimal to get anything less than 240/256GB, which can be had for around $100. The 128GB drives are more expensive per GB that I've seen. Note that this is a recent change, it 128 was the sweet spot fairly recently.


Not only that, but performance usually goes UP on larger SSD's (more NAND chips) and write endurance for longevity is increased exponentially. Plus as you mentioned when you reach 50%, much like regular hard drives, performance starts to tank. With SSD's this gets worse and also takes a bigger toll on wear leveling.
 
Has there been any improvements in the gaming/SSD combo area?

Define... "improvements".

Honestly, after reading all your posts I still don't really know what you're looking for an SSD to do for your gaming beyond load times. You'll get reduced load times, but how much will vary by game and there's no blanket statement as to whether its better or not, that's something only you can decide after using it.

An SSD will not make every game "better", but some it can certainly improve (MMO's being a prime example with the old "pop up" problems in busy spots).

Only you can determine if its worth it or not based on the games you play and how impatient you are to wait on them to load.

Pretty much everything runs better off an SSD, how much better varies by far too much to try and simplify like you seem to be trying to do. I'd never go back to HD's for video capture/encoding or storing massive quantities of image files. The instant response time from an SSD for both those things is too great to give up. But thats me.
 
I'm still rocking a 60GB SSD (with Win7 x64) on my main desktop, so you can make due with 120/128. Of course I have to use symbolic links to a spinner for my games, but for the most part it isn't an issue.
 
If you are going laptop and trying to decide on how big of an SSD, I would say go big. I went with a 480 for mine and completely removed the spinning disks. I don't have any quantitative data but it sure feels like I gained significant battery life.
 
I have the 250G EVO and the performance is amazing. I can't recommend larger unless you plan on installing a ton of games on it. So far on mine I have Starcraft 2, BF4 and four Crysis games and still have 100G of space left.
 
I have a Samsung 840 Pro 128GB drive and a 256GB drive I'm using at the moment. I've installed windows 8.1 on them both multiple times. The 128Gb loads *very* slightly faster. Why this might be I have no idea.

In benchmarks the 256GB wins every time
 
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I have a Samsung 840 Pro 128GB drive and a 256GB drive I'm using at the moment. I've installed windows 8.1 on them both multiple times. The 128Gb loads *very* slightly faster. Why this might be I have no idea.

In benchmarks the 256GB wins every time


Margin of error. Especially if it's as slight as you say. When I first switched out my RAID0 3 x 640GB array to an SSD, the SSD felt fast, but my perception of the RAID0 felt faster as I remembered it despite every test showing otherwise.

Plus load times aren't really an accurate way of measuring performance.
 
Margin of error. Especially if it's as slight as you say. When I first switched out my RAID0 3 x 640GB array to an SSD, the SSD felt fast, but my perception of the RAID0 felt faster as I remembered it despite every test showing otherwise.

Plus load times aren't really an accurate way of measuring performance.

No margin of error when multiple sources with hundreds of test cases have shown the 120gb to perform better
 
No margin of error when multiple sources with hundreds of test cases have shown the 120gb to perform better

Except in benchmarks, my 256gb wins *every* time. At every filesize, in all different types of benchmarks... where are these test cases that show the smaller Samsung performs better? I can verify, however, that the 128GB drive loads windows faster than the 256GB, over and over--the balls make it easy to see how long it takes, generally there are little positions they almost always load the same if you haven't messed with anything. Nothing else I've seen gives me any indication that the 256gb drive is slower. Obviously windows loading isn't exactly a good test for ssd speed...
 
Except in benchmarks, my 256gb wins *every* time. At every filesize, in all different types of benchmarks... where are these test cases that show the smaller Samsung performs better? I can verify, however, that the 128GB drive loads windows faster than the 256GB, over and over--the balls make it easy to see how long it takes, generally there are little positions they almost always load the same if you haven't messed with anything. Nothing else I've seen gives me any indication that the 256gb drive is slower. Obviously windows loading isn't exactly a good test for ssd speed...

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Explore/Fastest-SSD/8
 
That site claims the 128gb samsung evo is faster than both the pro 256 and 128. Interesting. Still the pro 256 shows well ahead of the smaller pro.
 
I use a 128 gb SSD on my desktop. and its not even 50% full. I have 0 reason to run a larger SSD. Certain applications dont even utilize and SSD to show much of an improvement which means those go on the HDD. In fact that are areas where SSDs are at a disadvantage in the areas of video and photoediting

Please explain how there is any dis-advantage in either, in both those the speed gains are a massive advantage of an SSD over HD, period, especially with large file sizes.

If your talking size and $/per gig, yes, that is literally the ONLY dis-advantage SSD have over mechanical.
 
Get at least a 250 gig ssd and put a few longer loading games on it like BF4 or some MMO that you're playing. Get a new Western Digital Black FZEX for all the rest of the games. That should take care of everything you need. Also make sure you have at least 8 gigs of ram installed.
 
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