Which games benefit(in game) from installation on ssd?

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Feb 28, 2009
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I know games that stream game assets benefit but is there a list anywhere? I know nearly all games load levels faster but I'm more interested in the actual in game performance improvements. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have a ton of games and dont know which ones I should put on my limited space ssd.

Games I've been told so far:

All MMO's
Bioshock Infinite
BF3
Elder Scrolls games
STALKER
RAGE
Assassins Creed games
Dark Souls
 
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When I ran my tests in 2009 I saw no improvements in-game outside of things like MMOs and particularly resource-heavy single player games like GTA4. In GTA4's case it was mostly about travelling fast, geometry and textures wouldn't load on time but with the game on the SSD everything rendered, nothing popped in ever again.

I was testing Rift at the time, 45 seconds to change dimensions took five.
 
I usually end up doing it on the fly as needed with a symbolic link. Any game that loads assets on the fly and causes shuddering/hitching when doing so will benefit.

Only games that come to mind that I've played recently that benefit are Diablo 3 and Bioshock Infinite.
 
Put the games your playing alot on your ssd then move them to your other drive when your not
 
MMOs usually. Nothing which makes you wait until everyone has loaded (unless you join after the start), or games where you load then have a 30 second wait around because of loading grace periods (though you can stand around and jump for 10 seconds longer :D).
 
BF3. It loads so fast you aren't spawning in while all the vehicles are driving away at the beginning of the round. ;)
 
While not all games benefit from a SSD in benchmarks or FPS numbers, the quicker load times can make a 10-15 second load time feel like an FPS hitch instead.
After getting mine last year, I think the only component that truly improves performance more would be the video card - especially in non-gaming scenarios.
I look forward to the day when I can have 2 SSD's - 1 main and 1 backup.
 
BF3. It loads so fast you aren't spawning in while all the vehicles are driving away at the beginning of the round. ;)

Is BF3 that slow? I've loaded it off 7200 Hitachi's and 5200 Samsungs and still have at least 20-30 seconds before the battle starts?
 
My massively-modded 70 GB Oblivion install benefits greatly from being on an SSD. I imagine a similar Skyrim or Fallout setup would too!
 
Any game that requires frequent loading would be most beneficial.

Games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Starcraft, and pretty much all MMO's/RPG's come to mind.

I think ARMA does

I wouldn't put ARMA on a SSD unless you have an excessive amount of space on them. Once you load into an ARMA server there really is any loading afterwards (from a hard drive standpoint); you're mostly stuck waiting for enemies to show up or teammates to get into town so you can spawn.
 
I've used WD Raptors & Velociraptors for my games mostly. When I have used SSDs, the load performance was great but most of the games I've played only have shown a difference of 5 to 15 seconds during load time.
 
My massively-modded 70 GB Oblivion install benefits greatly from being on an SSD. I imagine a similar Skyrim or Fallout setup would too!

+1 to this. If nothing else it improves immersion by reducing the amount of time you spend on load screens going in and out of structures.

I have a heavily modded Skyrim install sitting on a regular HD and I regularly have to wait for at least 5 seconds every time I see a loading screen due to loading of textures. Many times it's as long as 15 seconds. An SSD install would cut this time down drastically.
 
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Yeah I'm definitely putting my Skyrim install on the ssd. Nothing worse than hitching from the game loading high res textures in those extra cells I enabled. :D
 
STALKER too. On a HDD, you get hitching whenever the "disk" icon appears in the corner (i.e. when it's loading parts of the level).
 
Depends on your system. When a game loads, it is reading data from disk, processing it with the CPU, and sticking it in RAM. Depending on how the assets are stored and what the loading process is, what the limiting factor is can vary. The faster your processor is, the more likely the disk could be limiting things. For a number of games, only raw core speed matters because their loading process is single threaded. For others they thread out the loading.

So it'll really vary not only by game, but by hardware. It'll also vary based on SSD, some are faster than others.

Finally it'll vary based on HDD condition. HDDs are reasonable at sequential data transfer so if you keep it nice and defragged, it may not be that much slower than a more pokey SSD. If your drive is heavily fragmented then its performance can really suffer, whereas SSDs don't need to be defragmented (it is meaningless based on how they store stuff and would do nothing but hurt them).
 
STALKER too. On a HDD, you get hitching whenever the "disk" icon appears in the corner (i.e. when it's loading parts of the level).

I'm really glad you posted this.

Time to play STALKER again, the hitching was brutal.
 
Is BF3 that slow? I've loaded it off 7200 Hitachi's and 5200 Samsungs and still have at least 20-30 seconds before the battle starts?
You might be right, I was probably thinking of it from a pilots standpoint since that's my specialty. If you load in slow the jet spawns are already taken.
 
RAGE and Vanguard Saga of Heroes both benefit greatly from SSDs.

Rage? That game is short enough as it is. The last thing we need is to cut load times and make it shorter. Might as well install Crysis 3 on an SSD as well.
 
Any game that uses a significant number of resources is also probably doing a significant amount of streaming, particularly multi-platform games that are primarily designed around the resource constraints in current consoles. The better platforms can do this asynchronously, however, meaning faster disks don't confer many real benefits.
 
Let me preface this by saying that Project Cars is in the alpha stage of it's development. But installing the game onto a SSD allows me to play 40 car races without having the textures on the other cars pop in. Makes a huge difference there! Otherwise it's just MMO's that seem to benefit the most.
 
PoE seems to help a lot. I was playing with a friend the other day, and going through portals and loading new zones I was in there 10x faster than he was.
 
Don't know why everyone keeps mentioning Skyrim, even on my old dual core and 320 gig WD HD the game loaded superfast. Even ARMA2+DayZ. Now any of the new Total War games, especially Shogun II, now THOSE need a fast drive.
 
So there are games out there that dont benefit from an SSD drive? I usually install a game (while playing a game on my SSD) to a spinner. Once its installed and updated ill run it. After ill copy it to my raid 0 ssd and definitely notice the different in load times, levels and general performance.

No offence Op, if you have limited SSD space. Only install what you play consistently.

Maybe change your question to 'what games do not benefit from an SSD'
 
To the people that don't understand it:
Heavily modded Skyrim and Rage are recommended on an SSD because of the way the assets are constantly streamed to the player. In Skyrim you get hitches and hiccups that takes you out of the action and affect the immersion, and in Rage the low quality textures last longer on the screen with an HDD vs an SSD.

Unreal Engine 3 games present a similar problem as Rage with textures but their native load times is much faster so this will depend on the taste of the user, MMORPGs with vast open worlds also have that problem when moving from one zone to another so it shouldn't matter for battlegrounds and instances, but it will be noticed on the overworld.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1641603 this was a similar older thread here.

And well, here is some old research done about the subject:
http://www.samsung.com/global/busin...ct/SSD_vs_HDD_is_there_a_difference_Rev_3.pdf
 
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