why does real world ssd performance suck?

[Vielgus-Kutas]

and here i'm specifically referring to game load times, on paper the ssds are about 400% faster at reading than rpm drives, but looking at game load times you're lucky if you gain 50% load time, so that sucks big time, what's the problem?

 

[jwcalla]

I assume most of what you're loading has to be de-compressed and that's CPU-limited?

 

[munkle]

Some loading isn't even loading from disk all that much but more calculations (randomly generated worlds for example)

 

[bigdogchris]

SSD's were not designed to help game load times. They were designed to improve IOPS and performance in heavily disk intensive server applications. Or at least that's where you'll see the biggest benefit.

Yeah, grandma's solitaire machine doesn't need a SSD and a quad core CPU.

 

[Tsumi]

First off, learn and understand something called queue depths. The higher the queue depth, the more parallel the workload. SSDs get much of their speed from reading and writing data in parallel. The SSD controller has a certain number of channels, each having their own memory chip, with a set bandwidth. The more parallel the load, the more number of channels that can be used, and the higher the speed. An operation that only uses one channel (low queue depth) would therefore not have anywhere close to the maximum throughput of the SSD.

Now, to your loading games scenario: OS and general desktop operations are very low queue depth (on the order of 3-5). It takes a queue depth of approximately 24+ to maximize an SSD's throughput, generally seen only on large file transfers, or server applications. That's why SSDs can feel the same speed on SATA II and SATA III, because the speed of low queue depth operations is below the maximum speed of the SATA II interface for 99% of consumer SSDs.

The gains for gaming and general desktop usage come from the near 0 access times, not the increased maximum throughput.

 

[timta2]

Some people just have unrealistic expectations. When I hear someone say SSDs suck I know they've never waited for a 1541 to load up their game.

 

[drescherjm]

on paper the ssds are about 400% faster

Should be way more than 4 times as fast in a lot of workloads because of their 4K and IOPS advantage. Although marketing pushes the large sequential benchmark results to get the biggest #s even though for most these are not that valuable since this is not the way most programs read data (they can't assume everyone has 32GB of ram and optimize for that).

Edit: I see that Tsumi covered this..

I know they've never waited for a 1541 to load up their game.

Hmm. I remember having a Fast something cartridge that helped a somewhat with that.. Although in any case at the 1541 was orders of magnitude faster than the cassette on the Vic20.

Edit: Here it is (Epyx Fast Load Cartridge):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O08XHetCzUQ

 

[Rectal Prolapse]

A few games have unskippable intro movies - makes it seem like it is loading a long time! Other games are probably decompressing assets on the fly (textures, maps, etc.). Usually it's the textures - some games have various texture compression levels depending on videocard memory limitations and user selecting texture detail options. This all takes time and are optimized to save space, not loading time.

Other applications, like development environments, you won't see much difference with SSDs because they cache as much as possible to avoid disk thrashing (ie. precompiled binaries and linking object files held in memory etc.).

The biggest difference I've seen for game loading is for multiplayer matches - you can tell when other players are using mechanical hard drives when you wait 10-20 more seconds for them to appear in the map when you're already running around!

 

[ob1]

It might help to know the system specs, game to be loaded and if things like firmware/drivers have been updated or not. Lets see if you have a problem with expectations or hardware.

 

[GotNoRice]

Plenty of games show nice performance increases. World of Warcraft loads a lot of data, often on-the-fly. It loads so much random data that even before the era of SSDs, it was one of the few games that even benefited from using 15k SCSI drives. I ran two 15k Fujitsu drives in RAID:0 just for the game and it ran considerably faster than the 7200rpm drives, and even the 10k rpm raptor drives of the day. Even then still, it was a noticeable increase when I moved to my first SSD, an Intel X25-M G2 80GB

 

[daglesj]

People get so hung up on MBps when it's really only a small part of the whole equation.

I'll take the access times anytime.

 

[bullet-worm]

It seems like a petty thing maybe, but I'm happy with the greatly reduced OS load time for my gaming rig. I used to leave my gaming rig on, but now that it takes all of 20 seconds to power on and have the machine ready to game.... Power OFF.

My electricity bill has met this with approval to the tune of about $30/month... More gaming money for me!

worm

 

[Aesma]

Some people buy an SSD dedicated to Flight Simulator X and extensions, because it makes so much of a difference.

 

[pcjunkie]

It seems like a petty thing maybe, but I'm happy with the greatly reduced OS load time for my gaming rig. I used to leave my gaming rig on, but now that it takes all of 20 seconds to power on and have the machine ready to game.... Power OFF.

My electricity bill has met this with approval to the tune of about $30/month... More gaming money for me!

worm

Try sleep mode or turn on power saving features when idle. That seems quite excessive savings for just turning your pc off to get that much benefit?

 

[bigdogchris]

I'll tell you what, though, use an SSD for a couple years. Then throw in a HDD into your system and reinstall Windows. As a hardware guru, after a few minutes you'll notice how much slower everything is.

SSD benefit isn't just about faster load times.

 

[cortexodus]

I'll tell you what, though, use an SSD for a couple years. Then throw in a HDD into your system and reinstall Windows. As a hardware guru, after a few minutes you'll notice how much slower everything is.

SSD benefit isn't just about faster load times.

It's so horrible... It really is. Dealing with a machine that has a spinner in it now is just... painful.

 

[FnordMan]

It's so horrible... It really is. Dealing with a machine that has a spinner in it now is just... painful.

Yeah... I got a cheap SSD for the laptop. (only used on weekends) I think I lasted all of two weeks before I bought one for the desktop as well.

 

[Nate7311]

Some people just don't have the proper perspective of having started out with a 5.25 Quantum Bigfoot HDD...

 

[drescherjm]

Some people just don't have the proper perspective of having started out with a 5.25 Quantum Bigfoot HDD...

Hmm. I remember loading my applications from cassette tapes. Although I expect a few to start talking about loading their fortran applications off of punch cards and the pain involved after dropping a stack of cards.

 

[SGA76]

Huge difference for me in Payday 2.
I used to take 30-45 seconds to load between heist loadouts, now its down to about 10-15 seconds.

 

[omniscence]

This just reminds me how my father insisted that there must be something wrong with his home desktop PC after I upgraded his laptop with an SSD and suggested him doing the same with his office PC.

And if there is no improvement in a specific workload after upgrading to an SSD it was not IO-limited in the first place.

 

[M76]

Some people just don't have the proper perspective of having started out with a 5.25 Quantum Bigfoot HDD...

So what if I started out with punch cards? What difference does that make?
For desktop use SSD is still a hell of a lot faster than any HDD. Of course in some cases they do suck. Like when you want to erase a large amount of data from them, all 840 EVOs roll over and die on AHCI, but not if they're in RAID, strange.

 

[drescherjm]

all 840 EVOs roll over and die on AHCI, but not if they're in RAID, strange.

Hmm. Possibly the lack of TRIM on RAID.

 

[TroyX]

simple reason, the games are much bigger than before.

 

[jbltecnicspro]

This just reminds me how my father insisted that there must be something wrong with his home desktop PC after I upgraded his laptop with an SSD and suggested him doing the same with his office PC.

And if there is no improvement in a specific workload after upgrading to an SSD it was not IO-limited in the first place.

Yep. My brother-in-law has an old Pentium (Core 2 Duo architecture) and 4GB of RAM. He's using Windows Vista right now and an HDD. Since all he's doing is document writing and just basic computing, I just told him to get a Corsair MX100 256GB. He has a spare Windows 7 Pro key and CD (why he wasn't using it before? Who knows)...

The SSD + Windows 7 should make his machine feel like a brand new one. And he only has to pay for the SSD. I plan on pushing my parents to switch to an SSD too. They have a Core 2 Duo laptop + 2GB of RAM. We upgraded the RAM to 2 GB and put Windows 7 32-bit on it. Top it off with a decent SSD, and BAM - instant winner.

OP - games aren't affected all that much by SSD. Though it seems most everything else is. I'd love to have a file server that was all SSD's for the super-low access times. But alas, for a home file server, it makes no sense financially.

 

[zrav]

The lowest end SSDs have access times comparable to spinning disks, these are mostly OEM only, tho.

 

[Nenu]

I'll tell you what, though, use an SSD for a couple years. Then throw in a HDD into your system and reinstall Windows. As a hardware guru, after a few minutes you'll notice how much slower everything is.

SSD benefit isn't just about faster load times.

This.
I keep a backup of my system on a hard drive to minimise downtime and it takes well over 4 times longer to reach the desktop (from the boot logo) with a spinner.
It doesnt stop there, background loading continues for a long time after boot whereas it terminates rapidly on the SSD (with the exception of delayed loading processes).
General Windows use is a lot more sluggish with pauses between/during operations.

Some games benefit a fair bit loading from SSD, but most dont show much improvement.
I test each game after installation that has long load times to see if it can be helped, if so I put it on a gaming SSD partition.
(using a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB on Gigabyte P67a, SATA III)

 

[Ramses]

I recently put an EVO 840 in my Sabertooth 990FX/8350/16gig box that was previously running a 1TB Velociraptor as a system drive. I was underwhelmed too honestly. It's faster, don't get me wrong, and the SSD benches fine. I just added a Crucial MX100 for more room too so I'm committed and all. But it didn't knock my socks off like I'd hoped it would after being a really late adopter. Might well be because I went from a pretty quick disk drive to an SSD, and a budget SSD at that. As long as the prices and size keep going as they are I'm not gonna turn back, but nor am I getting rid of my last few really fast hard drives. That raptor and the 7200.14 Barracuda are still stout for size/cost imo, without even touching on RAID. If I found a good deal on a dozen raptors I'd buy them before any more ssd's, no doubt.