I am in the process of putting together a gaming PC and was wondering if SSD really are worth it for Gaming, in particular MMO gaming? Any links, feedback, statistics, random comments?
I am in the process of putting together a gaming PC and was wondering if SSD really are worth it for Gaming, in particular MMO gaming? Any links, feedback, statistics, random comments?
Save your money and stick with a normal HDD. If you were doing something with an awful lot of reading and writing to your harddrive, then it'd be worthwhile for an SSD. As it stands, just normal gaming isn't going to be doing all that much reading/writing as far as I have seen.
You're going to be better served by putting that money into your RAM, vidcard, and CPU.
It does have an impact on minimum FPS, it alleviates the worst case scenario which is loading textures on the fly off the hard drive, and happens in towns especially, so if that bugs you an SSD will help, but vid card and CPU are still the best investment.
I'll dig up some links later if you want to see 'em.
It does have an impact on minimum FPS, it alleviates the worst case scenario which is loading textures on the fly off the hard drive, and happens in towns especially, so if that bugs you an SSD will help, but vid card and CPU are still the best investment.
I'll dig up some links later if you want to see 'em.
Sure, I like to save links for future references. I figure this was the best place to ask from a MMO gaming perspective. I love creating the "wish list" of a gaming rig, I feel like a kid before Christmas. I am surprised on the difference most MMOs perform when compared to standard games concerning video cards. ATIs seem to be the "flavor of the month" but still underperform on MMOs due to developer support, especially crossfire/sli configurations.
It does have an impact on minimum FPS, it alleviates the worst case scenario which is loading textures on the fly off the hard drive, and happens in towns especially, so if that bugs you an SSD will help, but vid card and CPU are still the best investment.
I'll dig up some links later if you want to see 'em.
Sure, I like to save links for future references. I figure this was the best place to ask from a MMO gaming perspective. I love creating the "wish list" of a gaming rig, I feel like a kid before Christmas. I am surprised on the difference most MMOs perform when compared to standard games concerning video cards. ATIs seem to be the "flavor of the month" but still underperform on MMOs due to developer support, especially crossfire/sli configurations.
Unless you've got money to burn or are a competition gamer trying to cut game loading times, just stick with a nice 7200 RPM hard drive.
I am in the process of putting together a gaming PC and was wondering if SSD really are worth it for Gaming, in particular MMO gaming? Any links, feedback, statistics, random comments?
deactivate virtual memory and you ll get better result (make sure you got enough ram.
ssd right now only help offline performance or loading of game at start after that not once 1 second of help if you deactivate viritual memory
kadaitcha.cx explain lot of tweak including this for various os!
While I don't think anything is wrong with waiting on SSD, things like the above have been corrected in most new SSD's. Just do a lot of homework on the specific brand you are thinking of buying.
Regarding degraded write performance in SSD's. In early ssd's that indeed was an issue because of the traditional method windows uses to delete and re-write data to mechanical HD's. SSd's don't work the same and it botched up the early drives so yeah those early SSD adopters got hosed (such are the risks you take when you gotta have the newest pc tech). So a technology called TRIM was introduced and addresses the issue. Any new SSD on the market supports TRIM... but I don't think TRIM works on winXP, only vista & 7. Google TRIM if you need to find out more.
You would definitely see a performance boost if your games were on a SSD, ESPECIALLY if you run stuff at very high details. A lot of the hitching and stuttering you get when you go into towns and high populated areas comes from your mechanical HD bottlenecking on large texture files. But an SSD is far from necessary, and the best reason to not buy one right now would simply be to let them come down further in price.
And there is still life left in quality 7200 rpm drives, and some tricks you can try if you really wanna get into tweaking but don't wanna do RAID 0.
Near the bottom of that article they do a WoW loading test with a bunch of SSD's, a Velociraptor, and a regular 5400 rpm drive. Even on the raptor you're saving upwards of 8 seconds. You should also note that you will also experience less(a lot less) load lag in games.
This won't increase your FPS, it just decreases load times. I use my SSD as a boot drive with room for 1-2 games. That way I get the benefit of the drive all day long which means much shortened install times, antivirus scans, load times on everything, etc.
IF you have the money its a decent upgrade. However if your money is tight its best just to get a better GFX card or processor. I'd draw the limit at say $400 GFX card and $300 processor. If your going beyond those prices your money is probably better spent on the SSD :P. Assuming you do decide to get an SSD make sure you get a good one, it should have trim and a good controller. The Intel SSD's and the OCZ Vertex are both very good.
Also if you wait another month the new Nvidia cards should be out. Whether they are worth the hype or not they will also bring the prices of other cards down; So if you get those cards or ATI you're going to benefit from waiting.
Yes, an SSD can make quite a bit of difference, but it depends on the application. Regarding games in general, and MMO's in particular, it just depends on the game. Some games really only benefit at the loading screen. However many games that rely heavy on Dynamic LoD are helped quite a bit. I think the most dramatic example of this in an MMO is LoTRO. The hitching and stuttering that the game is infamous for literally disappears when run from an SSD. Don't expect all games to make such a difference though.
I own 2 SSDs, a 40g Intel X-25v and a 160g Intel X-25m. Plus a 600g 7200rpm for media purposes.
I have the OS loaded on the 40g(8 second boots are awesome), and all my games on the 160g.
Do I recommend them? Yes. As a singular device they are the single most significant upgrade you can buy(short of skipping several processor generations). They speed up everything you do significantly.
Do I recommend them for pure gaming purposes? No. They will greatly improve load times, but thats merely a convenience issue. In most instances you will see almost no performance increase while actually playing the game.
The only games I did notice a marked performance increase were games with seamless worlds(Darkfall, Fallen Earth, etc). For instance I saw an average increase of ~10-20 FPS on Darkfall, where the game has to constantly load new textures off your drive. It also greatly reduced stuttering and minimum FPS dips that was caused by my 7200 Cavalier occasionally bottlenecking.
But is that rare 10FPS increase worth the money? No. I'm an enthusiast and enjoy building out a beast of a computer, but I would never recommend anyone dropping the premium cost of an SSD on what amounts to minimal performance gains while gaming.
I do however, highly recommend an SSD if you want an overall performance increase. It's money well spent, just not purely for gaming. However, make sure you buy a quality drive... SSDs are one product you don't want to skimp on, or you'll get a lemon. Quality products like Intel don't have the wear issues or the significant speed loss issues that cheaper drives do because of TRIM support.
Also, as someone mentioned. You probably want to have at-least 8gb of RAM before you buy a SSD. You want to be able to turn off your page file(Virtual Memory), otherwise your going to eat up a lot of write cycles and reduce the speed and lifespan of your SSD. Or simply move your page file to a standard drive.
You will likely see some improvements during loading of data but it isn't worth the price IMO.
Now if you are running dbs which require many transactions per second it would be worth in the raid. IF you are running ESX and a bunch of virtual machines, sure it would be great. But for general gaming, save your money or buy better cpu, memory and gpu.
lol that article speak about everything but the trouble!
microsoft is the problem very often!why because they trotle down countless setting everytime they get speeded up by
amd intel ati nvidia samsung etc
kadaitcha.cx as 2 tweak he mention that can make your system go very fast he even explain why those 2 setting arent activated
by default the truth is these setting affect certain website so you would end up with slower web on those specific site so in order for those ms had to let those 2 setting deactivated.yep silly but true and there are page and page of setting like that everywhere
often we active stuff but when we go on ms website they often have warning about those tweak
yes you can apply x tweak but since you apply this deactivate a because a isnt needed anymore
so tweak are good like
kadaitcha.cx he reference most with the kb numer so its very easy to verify and test
but other site arent so chrystal clear
check the the file format
we were at fat16 then went to fat32,not long ago we were at ntfs,then ms released exfat ,but you cant use that its a patch for
memory of cam etc ,so now you need all the other previous format plus exfat because our card are bigger then the 32 bg limit
come on!lets be serious why isnt microsoft releasing a file format just one once and for all like linux did
ext4 or ext5 if i recall(i could be wrong.
the thing is microsoft is very often the trouble.check this,you want achi on hard drive or whats not
you cant just active it in w it will not be nice ,you have to activate it then when you restart you have to activate it in the bios also
and the bios doesnt optimise this the bios always go for the oldest techno avail mine was set to ide like 70 % of people owning computer..i got so tweak on the port side thing of graphic in bios (asus)good luck trying to know what they do oh they are there but nobody knows for what.
ramdisk countless people use those .but ms is still going against it even tho its be proven countless time ramdisk(ramdrive)are almsot as quick as when the program is run soly on the ram without -paging file and the file in ram
the truth is most component are too fast ms and countless software company are trottling down our system(the reason)
for the better good of everybody.doesnt that sound a lot like the chinese.so i guess chinese arent has bad as lot of people make us believe but then we all knew that check the tactic use by bush to justify invading irak when their mandate was to just go protect kuwait.
The only reason I'd ever buy a SSD at the moment is if I had a work laptop that was going to get banged up, less moving parts, less problems. SSD's can go literally through hell and back and still work. Additionally they're good for storing family photos and stuff of that nature which you won't want to lose. I'd put them on a SSD over an external hard drive. Outside that, buying them for just the speed is not worth it. For the price of a SSD with enough space to satisfy, you can easily get some 10k rpms' and throw em in Raid 0.
But hey, if you're a nut with alot of cash you're looking to spend then might as well get a PCI-E SSD
As you can see, the minimum fps is helped a LOT here, and this will happen a lot in MMO's but not as common in single player games. But you also see the avg fps doesn't change a whole lot. That's because the SSD only helps with minimum fps when textures are getting streamed off the drive, which isn't too often so has less data points in the average.
So, SSD's are nice to have to avoid some frustration going to town or showing up to a raid (or getting teleported to a different part of the zone). It's not going to effect your normal game experience, just the slow chunky part when you first load an area/players/monsters and everything is getting settled into RAM.
Personally I really like them though, silent, fast loads, better min fps.. it'll let your data drives have a chance to power down which will cut down on PC noise a lot, and an SSD + large data drive is still cheaper and faster than a RAID0 Raptor setup.
Crysis is one of those FPS games that beats the hell out of the HD. IMO that kind of disc access will become more common as we move forward. Every game is gonna be pulling huge chunks of data off the HD on the fly. SSD prices just need to come down pls...
I am in the process of putting together a gaming PC and was wondering if SSD really are worth it for Gaming, in particular MMO gaming? Any links, feedback, statistics, random comments?
My random comment is that you should get one to act as your boot/OS drive. For the gaming the improvements are not that significant.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
It's designed to access information quicker but unfortunately it's like a flash drive in which it doesn't STAY active but it doens't spin down either. It's kind of a neutral state where everytime you access information on it you're basically having another info extraction session. So if you were to do this with gaming it would lag you like a monster.
But all these new techs are being improved upon daily so it's just a matter of time before there's DDR5 with really nice SSDs with Crystalline Processors to run Windows 2020 and Mac OSX Cubed
SSD's will eventually become more commonplace, but I would just wait it out until the technology gets more stable and less pricey. Next year I'm going for a 40GB for my OS and maybe a 60GB for my games while having a 7200 RPM 32MB cache for everything else.
I would say we will be seeing games move more and more away from pulling necessary data off the drive while in game. Maybe we will see an increase in dynamic load or a larger amount of load at the beginning of a level, but almost none during.
The HDD is the 2nd slowest part in your computer with the slowest being the Optical drive. It just doesn't make sense to rely on it for loading in real time. I would say at this point an SSD is worthless. You have to really do your research to find one that is sufficiently good enough, and those are still expensive.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
I have the intel X25-m. At the moment I have 3 games on there. ST:O, Crysis Wars, and one I can't say.
ST:O was on a WD Black FALS before on the SSD now the load screens are near instant. I often have already zoned in quite awhile before anyone else into an instance.
In Crysis Wars I actually get better FPS because of it, works really well.
They will become real cheap later in the year as new ones come out, if you can afford it they totally justify the cost in my opinion.
PS I have Win 7 on there to, once the PC posts im on desktop in no time. Transferring files is a breeze too.
Well they're essentially gigantic Flash Drives so naturally it's gonna be pretty instantaneous when it's hooked directly into the system. I plan to get one myself soon as I see them getting bigger sizes and cheaper prices.
Comments
Save your money and stick with a normal HDD. If you were doing something with an awful lot of reading and writing to your harddrive, then it'd be worthwhile for an SSD. As it stands, just normal gaming isn't going to be doing all that much reading/writing as far as I have seen.
You're going to be better served by putting that money into your RAM, vidcard, and CPU.
SSD would help a lot with the initial load time, and also times for zoning.
My god has horns.... nah, I don't think he is real either.
Thanks, much appreciated. I'll stick to the same dual HDD set up with one dedicated for gaming and other for OS
It does have an impact on minimum FPS, it alleviates the worst case scenario which is loading textures on the fly off the hard drive, and happens in towns especially, so if that bugs you an SSD will help, but vid card and CPU are still the best investment.
I'll dig up some links later if you want to see 'em.
Sure, I like to save links for future references. I figure this was the best place to ask from a MMO gaming perspective. I love creating the "wish list" of a gaming rig, I feel like a kid before Christmas. I am surprised on the difference most MMOs perform when compared to standard games concerning video cards. ATIs seem to be the "flavor of the month" but still underperform on MMOs due to developer support, especially crossfire/sli configurations.
Sure, I like to save links for future references. I figure this was the best place to ask from a MMO gaming perspective. I love creating the "wish list" of a gaming rig, I feel like a kid before Christmas. I am surprised on the difference most MMOs perform when compared to standard games concerning video cards. ATIs seem to be the "flavor of the month" but still underperform on MMOs due to developer support, especially crossfire/sli configurations.
Unless you've got money to burn or are a competition gamer trying to cut game loading times, just stick with a nice 7200 RPM hard drive.
Also, there have been problems with SSD drives. Name, degraded performance over time and bricking your drives with firmware updates.
~Ripper
deactivate virtual memory and you ll get better result (make sure you got enough ram.
ssd right now only help offline performance or loading of game at start after that not once 1 second of help if you deactivate viritual memory
kadaitcha.cx explain lot of tweak including this for various os!
While I don't think anything is wrong with waiting on SSD, things like the above have been corrected in most new SSD's. Just do a lot of homework on the specific brand you are thinking of buying.
Regarding degraded write performance in SSD's. In early ssd's that indeed was an issue because of the traditional method windows uses to delete and re-write data to mechanical HD's. SSd's don't work the same and it botched up the early drives so yeah those early SSD adopters got hosed (such are the risks you take when you gotta have the newest pc tech). So a technology called TRIM was introduced and addresses the issue. Any new SSD on the market supports TRIM... but I don't think TRIM works on winXP, only vista & 7. Google TRIM if you need to find out more.
You would definitely see a performance boost if your games were on a SSD, ESPECIALLY if you run stuff at very high details. A lot of the hitching and stuttering you get when you go into towns and high populated areas comes from your mechanical HD bottlenecking on large texture files. But an SSD is far from necessary, and the best reason to not buy one right now would simply be to let them come down further in price.
And there is still life left in quality 7200 rpm drives, and some tricks you can try if you really wanna get into tweaking but don't wanna do RAID 0.
stuff and things
It will help especially on games that do a lot of loading either zones or streaming. However your literally paying for seconds and at a premium.
Watch This
Read this!
Near the bottom of that article they do a WoW loading test with a bunch of SSD's, a Velociraptor, and a regular 5400 rpm drive. Even on the raptor you're saving upwards of 8 seconds. You should also note that you will also experience less(a lot less) load lag in games.
This won't increase your FPS, it just decreases load times. I use my SSD as a boot drive with room for 1-2 games. That way I get the benefit of the drive all day long which means much shortened install times, antivirus scans, load times on everything, etc.
IF you have the money its a decent upgrade. However if your money is tight its best just to get a better GFX card or processor. I'd draw the limit at say $400 GFX card and $300 processor. If your going beyond those prices your money is probably better spent on the SSD :P. Assuming you do decide to get an SSD make sure you get a good one, it should have trim and a good controller. The Intel SSD's and the OCZ Vertex are both very good.
Also if you wait another month the new Nvidia cards should be out. Whether they are worth the hype or not they will also bring the prices of other cards down; So if you get those cards or ATI you're going to benefit from waiting.
Yes, an SSD can make quite a bit of difference, but it depends on the application. Regarding games in general, and MMO's in particular, it just depends on the game. Some games really only benefit at the loading screen. However many games that rely heavy on Dynamic LoD are helped quite a bit. I think the most dramatic example of this in an MMO is LoTRO. The hitching and stuttering that the game is infamous for literally disappears when run from an SSD. Don't expect all games to make such a difference though.
I own 2 SSDs, a 40g Intel X-25v and a 160g Intel X-25m. Plus a 600g 7200rpm for media purposes.
I have the OS loaded on the 40g(8 second boots are awesome), and all my games on the 160g.
Do I recommend them? Yes. As a singular device they are the single most significant upgrade you can buy(short of skipping several processor generations). They speed up everything you do significantly.
Do I recommend them for pure gaming purposes? No. They will greatly improve load times, but thats merely a convenience issue. In most instances you will see almost no performance increase while actually playing the game.
The only games I did notice a marked performance increase were games with seamless worlds(Darkfall, Fallen Earth, etc). For instance I saw an average increase of ~10-20 FPS on Darkfall, where the game has to constantly load new textures off your drive. It also greatly reduced stuttering and minimum FPS dips that was caused by my 7200 Cavalier occasionally bottlenecking.
But is that rare 10FPS increase worth the money? No. I'm an enthusiast and enjoy building out a beast of a computer, but I would never recommend anyone dropping the premium cost of an SSD on what amounts to minimal performance gains while gaming.
I do however, highly recommend an SSD if you want an overall performance increase. It's money well spent, just not purely for gaming. However, make sure you buy a quality drive... SSDs are one product you don't want to skimp on, or you'll get a lemon. Quality products like Intel don't have the wear issues or the significant speed loss issues that cheaper drives do because of TRIM support.
Also, as someone mentioned. You probably want to have at-least 8gb of RAM before you buy a SSD. You want to be able to turn off your page file(Virtual Memory), otherwise your going to eat up a lot of write cycles and reduce the speed and lifespan of your SSD. Or simply move your page file to a standard drive.
You will likely see some improvements during loading of data but it isn't worth the price IMO.
Now if you are running dbs which require many transactions per second it would be worth in the raid. IF you are running ESX and a bunch of virtual machines, sure it would be great. But for general gaming, save your money or buy better cpu, memory and gpu.
lol that article speak about everything but the trouble!
microsoft is the problem very often!why because they trotle down countless setting everytime they get speeded up by
amd intel ati nvidia samsung etc
kadaitcha.cx as 2 tweak he mention that can make your system go very fast he even explain why those 2 setting arent activated
by default the truth is these setting affect certain website so you would end up with slower web on those specific site so in order for those ms had to let those 2 setting deactivated.yep silly but true and there are page and page of setting like that everywhere
often we active stuff but when we go on ms website they often have warning about those tweak
yes you can apply x tweak but since you apply this deactivate a because a isnt needed anymore
so tweak are good like
kadaitcha.cx he reference most with the kb numer so its very easy to verify and test
but other site arent so chrystal clear
check the the file format
we were at fat16 then went to fat32,not long ago we were at ntfs,then ms released exfat ,but you cant use that its a patch for
memory of cam etc ,so now you need all the other previous format plus exfat because our card are bigger then the 32 bg limit
come on!lets be serious why isnt microsoft releasing a file format just one once and for all like linux did
ext4 or ext5 if i recall(i could be wrong.
the thing is microsoft is very often the trouble.check this,you want achi on hard drive or whats not
you cant just active it in w it will not be nice ,you have to activate it then when you restart you have to activate it in the bios also
and the bios doesnt optimise this the bios always go for the oldest techno avail mine was set to ide like 70 % of people owning computer..i got so tweak on the port side thing of graphic in bios (asus)good luck trying to know what they do oh they are there but nobody knows for what.
ramdisk countless people use those .but ms is still going against it even tho its be proven countless time ramdisk(ramdrive)are almsot as quick as when the program is run soly on the ram without -paging file and the file in ram
the truth is most component are too fast ms and countless software company are trottling down our system(the reason)
for the better good of everybody.doesnt that sound a lot like the chinese.so i guess chinese arent has bad as lot of people make us believe but then we all knew that check the tactic use by bush to justify invading irak when their mandate was to just go protect kuwait.
The only reason I'd ever buy a SSD at the moment is if I had a work laptop that was going to get banged up, less moving parts, less problems. SSD's can go literally through hell and back and still work. Additionally they're good for storing family photos and stuff of that nature which you won't want to lose. I'd put them on a SSD over an external hard drive. Outside that, buying them for just the speed is not worth it. For the price of a SSD with enough space to satisfy, you can easily get some 10k rpms' and throw em in Raid 0.
But hey, if you're a nut with alot of cash you're looking to spend then might as well get a PCI-E SSD
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx
These are from this Anandtech article.
As you can see, the minimum fps is helped a LOT here, and this will happen a lot in MMO's but not as common in single player games. But you also see the avg fps doesn't change a whole lot. That's because the SSD only helps with minimum fps when textures are getting streamed off the drive, which isn't too often so has less data points in the average.
So, SSD's are nice to have to avoid some frustration going to town or showing up to a raid (or getting teleported to a different part of the zone). It's not going to effect your normal game experience, just the slow chunky part when you first load an area/players/monsters and everything is getting settled into RAM.
Personally I really like them though, silent, fast loads, better min fps.. it'll let your data drives have a chance to power down which will cut down on PC noise a lot, and an SSD + large data drive is still cheaper and faster than a RAID0 Raptor setup.
Crysis is one of those FPS games that beats the hell out of the HD. IMO that kind of disc access will become more common as we move forward. Every game is gonna be pulling huge chunks of data off the HD on the fly. SSD prices just need to come down pls...
stuff and things
My random comment is that you should get one to act as your boot/OS drive. For the gaming the improvements are not that significant.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
It's designed to access information quicker but unfortunately it's like a flash drive in which it doesn't STAY active but it doens't spin down either. It's kind of a neutral state where everytime you access information on it you're basically having another info extraction session. So if you were to do this with gaming it would lag you like a monster.
But all these new techs are being improved upon daily so it's just a matter of time before there's DDR5 with really nice SSDs with Crystalline Processors to run Windows 2020 and Mac OSX Cubed
SSD's will eventually become more commonplace, but I would just wait it out until the technology gets more stable and less pricey. Next year I'm going for a 40GB for my OS and maybe a 60GB for my games while having a 7200 RPM 32MB cache for everything else.
Getting too old for this $&17!
I would say we will be seeing games move more and more away from pulling necessary data off the drive while in game. Maybe we will see an increase in dynamic load or a larger amount of load at the beginning of a level, but almost none during.
The HDD is the 2nd slowest part in your computer with the slowest being the Optical drive. It just doesn't make sense to rely on it for loading in real time. I would say at this point an SSD is worthless. You have to really do your research to find one that is sufficiently good enough, and those are still expensive.
I have the intel X25-m. At the moment I have 3 games on there. ST:O, Crysis Wars, and one I can't say.
ST:O was on a WD Black FALS before on the SSD now the load screens are near instant. I often have already zoned in quite awhile before anyone else into an instance.
In Crysis Wars I actually get better FPS because of it, works really well.
They will become real cheap later in the year as new ones come out, if you can afford it they totally justify the cost in my opinion.
PS I have Win 7 on there to, once the PC posts im on desktop in no time. Transferring files is a breeze too.
Well they're essentially gigantic Flash Drives so naturally it's gonna be pretty instantaneous when it's hooked directly into the system. I plan to get one myself soon as I see them getting bigger sizes and cheaper prices.