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A revolution in the world of MMO's: SSD's
KingKong007
Member Posts: 149
I replaced my old PC with a new one 2 days ago and I was talked into getting a SSD hard disk.
The odd thing is that SSD will probably have more influence on MMO design than any software or hardware card.
The nature of SSD is that it actually functions as a hard disk with no moving parts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
The advantage in speed and handling the background loading in MMO worlds is unbelievable.
Because Wow is the most played MMO to compare things: complete Dalaran loads in a blink of an eye (<1 sec).
The old system had me wait sometimes for 10-15 seconds before data loading was done from those spinning hard disks. That resulted in client lag too.
I tested yesterday the Wintergrasp zone in prime time (on our server >200 players fighting): all data apppeared on screen with zero waiting times. No client hic-ups at all.
The huge gap between preloaded (instanced) shooter games and the background loading of MMO play got very narrow with this.
I think that within 2 years MMO's will have much higher data swapping (so much more vectors) than we are used to.
The disadvantage is the price of course: you need a 100 GByte SSD with the latest TRIM technology and that is still above the 400 Euro mark. 100 Gb is barely enough to put the OS and 2 MMO's on it.
In the meantime hardcore MMO players are advised to have a look, but no doubt this storage system will be standard at 200Gb within 2 years.
MMO designers should plan accordingly. TOR low vector graphics risk to be outdated the moment the game will launch.
I expect a high end vector adjustment for WOW within 2 years.
Perhaps GW2 will come just in time to support the graphics it now shows on artificially tuned local machines.
Within 2 years the huge gap between preloaded games and MMO's (with unexpected data load) will decline for sure.
Comments
Back in the day, most gamers were enthusiast, today most gamers are people who buy computers and happen to notice things... *sigh*
Ths is not news and a good reason why most gamers have a seperate HD for OS and games. IO is important.. many people complained about Vanguard, those who did had inadaquate IO. A second HD, or Raid array fro their games helped. SSD is only naturalprogession.
Most, if not all system will have a boot drive for their OS soon.
gratz on the new rig!
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
you know Phel, the funny thing with VG was, I bought 2 new midgrade comps for that game. Out of the box HP pavillions cuz they were cheap, and had no issues at all with any form of lag, stutter, rubber banding, etc with the game at all from launch on. Friends with custom built top of the line systems quit after 2 days due to inability to play /shrug
"The effect of the RamSan was immediate on both system performance and customer satisfaction," Hilmar V. Pétursson, CEO, CCP
Read the full article here
Ghost
Nothing new ? LOL.
Only since 2008 SSD's began to appear in consumer PC's. With a price tag of almost 1000 dollars for 60 GByte in 2008, I now have the new OCZSSD2-VTX 100 GB for 400 Euro.
I guess most people don't have a clue about the latest ones with built in Windows 7 support.
I say it will wipe the traditional spinning HD for MMO usage in 2 years time.
No... I was surprised that you hadn't known what a fast HD can do for your computer, let alone how it speeds up games, etc. Secondly, SSD's have been around and like you said since 2008... so your post seemed a tad late as "news" to the community.
But was happy for your just now experiencing this for yourself.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
I have 4 raided SSDs as main disk and it does have advantages and makes loading faster but it is not quit so big difference in the games I play.
SSDs are a temporary solution before the truly fast memory comes that will be as fast as ram. It will make all the computers memory into a one large unit and kill off the need for zooning in any game while taking away a lot of lag.
That will change the MMOs in 5 years or so when it actually is out, right now however have Samsung a small working version for cellphones that is expensive and far from perfect but we are getting there.
I do love the fact that SSDs are soundless and generates no heat but they still isn't perfect.
Considering that MMO designers need to cater towards a fairly low common denominator, it'll be quite some time yet before SSD's actually begin to influence design decisions. We've still got loads of people who hesitate to spend $100 on a decent graphics card - they're not going to spend $2+/GB on an SSD when they can spend pennies/GB on a mechanical disk that gets the job done fine.
Furthermore, the area that SSD's show the most improvement is actually in conpensating for the mechanical rotational latency in traditional hard drives. But this can also be strongly compensated for by simply optimizing the necessary data files so they can be pulled off in long strips, rather than countless smaller chunks.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
Intel stated recently that they will be releasing 600GB SSDs shortly. To be honest though a fast hard drive and lots of RAM has never left me waiting on levels to load in WOW for more than a few seconds. Get a Velociraptor or if you really need it get a couple and put them in RAID and you will get close to the speed at a fraction of the cost with more storage.
The advantage of an SSD is most easily shown in a few graphs:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
Those are 4k random read and write speeds for various drives. Longer bars are better. Look way down at the bottom of the first and third graphs. One of those bars is a VelociRaptor. The other is a more typical hard drive. See the difference? If you don't, that's the point: a VelociRaptor might be twice as fast as a more typical hard drive in some things, but that just means that instead of having to wait a long time, you have to wait a somewhat shorter time. In the second graph, they didn't even bother showing the VelociRaptor, because its bar would have been 0 pixels long, so there would be nothing to see.
The bigger bottleneck for hard drives is random reads, not random writes, mainly because you do more of the former than the latter. That's the bottom graph on the page linked above. Random reads don't scale with RAID at all, so if you put eight VelociRaptors in RAID 0 with a high-end discrete RAID card, you still get an itty bitty bar that you can barely see. And it still gets smoked by an SSD, which is the only way to get good storage performance. So no, this isn't at all like getting a faster hard drive. Even if you're upgrading from a hard drive that you bought 20 years ago (and magically hasn't yet died) to a VelociRaptor, that still wouldn't be in the same league as going from a VelociRaptor to a good SSD.
This kind of performance jump doesn't happen every year, or even every decade for that matter. When is the last time that processors had that kind of performance leap? Maybe the invention of the microchip, rather than using vacuum tubes? Certainly nothing more recent than that has been comparably revolutionary for CPUs, and even getting rid of vacuum tubes was more about reducing power and cost than improving performance. If solid state drives aren't revolutionary, then no computer parts introduced in my lifetime are.
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So how does this affect games? How big of a deal the loading time difference is depends greatly on how much zone loading you have to do. In a game that is good at loading things in the background, it might not matter so much. In Guild Wars, going from a hard drive to an SSD was a much more noticeable upgrade than going from a Radeon X1300 Pro to a Radeon HD 5850, largely because of the constant zoning of map travel.
But there's also the server-side advantages that KingKong007 brings up. The enterprise stuff that RamSan offers is orders of magnitude faster (and more expensive!) than consumer SSDs, but not having to wait on the database can be a very big deal in game performance. Getting the same sort of performance boost out of hard drives is physically impossible, short of something outlandish like making hard drives spin 100x as fast as they do now.
And it's not just games. I very much like it how, when I want to open a program, it just opens. I don't have to sit there and constantly wait for my computer. Someone who wants a cheap computer for web browsing and e-mail would do well to skimp on the CPU and GPU but get a good SSD.
So how big is the difference for non-gaming programs? Let's suppose that you built two rigs. One is a super high end rig, except that it doesn't have an SSD. I mean stuff like a Core i7-980X ($1000), a Radeon HD 5970 ($700), two VelociRaptors in RAID 0 ($600), and 24 GB of memory ($500). The other is a pretty cheap rig, with a budget SSD. Let's say an Athlon II X2 ($60), Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics, 2 GB of memory ($50), and a 32 GB OCZ Onyx ($70).
You then take both rigs and let some people who are decent with computers but don't know about hardware use both for web browsing, e-mail, word processing, and that sort of thing, and see which they think is faster. They'll be impressed with the speed on both. But they'll say that the second machine is faster, and that it's not close. An SSD really does make that big of a difference. If storage is the bottleneck, as it is for most things other than frame rates while gaming, then a faster processor or video card doesn't matter.
I can't fathom why anyone these days would spend near $1000 on a PC and not get a SSD...It's pretty much a necessity these days, they've done benchmarks and practically everyone who's reviewed SSD's agrees they are the biggest performance boost of the last 20 years when it comes to PC's. It's not even gaming where you see the best improvements, it's just daily PC usage...
For example there was a test done, time it takes to launch a few apps after computer startup, those Apps were WoW, Firefox, Photoshop CS4...It took a computer with a 10k Velociraptor 31 seconds to load those apps completely...which would be even longer for a standard hard drive, around 40-50 seconds...It took a SSD 6.5 seconds to do the same...And when using a mechanical HD, when you're loading one application, all the other ones running become unresponsive until the load is done...
There was a time when SSD's were a luxury item, but for any performance PC nowadays they are a necessity...It's only a matter of time before OEM's start biting the bullet and including them in their PC's...Anyone who's used one know's its a night and day difference, it makes an i7-920 system feel like a 10 year old Pentium 4 when you don't have a SSD in it.
http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/9184-why-you-need-a-ssd/page__p__185649__fromsearch__1#entry185649