Moving to SSD

Oziius

I'll admit I've been slow with upgrading over the past few years due to work and a baby, but I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things. My question is on SSD and the impact on gaming. Just from the reading I've done, it seems that it does have a big impact depending on the game. 

 

While I know that load times will improve greatly, I'm wondering what impact this will on my mmo's. For example, I'm currently playing eq2, which has ALWAYS run like hot-buttered-shit no matter what upgrades I throw at it lol. I'm still using an I-7 920, but it seems to handle most newer games pretty well. However, I do notice in eq2 when I'm running around large areas some "stutter". I guess that's the correct word for it. I keep an eye on my fps, and while they stay steady, the game will jerk around while it appears to be loading larger areas. Is this something that could be helped by the SSD? 

 

Sorry for my ignorance on the topic, I've been out of the hardware loop for a few years lol. Thanks in advance!

Kabaal

It will make practicaly no difference to your gaming experience other than being among the first to load into a map, once you're there performance will be the same. EQ2 is heavily CPU dependant and if you haven't already done so overclocking that 920 should help you a bit.

Oziius

Thanks for the advice. I was worried about over-clocking with the standard cooling it has now. I may also spring for a nicer cpu cooler and let fly. I hear that the 920 overclocks nicely.

Quizzical

What an SSD offers is that delays due to waiting to load things off of a hard drive nearly vanish.  This usually makes loading times, both for the initial program launch and for zoning within games, go much, much faster.  In a relative handful of badly-coded games, it will eliminate hitching caused by waiting to load things from a hard drive as the game is running.  It sounds likely that it will fix your hitching problems.

EverQuest II is a badly-coded game that needs massive amounts of single-threaded CPU speed and not much GPU power.  That makes it an outlier to a lot of general guidelines on what you need for gaming.

Iselin

I'll echo what Quiz said. I've been using a 2 SSD system now for so long that I've gotten spoiled. I use a smaller one for just the OS and a second one for my MMOs.

I've sometimes had so many MMOs, released and betas, going at once that I've been forced to play some off the hard drive instead intitally and then moved it to the SSD when I could delete something there. When you do that, the difference is obvious and significant.

It's not just zone loads that are affected: your client handles all the graphics textures that need to be loaded on the fly. Come into a busy spot with 100 other players there with their own armor and unique looks and the load from the drive is noticeable. An SSD just zips through that making it hardly even noticeable. Once you start using SSDs there's no going back.

fat_taddler

Whatever Quzzical says.  That dude seems very smart when it comes to this stuff and I would definitely trust his opinion.

 

I just pulled the trigger on the Samsung 840 Pro based on my buddy's recommendation but haven't installed it yet.  Hoping to have time this weekend. 

leojreimroc

What gpu are you using?

Zuvielify

SSD is probably the single best thing you can do to improve overall performance on your PC. I was blown away when I finally did it 8 months ago. Having your pc boot in 20 seconds is pretty awesome. 

 

That said, it generally wont help your framerate or anything like that, but it will make the game load way faster. 

Edit: A note on load speed: I put Battlefield 3 on my SSD. It used to take like 5 minutes to load a new map on my old HDD, now it's 30 seconds or less. 

 

One thing to note about SSD. Your motherboard needs to support high speed SATA for it to really be worthwhile. You'll want SATA3 6Gb/s to fully utilize the speed of your SSD

Quizzical

Originally posted by Zuvielify

One thing to note about SSD. Your motherboard needs to support high speed SATA for it to really be worthwhile. You'll want SATA3 6Gb/s to fully utilize the speed of your SSD

Not really.  SATA 2 (3 Gbps) caps you at 300 MB/s theoretically (closer to 280 MB/s in real-world speeds), but even 100 MB/s is blazing fast for non-volatile storage (i.e., as opposed to system memory, CPU cache, etc.).  (In case you caught that 3 Gb/s is not the same as 300 MB/s, the SATA 2.0 protocol says that for every 8 bits of "real" data, you have 2 bits of error correction data, so the 3 Gb/s comes out as 2.4 Gb/s = 300 MB/s of real data and 0.6 Gb/s = 75 MB/s of error correction.)  The problem is that if you have a hard drive and have to load a ton of small files (e.g., thousands of small textures while zoning in a game), a hard drive may chug along at 1 MB/s.

While using a SATA 2 motherboard will limit the sequential transfer speeds of most SATA 3 SSDs, the real-world significance of this is basically zilch for most consumer applications.  If you have both SATA 2 and SATA 3 ports on the motherboard, then yes, you want to plug a SATA 3 SSD into a SATA 3 port.  (SATA is backwards-compatible, so if you plug it into a SATA 2 port, it works, but at SATA 2 speeds.)  But not having a SATA 3 port is not a good reason to hold off on buying an SSD.

Toxia

I recently(sometime around november) added an SSD to my system, and the difference has been quite noticeable, not just for games, but for normal use of my pc as well(music, videos, etc). My pc stays on round the clock, so the startup wasn't an issue. It seems to programs much faster as well(like starting a prgram used to show the circle windows loading icon for abit, and now it flicks for maybe half a second. This could have been due to a less that premium HD, or something else, but since installing the SSD, my computer life has been much more enjoyable.

Oziius

Originally posted by leojreimroc
What gpu are you using?

MSI R7970-2PMD3GD5 Radeon HD 7970 925MHz 3Gb 384-bit GDDR5 

 

 

Doesnt seem to matter with eq2 though lol. I have an i7 920 and 6gb of ddr3 ram. My shitiest component at this time is my slow-ass hard drive.

Oziius

Originally posted by Quizzical

What an SSD offers is that delays due to waiting to load things off of a hard drive nearly vanish.  This usually makes loading times, both for the initial program launch and for zoning within games, go much, much faster.  In a relative handful of badly-coded games, it will eliminate hitching caused by waiting to load things from a hard drive as the game is running.  It sounds likely that it will fix your hitching problems.

EverQuest II is a badly-coded game that needs massive amounts of single-threaded CPU speed and not much GPU power.  That makes it an outlier to a lot of general guidelines on what you need for gaming.

Thanks Quizzical! I appreciate the advice. I read another post from you earlier on a different thread concerning which SSD to get. I'll be grabbing one in the next few days.

 

thanks everyone for the replies!

Zuvielify

Originally posted by Quizzical

  But not having a SATA 3 port is not a good reason to hold off on buying an SSD.

I agree. It's more important to note if someone is buying a new motherboard.