Always the first to spawn on games... must be SSD

When used to play BF2 them map load times was increased massively when I doubled my memory from 1GB to 2GB. After that I was nearly always first in the game and had the pick of the vehicles.
 
ssd is the most advanced breakthrough in pc bottlenecks for years... i could never go back to a standard drive. When we start seeing these new bios bootup times should be 10 under 10 seconds with a ssd all in
 
Only problem is how expensive SSD's currently are, 128GB ones aren't too bad. The prices start getting silly soon as you look at the 128GB+ SSD's.

The prices do seem to be slowly creeping down though.
 
I put BC2 onto the SSD while at my gfs parents. Her brother said he didn't notice any difference and tbh neither did i.
 
A single 36gb Raptor sufficed in the days of Battlefield Vietnam. Went from midfield spawning on a 40 player server to 2nd or 3rd. Flags could be captured and helicopters stolen (then promptly crashed :o) before the most of the server had even turned up. Happy days.

A good overall system always helps, but one assumes its the speed the data is ripped off the HDD that makes the final telling difference.
 
Put windows 7 and WOW on a 128 crucial SSD didn't change anything else. Difference in boot and getting into game is huge, about a quarter of the time than without - not very scientific but you get the picture. Makes no difference in game except for level loading but I wouldn't - couldn't go back to HDD. Sigh, bought another 2 for the rest of the games.
 
Sleepless said:
Put windows 7 and WOW on a 128 crucial SSD didn't change anything else. Difference in boot and getting into game is huge, about a quarter of the time than without - not very scientific but you get the picture. Makes no difference in game except for level loading but I wouldn't - couldn't go back to HDD. Sigh, bought another 2 for the rest of the games.
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these is no going back... even if they doubled in price i would buy again
 
I don't understand what's so amazing about having Windows boot up a couple seconds faster or a map that normally has a 'ready up' timer anyway?

I have 2 500GB HDDs in my PC - One for Windows and one for games. Always have been top 3 in any game to load up first and that is against players with SSDs.

Must be the way I think about it. :confused:
 
Actually, I've been playing MMOs for years off normal un raided hard drives, and I've always loaded up faster than most other people.

I'm pretty sure that the loading time is based on your internet speed for online games, not on your hard drive because you arent loading from a saved file, you are recieving all your character data to load from the servers. your PC loads the textures and graphics, but they never really take too long from a hard drive.
 
The problem I have with SSDs is the money can always be spent better elsewhere to actually improve your gaming experience, rather than just how long you have to wait to get to that experience.
 
A 64 Gb SSD for windows is still a nice upgrade to have, or if you can afford a 128 Gb+, you can also fit a few games on.

But for general use, putting a pair of F3s in Raid 0 will give you the best performance you can get from mechanical drives, and for really cheap. The 1 Tb F3s and 2 Tb F4s are dead cheap now, you simply raid a pair of F3s, and add an F4 to keep a backup image. Back it up once a month and you are completely fine, and you have plenty of space for all your games and anything else.

I currently have just 18 games installed on steam, plus lots more that I havnt downloaded yet, plus a couple on impulse. If I downloaded everything I have on there, I would exceed 256 Gb in no time, as well as all the non digital games I have on top of that on disks, I'm looking at over 1.5 tb worth of games, though I dont install ones I'm not playing.

An SSD for games wouldnt be able to store hardly anything, and you would have to constantly delete and install games you are currently playing to make the use of the limited space, which wears SSD drives down.
 
bhavv said:
Actually, I've been playing MMOs for years off normal un raided hard drives, and I've always loaded up faster than most other people.

I'm pretty sure that the loading time is based on your internet speed for online games, not on your hard drive because you arent loading from a saved file, you are recieving all your character data to load from the servers. your PC loads the textures and graphics, but they never really take too long from a hard drive.
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Depends on the game, the engine, how intense the area of the game is you're loading into and of course how high you have set your graphics settings. The data being sent between you and the server during loading if anything more than an auth will be tiny, so unless you or the server are having network problems that won't add much.

Take WoW. Load into Elwynn Forest and even on a HDD the load times are only going to be seconds at most, whilst SSD would load quicker the time difference would be too small to really discern. However loading into a busy city on a high population server, hundreds and hundreds of characters, all the different races, armours, mounts etc. The difference between HDD and SSD become rather large.

Recently with Cataclysm they implemented that system of having you load into the world a lot quicker, so purely in terms of load times there difference has diminished to a negligible time difference. Although it does this by throwing you in asap in low detail, then continuing to load the higher resolution textures in as you play, whilst playable on either the time taken to complete this will be much quicker on SSD.

Bad Company 2 was mentioned also, the maps aren't that big and the load times are low enough on HDD so the benefit from SSD isn't going to be that high (although still there). Then go to something like Arma2? SSD will have a massive benefit in load speeds, plus the maps are gigantic enough to require constant streaming of new data as you travel about also seeing a pretty noticable in-game performance improvement from SSDs.
 
Swifty55 said:
I don't understand what's so amazing about having Windows boot up a couple seconds faster
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Just borrowed a Corsair 256GB SSD extreme series drive off a friend yesterday and i cloned my windows 7 install from my 150GB raptor drive to it

150GB raptor HHD : windows 7 boot time was 50 seconds
Corsair 256GB SSD : windows 7 boot time 16 seconds :eek:

34 seconds faster
 
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GJ02 said:
not true, what about the load times in bfbc2 with the old ati drivers ?
until ati fixed it there was a huge gap in load times
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Wow. I always wondered why I was so late to spawn in BC2 games but never considered the graphics driver and just assumed that SSD users are more commonplace.

Was using a April 2010 Catalyst driver and got around 33 seconds (I timed it) on maps. Updated to the latest 11.1 and it's now 13 seconds (timed on the same maps as on the old ones).

I wonder what difference an SSD can bring to this. Still 20 seconds improvement is amazing.

Thanks for pointing out the bug with the ATI driver.

Still not thinking about going SSD while they are still too expensive per GB.
 
A 256gb SSD? Jeez, that can't've been cheap.

Yeah the main reason gfs bro bought an SSD was to put Windows on it and the difference in boot up speed is incredible. Once the desktop loads up you can use everything instantly instead of waiting for a bit while things load up. Honestly i saw very little improvement with the 2 games we tried (L4D2 and BC2) so you're probably better off just using it for SP games. Could you imagine how smooth Oblivion would be?
 
Also using lower graphic settings really increases the load level times..


Just do a test by loading a level with max detail & 4xAA etc settings and then load the same level with low detail settings & 0xAA
 
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No going back for me since i purchased my vertex2e, fantastic drive, i'm almost always first onto servers. Just general use in Windows is just fantastic now.
 
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