Games from SSD or RAM

FatRakoon · 10 Apr 2015 at 10:50

I have been doing a load of experiments over some time now, and the last couple of days has verified to me a few things that are fairly annoying.

I have a stupidl;y strict folder policy where everything is in absolutely exactly where I want it, I have my hard drives all seperated, I dont even have more than the one partition on a disk anymore.
Windows is on an SSD, Apps are in D:\Program Files\ and games in D:\Games and my Media Drive is E:\ and misc junk in F:\ and so on... I even have my Torrents in T:\ as well as my NAS rives all very well ordered to an anal point.

my Steam Folder in D:\Games\Steam and what I have done, for my most played games, is added an SSD just for those games. Over time it built up, and now what I have done, is used a pair of 240GB SSDs in RAID and Added that as another steam folder, and now most of my games are installed to that.

The thing is, that I never really noticed any speed increase over using a normal HD to using the SSD and again, no increase with RAIDing a pair ( striped RAID ).

Now, the other day, I bought 32GB of RAM to give my main PC a little catch up with my Server ( 48GB ) and this would allow me to have the most used game permanently setup on a RAMDISK, and I could have a 16GB RAMdisk setup.

Again, after doing all the sillyness of having to reinstall the game, and after playting it for a short while, I noticed that the bloody thing does not load any quicker at all.

Ok, this was on a smaller game I grant you, but thats only because I was limited with my RAMDISK... I set it to 24GB and that gave me just under 8GB of RAM to play with and every single game that I tried out, all did the same thing... Running the game from the HD was the same speed as running it from RAM or from the SSD... If there was any sped improvement, then it was such a tiny amount, that it was not really noticeable at all.

Now, on the Server ( not really serving anything except music through WinAmp when I'm in the computer room ) has a bundle of apps on its RAM disk, such as Office, and a few other apps like Nemo, CuteFTP, and so on, and these do seem to be a tad quicker, nothing special, and again, Im only really wasting RAM to do that, but it seems to me, that games are simply not going to benefit from using anythign faster than a good HD to run them from.

Wondering if anyone has any games that are faster at loading when run from an SSD?

Karathez · 10 Apr 2015 at 11:01

Path of exile, that is the game I have noticed the difference with an ssd the most, & its a huge difference in that game, although its only for the initial load you can really tell, where it goes through checking resources, then allocating space.

I havent run it from a normal hd in a while so they may have done some improvements there since I last checked, but before I had it on ssd it wasnt unknown for it to take a very long time to load (15 mins maybe), especially if there had been a patch.

FatRakoon · 10 Apr 2015 at 11:19

15 minutes? You're kidding!

Well, surely that will be the setup etc... I have noticed that the loading is a very small part of any game, and so sure, the setup or the data is the biggie.
Even the loading / saving between maps or levels etc on my games have all been fairly instant from the HD and so trying to find the difference between instant, and even more instanter ( ?? ) has been a bit of a needle in a haystack.
But 15 minutes? Are you sure you are not loading it off tape?

Concrete · 10 Apr 2015 at 11:20

CS:GO I am normally the first person to join the server after a map change by a good 10 seconds on SSD.

Witcher1979 · 10 Apr 2015 at 11:23

games like gta 4 will benefit from using a SSD. Pretty much every game that has to load Textures like that.

stopper · 10 Apr 2015 at 12:07

Concrete said:
CS:GO I am normally the first person to join the server after a map change by a good 10 seconds on SSD.

Yep, same here, and with TF2.
Transition stages on HL2 and Portals are a lot faster, and it has more than halved the time WoW takes to load up.

jamief · 10 Apr 2015 at 12:13

BF4/Hardline - SSD made an enormous difference to load times. Normally first person on the map. So I can wait

ci_newman · 10 Apr 2015 at 12:26

I noticed a massive improvement on load times when going from HDD to SSD. Are you bottlenecking anywhere else in your system?

dr_volki · 10 Apr 2015 at 12:46

Karathez said:
Path of exile, that is the game I have noticed the difference with an ssd the most, & its a huge difference in that game, although its only for the initial load you can really tell, where it goes through checking resources, then allocating space.

I havent run it from a normal hd in a while so they may have done some improvements there since I last checked, but before I had it on ssd it wasnt unknown for it to take a very long time to load (15 mins maybe), especially if there had been a patch.

i think it's still pretty much the same old. so yes POE should be played from a SSD or RAMdisk

MouthBoy · 10 Apr 2015 at 12:53

When I used to play WoW I saw a massive speed increase in load times.

Wolfenstein:TNO also really showed a huge difference.

Regarding PoE, when I used to run off a HDD it only took a minute or so to load. When running off the SSD its generally up and running before I get comfy to play.

arknor · 10 Apr 2015 at 13:23

Witcher1979 said:
games like gta 4 will benefit from using a SSD. Pretty much every game that has to load Textures like that.

every games loading times benefits from an SSD massively in my experience.

once everything is cached to and loaded though there's no difference as it should be.

If ops no faster on an ssd then maybe he has a slow cpu holding him back.

with a HDD the CPU is almost constantly waiting for data. so is the bottleneck
With an SSD it can provide information as fast as the cpu can deal with it thus the CPU becomes the weaker link

Witcher1979 · 10 Apr 2015 at 13:45

They are a pretty good upgrade for sure, not so much for gaming though. Sure they load faster but nothing major and nothing you can't live without. Although my win 8.1 boots in like 2 seconds.

Woogie · 10 Apr 2015 at 13:56

No increased load time from HDD to SSD? It sounds like something is very wrong with your setup. My load times are drastically quicker now I have my games on a dedicated SSD. CSGO loads very quickly and Map changes in BF:Hardline take about 10 seconds which is lovely

Haggisman · 10 Apr 2015 at 14:14

I noticed a difference in Watch_Dogs when driving fast - I'd occasionally get very short pauses (~1 second) while the game "caught up" and loaded the next area, moved the game from my mechanical disk to SSD and they disappeared.

Witcher1979 · 10 Apr 2015 at 15:10

Yeah GTA 5 will no doubt benefit from a SSD install.

murah · 10 Apr 2015 at 15:18

place BF4 on SSD, play games on vanilla maps, maps load fast
now place BF4 on HDD, wait an age for vanilla maps to load

SSD working confirmed.

Honestly it only becomes noticeable with large games for me otherwise I'm happy keeping most stuff on HDD. EG: TF2 loads quick with or without an SSD

But BF4 , star citizen , elite dangerous and BF hardline HAVE to be on an SSD else it takes an age waiting for them to load on a standard 7200rpm HDD

DaleTheWhale · 10 Apr 2015 at 15:24

Skyrim, Fallout, League of Legends, BF3/BF4, anything with loading screens really.

varkanoid · 10 Apr 2015 at 15:51

Massive increase. Both my windows and games drives are on their own SSD (240gb/500gb) and Windows 8.1 boots to desktop in less than 10 seconds. My wife's laptop is even faster and I timed it last night it boots to desktop in 6 seconds but I think its got some kind of fastboot technology on it.

matt_fsr · 10 Apr 2015 at 16:02

What CPU do you have FatRakoon? What's its' overclock, or is it stock?

Witcher1979 · 10 Apr 2015 at 16:15

varkanoid said:
Massive increase. Both my windows and games drives are on their own SSD (240gb/500gb) and Windows 8.1 boots to desktop in less than 10 seconds. My wife's laptop is even faster and I timed it last night it boots to desktop in 6 seconds but I think its got some kind of fastboot technology on it.

10 seconds must be including post.