RW3 at GamesCom

[Chessie8638]

Even though this is a photo of the game taken off a monitor at the booth, that is some pretty dern good scenery. Want game now.. hehe.

[barnez]

at first glance I thought this was a photo of someone's model train layout. Count me sold on the graphics upgrade. Now here's hoping either my old GeForce 8800 can handle it or the wife lets me upgrade the old PC machine!

-barnez

[EliteMarksman]

Same here, though I have a new rig planned for winter or thereabout. Waiting for Ivy Bridge and/or Bulldozer to either lower prices of the i5-2500k or improve performance even more.

[Toonces]

at first glance I thought this was a photo of someone's model train layout. Count me sold on the graphics upgrade. Now here's hoping either my old GeForce 8800 can handle it or the wife lets me upgrade the old PC machine!

Yeah, you and me both. And I may need to upgrade to Windows-7 (64-bit). Right now I have 32-bit XP..

[barnez]

Yeah, you and me both. And I may need to upgrade to Windows-7 (64-bit). Right now I have 32-bit XP..

Win7 I has. Quite nice. Highly recommended. I got a surprising performance boost simply by upgrading the OS (and putting it all alone on its very own SSD)

I'm rather anxious to see how RW3 handles - they say it is multi-core optimized so that itself might make things ok. Then again - my gfx card is rather old now - and sometimes seems to have trouble making texture calls (which earns me a CTD in RW )

-barnez

[EliteMarksman]

If you do put your OS in an SSD, make sure you move your page file to a spinner. Solid states and constant writes do not mix (unless you have money to replace them).

[arizonachris]

Solid states and constant writes do not mix (unless you have money to replace them).

Win 7 supports the TRIM command on SSD drives that have it, and most SSD makers do have software that will "clean up" the drive. But, never, ever defrag one. I would probably spend the $$$ on a new graphics card, and Win 7. Wait and see what performance RW3 brings to the table.

[EliteMarksman]

TRIM doesn't help drive wear. If the page file is on the SSD, there will be constant writes to at least a portion of the drive. If the firmware has a good wear-leveling algorithm, it should still last a while, so long as there is sufficient free space. If the wear-leveling is bad or there is not much space left on the drive to spread the wear out, you will have failed blocks much sooner than you should.

With solid states (and anything flash-based, so thumb drives and SD cards), there are a finite number of writes before the block fails, spinners do not suffer nearly as much, they just get worn out in general. Anything that causes repeated writes to flash memory will shorten its expected life.

TRIM addresses the other weakness of flash memory - namely that without it, the controller doesn't "know" when a file has been deleted, so it can't write something else to that block. And because of the way flash memory works, if there are a limited number of blocks available (either due to a lack of TRIM, or just the drive being nearly full), performance will degrade very quickly.

[barnez]

If you do put your OS in an SSD, make sure you move your page file to a spinner. Solid states and constant writes do not mix (unless you have money to replace them).

My setup (for those concerned or just plain interested) is Win 7 (64 bit) on the C drive: an SSD (64 gB if anyone cares) and with very few exceptions is the only item installed on the drive.

Most everything else is installed on a physically seperate drive (1TB WD blah blah blah) which is partitioned out.

The swap file (page file) is on its own partition and is the only item on that partition. If you can swing it, the ideal setup is to have the swap file on its own partition and installed on a drive seperate from the OS.

A few other notes if anyone is still reading: the manufacturers claim that the current generation of SSDs can perform enough read/write cycles to write continiously for 50 years without locking up (whether we believe them is something else entirely)

Everyone and their cousin is selling SSDs now, but not all are of the same quality. Buyer be warned.

As previously posted by someone else - there is no reason to defrag an SSD, the only maintenance needed for those drives is to keep them less than 90% filled (the only time SSDs have a slow-down)

-barnez

[hughes407]

Guess I'm behind the times a bit. Is there any distinct advantage to using a SSD for my gaming disk (non-system) over a 7200 rpm hard disk?

Don

[micaelcorleone]

Guess I'm behind the times a bit. Is there any distinct advantage to using a SSD for my gaming disk (non-system) over a 7200 rpm hard disk?

Yes and No. And you're not behind the times.

The only advantage is that it is a lot faster. However, it is a lot more expensive than a "normal" hard disk.
Also the life-span can be less, but good SSDs have the same as a hard drive.

[Hawk]

You could also compare the SSD to a 10,000 RPM drive.

[EliteMarksman]

A good SSD (Sandforce controller is preferable) has faster read/writes than any normal hard drive ever made, or that we probably ever will make. Obviously there is less of a difference between sequential read/write than there is random read/write, since it doesn't really matter where the data is stored on the SSD.

Also, SSDs will slow down after they are used for a bit. When manufacturers, and most reviewers, benchmark the drive, you are seeing straight out of the box numbers. Use it for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, and those numbers will drop by anywhere from 1/2 to 1/10th the performance of a brand new drive. Since we're generally talking 300mb/s+ read/writes, even dropping that by an order of magnitude is still faster than most spinners.

Also, with SSD, the larger the drive, the faster it will be. Most vendors do not use all available channels in their 64GB models, where they use all available channels in their 240 and 512MB models. Less used channels means less parallel read/writes, so less performance.

The main enemy of SSD is writes. Having your O/S and frequently used programs on an SSD is great, since you can boot and load programs, levels, etc, much faster. I would be leery of keeping the page file on the same SSD as the OS though, the writes will kill it eventually. Page files would be best on a fast spinner (Samsung F3 for 7200RPMs, or Raptors for 10000RPM drives). However, one path I may take on my next build would be a second, very small (16-32GB) ssd for the page file. That when when it dies, cheap and easy replacement.

[barnez]

A good SSD (Sandforce controller is preferable) has faster read/writes than any normal hard drive ever made, or that we probably ever will make. Obviously there is less of a difference between sequential read/write than there is random read/write, since it doesn't really matter where the data is stored on the SSD.

Also, SSDs will slow down after they are used for a bit. When manufacturers, and most reviewers, benchmark the drive, you are seeing straight out of the box numbers. Use it for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, and those numbers will drop by anywhere from 1/2 to 1/10th the performance of a brand new drive. Since we're generally talking 300mb/s+ read/writes, even dropping that by an order of magnitude is still faster than most spinners.

Also, with SSD, the larger the drive, the faster it will be. Most vendors do not use all available channels in their 64GB models, where they use all available channels in their 240 and 512MB models. Less used channels means less parallel read/writes, so less performance.

The main enemy of SSD is writes. Having your O/S and frequently used programs on an SSD is great, since you can boot and load programs, levels, etc, much faster. I would be leery of keeping the page file on the same SSD as the OS though, the writes will kill it eventually. Page files would be best on a fast spinner (Samsung F3 for 7200RPMs, or Raptors for 10000RPM drives). However, one path I may take on my next build would be a second, very small (16-32GB) ssd for the page file. That when when it dies, cheap and easy replacement.

What he said.

And - I like the idea of a small dedicated SSD for the page file. (File that one in the back of the noodle - it'll be awhile as my current case is running out of real estate

-barnez