Personal computing discussed
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slushpuppy007 wrote:okay, thanks, that makes sense.
Assuming the game loading process is single threaded, having a "faster" single threaded performance cpu will give you an edge in game loading speed, rather than a faster SSD?
Waco wrote:slushpuppy007 wrote:okay, thanks, that makes sense.
Assuming the game loading process is single threaded, having a "faster" single threaded performance cpu will give you an edge in game loading speed, rather than a faster SSD?
Game load times can be significantly improved by multiple fast cores (depends on the game, not all of them are terrible single-threaded beasts).
jihadjoe wrote:... RAMDrive which is literally 100s of times faster than the fastest SSDs ...
Krogoth wrote:Waco wrote:slushpuppy007 wrote:okay, thanks, that makes sense.
Assuming the game loading process is single threaded, having a "faster" single threaded performance cpu will give you an edge in game loading speed, rather than a faster SSD?
Game load times can be significantly improved by multiple fast cores (depends on the game, not all of them are terrible single-threaded beasts).
Not likely going to happen. Loading data onto memory tends to be a heavily serial workload. You are not going to see that much of a benefit from parallelization.
just brew it! wrote:jihadjoe wrote:... RAMDrive which is literally 100s of times faster than the fastest SSDs ...
Not true.
Even under ideal conditions, a RAMDrive on a system with dual-channel DDR4-2133 RAM has a hard ceiling at 17 GB/sec (total RAM bandwidth is 34 GB/sec but you only get half of that because accessing the data causes it to be copied from one location in RAM to another).
The Samsung 960 Pro that was just written up on the front page has a sequential read speed of 3.5 GB/sec.
So the difference is less than a factor of 5.
Another way to look at it: Today's high-end SSDs are faster than the system RAM of 15 years ago.
Waco wrote:Wrong, but okay. The only operation being done is not just loading data into memory...if it was, it would scale pretty nicely with better IO subsystems.
Waco wrote:If there's any amount of latency affecting things, RAM drives are hundreds of times faster than even the best NVMe drives, as you can essentially saturate the bus even with small low-queue depth workloads.
ClickClick5 wrote:I once ran Skyrim on a WD Green drive, WD Black drive, an OCZ ssd, and from RAM. I then tried different loading points to get a metric of how fast the game loads on these devices. The HDDs were the slowest obviously, while the SSD was a massive jump over the HDDs. Yet the RAM only shaved off about a second or two vs 10+ seconds.
The CPU is going to be the bottleneck with these fast drives. Just that simple.
EDIT: Found it: http://i.imgur.com/u2OO3z2.png
The computer was rebooted before each drive change to clear any preloaded content.
Krogoth wrote:Waco wrote:Wrong, but okay. The only operation being done is not just loading data into memory...if it was, it would scale pretty nicely with better IO subsystems.
Not every process and operation can be easily parallelized and there's an hefty opportunity cost on writing proper multi-thread code (more manhours spend on testing and QC). There's a reason why most mainstream application are still single and dual-threaded at most. There is simply isn't enough benefits to justify the extra cost.
just brew it! wrote:Waco wrote:If there's any amount of latency affecting things, RAM drives are hundreds of times faster than even the best NVMe drives, as you can essentially saturate the bus even with small low-queue depth workloads.
I'd be a little surprised if the difference is hundreds of times even for latency-sensitive workloads. You're still treating it as if it was a disk, and operating through an API and device driver stack that is emulating a block I/O device. So although you don't have the overhead of sending commands to the drive and waiting for it to respond, you do still have quite a bit of software overhead for each request. It's also likely to be more CPU intensive, since the CPU is moving the data around itself instead of offloading the data movement to a hardware DMA engine in the disk interface.
A few months ago at the day job we were evaluating a PCIe-based SSD card. Much to our surprise, the performance of the SSD was actually better than a RAMDisk on certain workloads. (The testbed we were using was a ~4 year old server using DDR3 RAM; I expect that the RAMDisk would've won on newer hardware, but the result was still a bit of an eye-opener, and we initially thought we had screwed up the test somehow.)
Waco wrote:I'm well aware there are costs, but you're ignoring a massively complicated set of parameters and sweeping them under the rug by saying game loading is single threaded and "only loading data into memory". That's not reality. Game assets have to be decompressed, data structures built, etc, and these all affect loading times even if the thread doing I/O is "just loading things".
Krogoth wrote:Waco wrote:I'm well aware there are costs, but you're ignoring a massively complicated set of parameters and sweeping them under the rug by saying game loading is single threaded and "only loading data into memory". That's not reality. Game assets have to be decompressed, data structures built, etc, and these all affect loading times even if the thread doing I/O is "just loading things".
Most of that stuff in mainstream applications and games are serial in nature and it doesn't yield much in returns if try to parallelized it. If it was so simple to parallelize and it yield massive benefits then why almost every piece of software that parallelized focuses on massive number crunching with workloads that easily be broken-up? Reality itself is you claim is much more complicated.
Parallel computing isn't some magical wand that makes everything 2x as you keep throwing more cores onto it. People are so desperate on trying to keep the "Moore's law" meme alive when it has been dead for almost a decade now.
Waco wrote:
If you want to think a single core is all that matters for loading times, by all means, continue to do so. Here, a quick little sample of why you're wrong from 6 years ago: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... 38-14.html
Krogoth wrote:Hopefully you can see why THG is not really held in high regards within the enthusiast circles.
slushpuppy007 wrote:Hi,
When I read the reviews on the new NVMe SSDs, like the Samsung 960 Pro, I see that the windows boot times and load times for games are pretty much the same.
Like 0.5 seconds difference between a SATA SSD and a NVMe SSD, sometimes the SATA SSD even beats the NVMe Drive with game / application load times, and its got only 550MB/s Seq Read vs 3200MB/s Seq Read.
Can anyone explain the technical detail on why this is the case?
Reading some large game media files seems like a Sequential Workload, and the NVMe Drive should shine here.
Thanks
Slushpuppy007
anotherengineer wrote:About this.
Does or has anyone upgraded from a good 2.5 sata SSD to an NMVe on a newer CPU?? Just wondering if there is a human perceivable noticeable real world improvement??
I am planning on building a new machine probably this summer, and I don't know if I should pay the premium to get NVMe or a larger capacity 2.5 SATA SSD??
I basically use the PC as a web-surfer and occasional gaming, with some occasional AutoCAD 2015. Just wondering if it's worth it??
If I had to do it over I would go with the larger drive as you mentioned, I put this in mine and while fast I don't believe it was worth the money.
On the other hand I put a 960GB each in my boys new computers and they seem plenty fast to me.
Btw I am using an i7-6700k
http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=179_1229_1296&item_id=090002
anotherengineer wrote:About this.
Does or has anyone upgraded from a good 2.5 sata SSD to an NMVe on a newer CPU?? Just wondering if there is a human perceivable noticeable real world improvement??
I am planning on building a new machine probably this summer, and I don't know if I should pay the premium to get NVMe or a larger capacity 2.5 SATA SSD??
I basically use the PC as a web-surfer and occasional gaming, with some occasional AutoCAD 2015. Just wondering if it's worth it??