Recent SSD that works with Win7

[Bizman]

Thanks TDeacon.

"if you start moving fast, you can sometimes outpace the loading of the information" reminds me of my early playing days when Colin McRae Rally was my favourite. The winter rally in Sweden was particularly fun when the spruce forest kept popping up from the white fields only a few car lengths in front of you. Talk about growing carbon sinks to eliminate fossil fuel emissions!

[haggerty]

yeah, I'd just like to add that many games benefit from SSD.  I've experienced the stutters on hard drive intensive games that goes away when I re-install it on the SSD.  While you may not gain any frames, your experience will improve with much faster load times and by not getting lost frames from hard drive access stutters.

[Skuzzy]

Must be the result of using generic graphic engines preventing them from pre-loading what they are going to need.  Aces High has been doing that since its inception.

[Wiley]

Bizman, note the following: 

The current alpha 3.0.0 Star Citizen release has microstutters which apparently go away when you put the game on a SSD.  See this thread https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50174/thread/performance-comparisons/903190 , in the Jan 12 10:04am post, regarding test with game on SSD versus game on HDD.  These micro-stutters don't appear to have anything to do with moving "fast", and can most easily be seen by sitting in space and slowly rotating your ship around the fore and aft axis.  Presumably a design bug, but who knows when they'll get to it.  And as you say, for that game, a SSD helps with the 5+ minute game loading time. 

BTW, I have a pretty decent system, with Win7 Pro 64 bit, i7-6700K-4.0GHz, 32 GB DRAM, GTX 1070 8GB, 1080p 144 Hz monitor, etc.  You can see who I am on Spectrum by my avatar, which is the same as the one I use here ...

EDIT:  Some say Star Citizen's ship combat system is supposed to be "WW2 in Space".  I always refer people who use this ludicrous term to Aces High, so they can see what WW2 fighter maneuvering actually involved.

SC pretty much won't run on my system.  Non-overclocked 2500k with 16GB RAM and an r9 380.  I'm chalking it up to Alpha and my system being marginal at best for it.  To play that game properly I'm likely going to have to get a whole new system (gee darn).

Where I really noticed the HD access was in the GTA games when you get in a fast car.  I always assumed it was due to the maps being so detailed with so many different things in them that loading as you go is more efficient than preloading everything.  Edit:  "Efficient" is the wrong word.  "usable by the target audience's hardware" is what I meant.

I've often wondered how some of those games would go if you could get enough RAM to throw them on a RAM drive...  Unfortunately the recent games I believe would benefit from it are 60+ gig games.

Wiley.

[Skuzzy]

A game does not need to pre-load everything.  It just needs to pre-load what is going to be drawn the next frame or frames.  Easy enough for a game to calculate that.

[Wiley]

That then raises the question- Why wouldn't everybody do it then?  Like you say, it's not complex.  It would seem to me with something like GTA, the amount of data you'd need to preload in some of the cities as you're moving through them would be relatively large, so that's why the HDD might fall behind?  In GTA5 there seems to me to be a ton of unique items being loaded in for the terrain.  Objects they reuse of course, but for the scenery there seems to be a ton of different tiles.

Or it could just be inefficient code I suppose.  PUBG's an excellent example of slapping something together on an engine that's not particularly well designed for it, in my estimation.

Wiley.

[Skuzzy]

It could be related to the use of a third party graphic engine where they have no control.  A proper pre-load algorithm needs to be implemented at the graphic engine level.