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Geek Culture / Do hard disk drives cause bottlenecks?

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AutoBot
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Posted: 29th May 2011 23:22 Edited at: 29th May 2011 23:23
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Say I have an AMD x6 CPU, maybe 8 gigs of ram, just as good of a cpu, and a standard 7200rpm HDD. Would the HDD cause a bottleneck for gaming and so forth? I've heard good things about solid state drives and how the loading cursers have basically "gone away" after using them, so I'd only think that it's a good guildline for a gaming rig.

A good example:



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TheComet
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Posted: 29th May 2011 23:30
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Yes, they are a bottleneck. But tell me one game that needs fast hard disk reading? Sure, your games would load faster when using an SSD, and you'll be able to start up your computer faster (if your bus can handle it), but in multiplayer games you'd still have to wait for the others to load.

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AutoBot
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Posted: 29th May 2011 23:40
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But would it increase FPS/game performance? Even in single player?

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Interplanetary Funk
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Posted: 29th May 2011 23:41
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it would only affect loading times. Everything else is done on the cpu, ram or gpu.


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Libervurto
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Posted: 29th May 2011 23:49
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You know when objects pop into view as you move towards them, can't remember what it's called, something to do with draw distance. Would an SSD improve or solve this problem? I'm assuming not all objects can be held in RAM and must be loaded from the hard drive.


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bitJericho
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Posted: 30th May 2011 00:27
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Games that dynamically load from the harddrive would be improved. Games like gta for example.

You're probably better off spending the money on more ram and faster GPUs though.

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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 30th May 2011 20:57
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I wouldn't recommend an SSD for anything other than just the OS, to get something with the capacity to store lots of games is going to cost you an arm and a leg for anything decent.


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JoelJ
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Posted: 1st Jun 2011 05:34
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SSDs make your computer feel more snappy, but not necessarily faster. Meaning, the response time for opening applications and such like that is faster. But once you're in and moving, it doesn't make a difference.

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TheComet
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Posted: 1st Jun 2011 14:31 Edited at: 1st Jun 2011 16:45
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Just to throw in another game that uses dynamic HDD loading : MineCraft

But Notch has programmed it well in my opinion, and only loads one chunk at a time. I don't notice anything on my machine. I'm not sure about other games that need to load dynamically, but they probably made it so the data being read/written per second doesn't exceed some value (which is usually way below anything todays HDDs can deliver).

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Interplanetary Funk
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Posted: 1st Jun 2011 14:41
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Most new games use multithreading to load content dynamically as it lets the game carry on without interfering, this can cause lag on single core CPUs though.


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crispex
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Posted: 2nd Jun 2011 06:12 Edited at: 2nd Jun 2011 06:13
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Quote: "But would it increase FPS/game performance? Even in single player?"


No. All it would do is decrease loading times. Unless it uses chunk generation like Minecraft, where data is constantly being written / read.

I just now realized I've had a typo in my signature for the past 3 years.
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