Game Load Time
- Thread starter rwolf
- Start date
alas, SCSI, you return to haunt me like in the days of my youth... I remember trying to set up an Adaptec 2920 card and an HP 2x external CD burner, and it wouldn't work no matter how many times I beat it in the face until I FINALLY disabled DOS sound emulation. then, voila, it works fine. of course, that was the burner where if you stepped too heavily in the room while it was running, it would die. ah, those were the days...Doomtrooper said:Need to buy SCSII for that
then again, SCSI rocked on the Amiga.
yes, WD drives are very sexy. have a 120 gig in my machine, and I put a 160 gig in my dad's machine last week (his 120 gig started to whistle... stupid father who decided to buy a Sony computer instead of saving a couple of hundred bucks and having me build it for him... grumble). but yeah, they are both absurdly fast. and they're REALLY quiet. the one good thing I can say about his box is that it is all but silent, and the drive added no noise whatsoever... very nice.Pete said:Same data density? I thought I saw some benchmarks of Hitachi drives faring well against WD's 8MB ones.Doomtrooper said:
My 8MB WD is very fast, though. I also went from potentially missing the pistol round in CS to being one of the first on a new map.
Doomtrooper
Veteran
WD makes a nice drive, but much like my video card preference, I have bias towards Maxtor, Many times they would return much better drives then the drives I sent back for RMA.
Hmmm, you sure you don't have background tasks? Nothing out there needs more than 512MB RAM under Windows right now unless you have a bunch of stuff (besides the basic services) running in the background. I can run with 512MB without a swap file without a problem. The speed of the RAM would matter, but adding more on top and not using it isn't going to assist.
Well, you wouldn't want less than 8MB cache now because you get a longer warrenty with 8MB. However, after that it all comes down to the HD size and model when determining speed. ATA-133 is an irrelevance, HD's don't even hit ATA-100 yet.
You want to be careful with SCSI. Unless you're going to buy a top end drive, you'll find an IDE drive will give you better desktop performance, and for a lot less.
If you want HD advice, I'd reccomend www.storagereview.com. It's the Beyond3D of hard drives
If you've built lots of computers, you will see a couple of HD failures. My guess is about 10%Althornin said:
I guess we've probably bought around 50-60 harddrives here, and had a reasonably constant failure rate of 1 per year (once we stopped buying Quantum) apart from the IBM experience many had where 3 went slightly wrong within weeks (even those IBM drives left seem good after the BIOS flash). Probably about 9 dead in total.
I have only RMAed two, and the Maxtor experience was much better than WD. The others were either 'failed, but reformat OK' (portable drives for if I have to go to the US, or 'experiment with this OS') or been 'dead, terminally' but with secure data on them.
As regards the original question, I find that the first time you load a level disk access tends to dominate. After the cache is warmed, it tends to be entirely CPU. Then again, all my machines have 512M, so on 256M machines disk may still dominate.
This seems particularly true for Warcraft III. It has led me to change my tactics slightly: if I see my opposition has a really slow PC, I sometimes lean towards units that generate as much chaos on screen as possible to make it harder for him to control
This seems particularly true for Warcraft III. It has led me to change my tactics slightly: if I see my opposition has a really slow PC, I sometimes lean towards units that generate as much chaos on screen as possible to make it harder for him to control
As for recent Unreal games, they are in no way, shape or form harddrive limited when loading. Just look at the access LED, instead of a steady glow it's intermittent blinking.
Unreal 2 is a real bitch when it comes to level loads, no way is the harddrive affecting that. I don't know what the hell that damn game does to have level loads that approach a minute in length on a system with half a friggin gigabyte of memory (no, it doesn't seem to swap much, it just loads horribly slowly).
And the CD is only used to check copy protection these days, and it's been that way for ages too.
*G*
Unreal 2 is a real bitch when it comes to level loads, no way is the harddrive affecting that. I don't know what the hell that damn game does to have level loads that approach a minute in length on a system with half a friggin gigabyte of memory (no, it doesn't seem to swap much, it just loads horribly slowly).
And the CD is only used to check copy protection these days, and it's been that way for ages too.
*G*
Doomtrooper
Veteran
Althornin said:
Like DIO said, if you build lots of computers..RMA is nothing new. We built around 1000 PC's during the time I owned my company. I used all drives as we a custom built PC company.
Many times you would recieve 20 Asus motherboards and two are dead in the box, or MSI...didn't matter.
If a customer wanted Quantum, they got it...RMA is part of the game. In my dealings with these companies, Maxtor didn't question if the PC was dropped, or mishandled (which in mose cases were..virus..whatever).
While others did, and not only that Maxtor send back a better drive.
Can't complain there.
Doomtrooper
Veteran
Quitch said:
Umm I think I have good background with PC's since I've been doing this for oh 20 years . You do realize Windows XP requires a minimum of 256 megs of ram for basic services, and that leaves a 60 meg swap file.
512 will speed up things niceley, but as anyone knows other programs must be loaded for securtiy, say Norton Internet Security if they don't have a hardware firewall, which also has Antivirus, then maybe a download accelerator, maybe Cd software....the list goes on.
Take UT2003, play 3 hours online with 512 megs of Ram (I see this every day BTW)..now shut the game off and watch how long it takes for the game to shutdown, and listen to the hardive getting ready to spin out of the case. I've timed it..45 seconds for the swap file clearing.
True, but ATA 133 drives are faster than the same drive with a ATA 100 interface, in fact some ATA100/ATA 133 drives perform as good as Serial ATA drives.
I've tested this myself with a utility called 'HDTACH'
10 MB/s more than the same drive @ ATA 100.
Yes I know IDE has come a long way, SCSII still reigns supreme high end.
If you want HD advice, I'd reccomend www.storagereview.com. It's the Beyond3D of hard drives
Yep good site.
Princess_Frosty
Newcomer
Lots of factors, basically.
Hard drive:
Cache
RPM
Seek time
Ram:
Amount
speed
CD/DVD rom:
Speed
The Ram amount is all good and well but theres many varying speeds of ram, especially new DDR ram, everything from PC2500 through to PC4500? Them serial numbers are actually data rates in MB/sec.
Having more ram is good because you can load up the game engine to ram and then when you change map you only have to load the map data, generally having more ram is better but theres a very definate maximum for each game before performance doesnt increase. Ram speed is better here, get some nice fast ram and make sure you can run it at that speed (cpu compatability) initial load times will be better.
Hard drive speeds are important, make sure you get a 7200rpm hard drive, 5400 are to slow now a days, 8mb caches are starting to replace 2mb caches as the best. Seek times and other factors important in Hard drive times are usualy relative to how large the drive is, best to use a smaller faster primary drive for the OS (C and have a backup data drive (larger and slower). For even faster hard drives you can consider raid and use striping, this requires a RAID motherboard or a RAID PCI card, and 2 Hard drives. Or Invest more money in SCSI, again can come as a PCI card, SCSI is very expensive though.
CD roms and DVD roms generally are so cheap now a days if you dont have a 52 speed CD rom then splash out a tenner and get one
Full game installs on the HDD help loading times, and IF you own a leagal copy of the game then maybe install a crack so that CD checks are removed, cracks from www.gamecopyworld.com (perfectly legal NON-warez site may i add) For instance many people play BF1942 online, you need a unique key and therefore have had to bought the game, but you can remove CD checks when the game loads by using a crack. Some people find connecting to servers impossible otherwise, simply takes too long.
Your video card can also affect loading times, although im not exacture sure how, maybe different speed memory? some of the new FX cards use 2.2ns memory which is very fast, do the math and its ~910Mhz DDR speed, i expect that loads texture data very fast compared to other slower memory (when clocked that high obviously) Might want to overclock your video cards memory, again im not sure if this will help loading times specifically but its a good idea to do it anyways.
CPU speeds i doubt will help improve load times, it really depends on what the game engine is doing during load, engines like UT2003 have a prep time for effects like particles getting ready etc, i expect cpu speed would improve this.
Hard drive:
Cache
RPM
Seek time
Ram:
Amount
speed
CD/DVD rom:
Speed
The Ram amount is all good and well but theres many varying speeds of ram, especially new DDR ram, everything from PC2500 through to PC4500? Them serial numbers are actually data rates in MB/sec.
Having more ram is good because you can load up the game engine to ram and then when you change map you only have to load the map data, generally having more ram is better but theres a very definate maximum for each game before performance doesnt increase. Ram speed is better here, get some nice fast ram and make sure you can run it at that speed (cpu compatability) initial load times will be better.
Hard drive speeds are important, make sure you get a 7200rpm hard drive, 5400 are to slow now a days, 8mb caches are starting to replace 2mb caches as the best. Seek times and other factors important in Hard drive times are usualy relative to how large the drive is, best to use a smaller faster primary drive for the OS (C
and have a backup data drive (larger and slower). For even faster hard drives you can consider raid and use striping, this requires a RAID motherboard or a RAID PCI card, and 2 Hard drives. Or Invest more money in SCSI, again can come as a PCI card, SCSI is very expensive though.CD roms and DVD roms generally are so cheap now a days if you dont have a 52 speed CD rom then splash out a tenner and get one
Full game installs on the HDD help loading times, and IF you own a leagal copy of the game then maybe install a crack so that CD checks are removed, cracks from www.gamecopyworld.com (perfectly legal NON-warez site may i add) For instance many people play BF1942 online, you need a unique key and therefore have had to bought the game, but you can remove CD checks when the game loads by using a crack. Some people find connecting to servers impossible otherwise, simply takes too long.
Your video card can also affect loading times, although im not exacture sure how, maybe different speed memory? some of the new FX cards use 2.2ns memory which is very fast, do the math and its ~910Mhz DDR speed, i expect that loads texture data very fast compared to other slower memory (when clocked that high obviously) Might want to overclock your video cards memory, again im not sure if this will help loading times specifically but its a good idea to do it anyways.
CPU speeds i doubt will help improve load times, it really depends on what the game engine is doing during load, engines like UT2003 have a prep time for effects like particles getting ready etc, i expect cpu speed would improve this.
LOL, i administer about 1500 computers. RMA is nothing new to me. I speak of overall reliability. And in that sector, our experience with Maxtor has not been as good. We have a higher percentage of thier drives fail than we do our WD drives. (although we have less WD drives, but i do speak of percentages.Doomtrooper said:
Doomtrooper
Veteran
OK cool, my experience was different. Do you deal with WD personally at your job Athlornin..interesting to see if their RMA process has changed.
I've had some really bad experiences with Western Digital with a drive dieing almost immediatly after buying it. I'd then RMA it, wait several months, and get the drive back only to have it die later that week. Rinse repeat over 4 more times, and I just gave it to a friend, who says it works fine as long as you never ever move your computer or walk too loudly. Apparently the drive had 0 fault tolerance.
I replaced it with the same sized drive from Maxtor and it was cheaper, faster, and quieter and has never given me a single problem. All 3 drives in this computer, along with all the other drives in the house are Maxtors now and I've yet to have to RMA any of them.
This was a from a couple of years ago though, maybe WD has made a big turn around since then.
I replaced it with the same sized drive from Maxtor and it was cheaper, faster, and quieter and has never given me a single problem. All 3 drives in this computer, along with all the other drives in the house are Maxtors now and I've yet to have to RMA any of them.
This was a from a couple of years ago though, maybe WD has made a big turn around since then.
This is burst speed - i.e. reading straight from the hd cache. Real world differences should be a lot smaller, probably hardly measurable.Doomtrooper said:True, but ATA 133 drives are faster than the same drive with a ATA 100 interface, in fact some ATA100/ATA 133 drives perform as good as Serial ATA drives.
I've tested this myself with a utility called 'HDTACH'
10 MB/s more than the same drive @ ATA 100.
The OS can also make a lot of difference. For me, Max Payne2 level load times are simply awful with W98SE (1GB sdram). Interestingly, if I'll use linux & winex, level load times are something like 4 times faster... (it's hardly playable under winex, but that's a different matter).
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