Comparison of 3 different storage techs with TDM

[AluminumHaste]

I've been looking at getting a current generation SSD hoping to improve my Darkmod experience, loading times for levels, textures and sounds etc.

Instead of buying an expensive SSD like a Samsung 840 Evo and hoping things would be better, I realized that I could try using something even more impressive; a RamDrive.

 

A ramdrive is a virtual disk that is created in the system memory, so it gains all the benefits of volatile memory, ie low latency, and fast speeds.

However because my installed system memory is only 6GB, I had to limit my ramdrive to only 3,096 MB, which is just enough to fit Dark Mod 2.01.

 

So to illustrate just how fast a ram drive is, here are the benchmarks in MegaBytes per second, of the read and write speeds of the various drives in my computer system.

 

So first up, is a newer (2012) Seagate 3TB 7200rpm traditional HDD:

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 Shizuku Edition x64 © 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [sATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

 

Sequential Read : 169.590 MB/s

Sequential Write : 164.741 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 34.262 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 76.175 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.347 MB/s [ 84.7 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.006 MB/s [ 245.5 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.043 MB/s [ 254.7 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.994 MB/s [ 242.8 IOPS]

 

Test : 1000 MB [E: 41.6% (312.3/749.8 GB)] (x5)

Date : 2014/04/23 2:45:56

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

 

Next is an ancient Samsung 256 GB SSD (6+ years old):

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 Shizuku Edition x64 © 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [sATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

 

Sequential Read : 235.450 MB/s

Sequential Write : 144.372 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 185.942 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 48.226 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 26.206 MB/s [ 6397.9 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.318 MB/s [ 565.8 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 31.995 MB/s [ 7811.2 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 2.167 MB/s [ 529.1 IOPS]

 

Test : 1000 MB [D: 40.5% (96.6/238.5 GB)] (x5)

Date : 2014/04/23 2:35:42

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

And lastly, here are the benchmarks of the Ramdrive:

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 Shizuku Edition x64 © 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [sATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

 

Sequential Read : 5798.891 MB/s

Sequential Write : 8029.174 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 5594.851 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 7671.060 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 610.294 MB/s [148997.7 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 577.084 MB/s [140889.6 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1787.781 MB/s [436469.9 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1505.924 MB/s [367657.3 IOPS]

 

Test : 1000 MB [G: 1.4% (43.6/3096.0 MB)] (x5)

Date : 2014/04/23 2:28:46

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

As you can see the SSD, while decently fast, especially compared to a regular spinning hard disk drive, is nowhere near what a Ramdrive is capable of.

 

Now that we've quantified the performance differences between the technologies, lets get to the benchmarks.

For the test I ran 2 separate tests; from the desktop until I got to the main menu, and from pressing Start Mission until the "Press Attack to begin" message comes up. The Map I used to test is Requiem as it's quite large and takes a "long" time to load.

 

So first up, is the 3TB 7200rpm traditional HDD.

 

Desktop to main menu: ~7s

Start mission to Click to start message: ~1m45s

 

Next up is the Samsung 256GB SSD.

 

Desktop to main menu: ~6s

Start mission to Click to start message: ~1m28s

 

Last is the RamDrive.

 

Desktop to main menu: ~4s

Start mission to Click to start message: ~1m26s

 

My system is not up to date by any measure, I have 6GB of ram with an Intel i7 930 clocked at 4Ghz, which is now 3 generations behind Haswell.

What I can take away from this experiment is that there are diminishing returns to just getting a faster drive to run Dark Mod from. Going from the regular HDD to the SSD made a significant improvement, however going from the SSD to the Ramdrive provided minuscule decreases to loading times, and is almost within margin of error.

 

What I can determine from this is that once you get over ~200MB/s read speed from your HDD, you will start to be bound by the speed of your CPU. And unfortunately, single thread execution speed here is going to be king, as Doom 3's engine is not multithreaded very much, especially map loading.

So my suggestion would be a fast quad core i7, or even a dual core i5, and overclock that baby as high as it will go, which will more than likely give you the best increases in loading performance with The Dark Mod.

 

I hope this post was helpful, I really need some sleep, so not even sure if this makes any sense.

[Briareos H]

Exactly what I expected from my recent adventures with a SSD. For people who want to shorten their loading times, your last paragraph is the heart of the matter: only half (or less than half) of the loading process is bound by the speed of your hard drive. While it is always worth it to upgrade to a SSD, you won't see huge improvements in loading TDM missions if you have a somewhat slow CPU, because on those systems, the "Preparing to launch mission" always takes more time than proper loading from disk.

 

Would it be possible for someone familiar with the code to tell us roughly what is being calculated during that second phase of the loading?

[Obsttorte]

Shouldn't the graphics card also have an impact on the loading times, as the textures have to be loaded to the graphics RAM in the mission loading step?

[AluminumHaste]

In this case not really. Since the entire game is sitting in DRAM already, going from DRAM to graphics card ram would be less than 1 second. Sequential reading of the ram drive is over 5GB/second, TDM in its entirety is less than 3GB.

[Bikerdude]

I've been looking at getting a current generation SSD hoping to improve my Darkmod experience, loading times for levels, textures and sounds etc.Instead of buying an expensive SSD like a Samsung 840 Evo and hoping things would be better, I realized that I could try using something even more impressive; a RamDrive.

Your aware your going to have to load TDM into the ram drive every time you boot the PC..?

 

SSD's arent as pricey as they used to be, for example the Crucial M500 480GB drive is a good mid-hi end SSD. But whats 'crucial' here is (terribly sorry for the pun) is the price-to-size ratio. A friend bought this drive for £165 a few weeks ago and thats what a top end 256GB SSD normally goes for.

 

Stop mucking about with RAM drives for anything other than placing all your temp folders in/on.

[FenPhoenix]

I decided to try this myself, while also testing the effects of overclocking. My CPU is an i7 3770K and my drives are the following, from slowest to fastest:

 

HDD: Western Digital Red 2 TB, 5400 RPM (WD20EFRX-68EUZN0)

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 © 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [sATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

 

Sequential Read : 126.228 MB/s

Sequential Write : 122.112 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 29.865 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 77.503 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.578 MB/s [ 141.1 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.694 MB/s [ 413.5 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.480 MB/s [ 361.3 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.730 MB/s [ 422.3 IOPS]

 

Test : 1000 MB [M: 24.1% (448.8/1863.0 GB)] (x5)

Date : 2014/04/23 10:39:59

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

 

 

SSD: Intel X25-M G2 160 GB (SSDSA2M160G2GC)

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 © 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [sATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

 

Sequential Read : 216.380 MB/s

Sequential Write : 86.345 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 202.488 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 68.445 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 21.468 MB/s [ 5241.1 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 27.551 MB/s [ 6726.2 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 195.075 MB/s [ 47625.7 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 50.722 MB/s [ 12383.2 IOPS]

 

Test : 1000 MB [C: 81.5% (121.5/148.9 GB)] (x5)

Date : 2014/04/23 10:21:37

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

 

 

RAM disk: 4 GB DDR3-1600 using Dataram RAMDisk Lite

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 © 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [sATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

 

Sequential Read : 6296.221 MB/s

Sequential Write : 9404.269 MB/s

Random Read 512KB : 6157.113 MB/s

Random Write 512KB : 8832.136 MB/s

Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 839.956 MB/s [205067.4 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 739.845 MB/s [180626.2 IOPS]

Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 799.204 MB/s [195118.0 IOPS]

Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 698.534 MB/s [170540.5 IOPS]

 

Test : 1000 MB [F: 0.0% (0.0/4084.0 MB)] (x5)

Date : 2014/04/23 10:30:27

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

 

 

I tested with Requiem and measured the time from clicking "Start Mission" until the "Press 'Attack' to start" screen.

 

The results:

 

3770K, stock (fluctuated between 3.7 and 3.9 GHz while loading)

HDD: ~1:42

SSD: ~1:25

RAM disk: ~1:23

 

3770K, OC'd to 4.4 GHz steady

HDD: ~1:30

SSD: ~1:12

RAM disk: ~1:10

 

4.4 GHz is as high as it would go without getting into settings I'm not familiar with, plus I'm running low-airflow-for-silence cooling on an Ivy Bridge so I wouldn't want to take it much higher anyway.

But anyway, in each case, the overclock still knocked 12-13 seconds off the load time. Pretty good. Still pretty long though... but overclocking (or just a faster CPU) definitely helps. And again the RAM disk is barely any faster than even my extremely old SSD (circa late 2009), so yeah.

 

[edits: whoops, I wrote down the wrong CPU... ]

Edited April 23, 2014 by FenPhoenix

[AluminumHaste]

Your aware your going to have to load TDM into the ram drive every time you boot the PC..?

 

Yes Biker, I'm not a moron lol

 

And I did test that very thing, the TDM image loads in <25 seconds.

I also tried system shock 2 in it's own image, that loads in less than 15 seconds.

 

And besides, my new computer is going to have 32GB of ram, in Quad Channel configuration. So for 99% of the time, my memory will be probably 90% unused, might as well use it for something right?

Planetside 2 or Diablo 3 would be good candidates.

[AluminumHaste]

And as Fen pointed out, it's more important to have a faster CPU really.

[Tr00pertj]

I'll chime in here though it is a little late.

 

I have an ssd (samsung evo 840) and 16 GiB ram in my laptop and a 5400 1 TB WD HD.

I always thought I would at some time create a Ram Disc just because it's there. Then I found that Samsung have an app called Magician for there SSD's and with it is an option to use rapid mode. It uses 1GiB of system memory to speed up one SSD.

I have not noticed any performance increase but no doubt if I took the time and tested it would probably be in the region of a fraction of a %. Go figure.

[Bikerdude]

Yes Biker, I'm not a moron lol

Heh, i was being slightly sarky

[Lydecker]

Interesting test. Confirms that getting an SSD is... crucial in eliminating loading delays, but does not necessarily make things much quicker. I have 2 myself, 128GB for Win7+software and 256GB for games. Besides Windows & other software starting up very quickly, games have been rather unaffected. Though I am almost always the 1st on a server in any game after level change, the initial loading takes rather long time.

 

Then if you are capturing a lot of gameplay video or editing it, I'd suggest 2 small SSD's in RAID0. Would make a hell of a scratch disk...