SSD or partition

[david1]

Just wonder on peoples thoughts and experiences, as my TS2014 folder is getting bigger i am now starting to suffer from slow frames rates from time to time. would investing in a solid state drive be the way forward although i dont really want to spend £100 on one if there is going to be little or no improvment, or would just running TS2014 from its own partition help frame rates as i have have a second 1TB HDD in my PC which i have 500MB for backup and the remaining partition is free.

[Natvander]

On my new PC I have a SSD dedicated to Train Sim and the load times for routes is a lot quicker than on the old PC, but that could also be down to the new system.
I believe the only improvement you will get is loading times.

[RONVKING]

Hi,

I have a OCZ revodrive which acts as both my main startup drive plus steam etc installed on it. All non windows stuff goes onto a couple of SSD's to try and reduce to loading on steam.

On most routes away from any heavy loadings I can get 70 plus FPS but once it gets into a heavy area like King's Cross, Glasgow etc thats drops to 15FPS.

Scenery loads quicker but still stutters at times when loading and I'm sure its a bottle neck in RSC's system as it's much the same as my older system was, just the loading stutters are shorter.

Rgds Ron

[Juanillo99]

Also the breaks decrease in tile transitions.
And also improves the rendering of the scenic elements.

[gptech]

Having the game in its own partition will be of no benefit, as it's still on the same physical disc as everything else. Partitioning brings no real performance boost with modern drives and is only a way of 'logically' organising your folders---it can even cause a performance loss so the answer to your question is that an SSD would give the best results. However, there's debate as to whether having the game on the SSD or Windows on the SSD gives optimum results and as far as I'm aware nobody has tried using an SSD as they were originally intended to be used; as a fast cache.
You'd get an improvement in loading times by just having the game on it's own conventional drive, certainly not to the degree an SSD gives but for far less money.

[david1]

Thanks for the advice, the partition that i was thinking of is not the same drive as the operating system and everthing else on the PC this HDD is only used for backup files, just trying to find out what others have tried and to what results, or do i just have to put up with slow frame rates in dense areas

[gptech]

Your frame rates are more dependant on your CPU and GPU than the kind of HDD used, a 'faster accessing' hard drive would only lessen stuttering.
What are the specs of the machine and what FPS are you getting?

[secludedsfx]

I use an SSD and loading Settle - Carlisle takes me about 5 seconds max (also I did notice a difference in tile stutter but not by much).

[david1]

Never measured my fps CPU 2.67 quad core, 1TB GPU radeon 5850, 8GB RAM DDR3

[scorpion71]

SSD wins every time for me.

Before I had my SSD 18 months or so back there would be certain points on routes where it would freeze for a second whilst loading new data, nothing major I know but it got really irritating in the end so I opted for a SSD, those pauses/freezes are now non existent.

[ttjph]

Are you suffering from brief slow-downs every so often as new scenery tiles are loaded; or sustained low framerates in areas with dense scenery?

If it's the latter then my standard advice is to install a program which graphs your GPU usage (nVidia Inspector is what I use, but presumably you'll need something different with a Radeon card). If this graph is hitting 100% in the 'heavy' areas then you're GPU limited, and need to turn down GPU-related graphics options (shadows and antialiasing first) or upgrade the video card; if it's always below 100%, then it's CPU (shadows again to start with, but some of the other options may help).

From the specs you give, either component could be the limiting factor...

If it's tile-loading stutters, then an SSD may help, but from my experience (and that of others) won't necessarily eliminate the problem. Moving to the other disk may or may not help, dependent mostly on the relative performance of your two disks I think.

HTH!

[smarty2]

I used to have steam on an ssd but that failed after 2 years, probably because of the constant changing to the asset folder nearly on a daily basis plus downloads and all the rest of it. Decided to get a 1TB HDD and whack steam on that and windows on an M4 120GB SSD, can't say I noticed any significant drop in performance having steam on the HDD, lot cheaper too.

[gptech]

As you already have another drive, move Steam to that and see if there's an improvement. Costs nothing other than a bit of time and won't destroy anything. Back up first of all thought!!

[KGBUssr]

I am lucky to have recently changed to the new Alienware 17 which is pretty awesome; I have Win 7 64 bit on a 256gb SSD, RW on a dedicated 256gb mSATA SSD, and everything else on a 750gb hybrid drive - I also have a 2tb external drive for storage, archives and back-ups, and would say that having your Windows and RW on SSD has improved load times and less stutter - I first used SSDs on my old Dell Precision, and the loading of Win7 was halved, and the loading of RW noticeably quicker.

[chriscooper]

http://openhardwaremonitor.org/ is a useful bit of software for looking at bottlenecks in your system. It shows CPU, Graphics and Memory percentage loads. Obviously those that are near 100% are the problems, whilst things that don't get close are fine. As well as graphs, it will also show maximum values, which give a very quick indication of whats being worked hard and what is cruising. It doesn't show data rates for drives, but clearly if other things are already maxed out then they are going to need sorting before something like an SSD would make a difference.