5 ms·

Enthusiasts tend to be gamers, and once you have a high end machine, most games tend to be limited on disk bandwidth, which affects load times. By consumers, I

Enthusiasts tend to be gamers, and once you have a high end machine, most games tend to be limited on disk bandwidth, which affects load times. By consumers, I meant enthusiasts, since that's who the Threadripper (X399) and Intel's Extreme Edition (X299) platforms are aimed at.

frou_dh 9y ago
That sounds frivolous versus a single high-end PCIe SSD. Wouldn't be surprised if the improvement in real-world game load times wasn't even perceptible.
- ux-app 9y ago
  >That sounds frivolous Maybe, but that's what being an enthusiast is all about :) also assets (models & textures) need to be loaded from disk during game-play which can result in stutter when gaming. Faster IO would help here.
  - frou_dh 9y ago
    Our baseline of a single high-end PCIe SSD isn't slow, though. This comparison is ultra high bandwidth vs ultra ultra high bandwidth.
theandrewbailey 9y ago
A lot of processing happens when games load. Once you have sufficient storage bandwidth and latency, load times flatten out. It seems that "sufficient" is SATA; above that, there is little difference in game load times: https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4 https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ss...
- twoodfin 9y ago
  I wonder if game developers are actually disincentivized from qualitatively improving load times past a certain acceptable threshold, lest their AAA game be perceived as lightweight.
  - theandrewbailey 9y ago
    I doubt it. Gamers have been complaining about long load times since almost the dawn of time, and I think one with as little as technically possible could make it a selling point.
  - wtallis 9y ago
    The poor market penetration of PCIe SSDs and their high price per GB is a strong disincentive for game developers to store data in lightly-compressed formats that require minimal CPU processing to load and use. We might see some improvement in using multiple threads to load game data now that CPU core counts are on the rise at the high end.
  - nbanks 9y ago
    Reminds me of the first time I played Kings Quest from a RAM drive. I first played the game from a floppy disk, and it ways really nice to have everything load instantly!
krisroadruck 9y ago
Enthusiast here - can confirm, an array of nvme's makes a huge difference over single standard SSD. I set this up last year, check the benchmark results, it's night and day. http://imgur.com/a/N4FpD http://imgur.com/a/N4FpD note: be sure to note the scaling at the bottom. 4-500MB/s old vs 3000+ MB/s new
- steveadoo 9y ago
  Do games actually load any faster? I went from a Samsung SSD(I think the 850 pro) to an Intel nvme ssd, and load times in games didn't seem much faster. I definitely notice it when booting up VS though.
  - hishnash 9y ago
    Gamers might the most vocal high-end PC users out there but they are not the people with the most money. The threadripper is not targeted at gamers. It is targeted at people who make money from using their machines, these people can, therefore, afford to upgrade. Consider a user who does video work. (most modern films and tv is filmed in 8k know) if this is in Raw format as it comes off the camera for a 90 min episode that is 6000 GB. Working on this data (tone mapping, cutting, etc) needs all this data to be fed in and out of the (CPU and or GPUs) so all these PCI lanes are there so you can have very fast access to the raw data and still have space for 2 or 4 full speed GPUs to do that work for you. Forget games no game developer optimizes their games for 4 GPUs these days even Nvida have said that they dont realy want people to do more than 2GPUs in SLI.
    - drewg123 9y ago
      I do a lot of compiles of a codebase which is pretty big (Netflix version of FreeBSD). A full recompile takes me ~1 hr on my box (Xeon E5-2630 v3, 8 cores, 16 threads, 32GB DDR4). Most of this is a parallel make that is 100% CPU bound. So I'm probably going to update to thread ripper when it comes out. Doubling my core count should come close to halving my compile times. I probably will do storage via a ZFS array of small-ish SSDs or NVME drives. I started with a ZFS array of spinning drives when I built this machine ~2 years ago, with an SSD for L2 ARC. I was occasionally IO bound, so I moved most of the build stuff onto its own SSD. That's probably enough, but I want redundancy (without spinning drives to back up to), and I suck at cabling, so I'm leaning towards just using NVME drives in PCIe slots in order to avoid the cables.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I think gaming and ARM cannot be used in the same context. The extra IO is useless to the gamer unless there is an Nvidia GPU on the other end.

frou_dh 9y ago

That sounds frivolous versus a single high-end PCIe SSD. Wouldn't be surprised if the improvement in real-world game load times wasn't even perceptible.

ux-app 9y ago
>That sounds frivolous Maybe, but that's what being an enthusiast is all about :) also assets (models & textures) need to be loaded from disk during game-play which can result in stutter when gaming. Faster IO would help here.
- frou_dh 9y ago
  Our baseline of a single high-end PCIe SSD isn't slow, though. This comparison is ultra high bandwidth vs ultra ultra high bandwidth.

theandrewbailey 9y ago

A lot of processing happens when games load. Once you have sufficient storage bandwidth and latency, load times flatten out. It seems that "sufficient" is SATA; above that, there is little difference in game load times: https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4 https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ss...

twoodfin 9y ago
I wonder if game developers are actually disincentivized from qualitatively improving load times past a certain acceptable threshold, lest their AAA game be perceived as lightweight.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  I doubt it. Gamers have been complaining about long load times since almost the dawn of time, and I think one with as little as technically possible could make it a selling point.
- wtallis 9y ago
  The poor market penetration of PCIe SSDs and their high price per GB is a strong disincentive for game developers to store data in lightly-compressed formats that require minimal CPU processing to load and use. We might see some improvement in using multiple threads to load game data now that CPU core counts are on the rise at the high end.
- nbanks 9y ago
  Reminds me of the first time I played Kings Quest from a RAM drive. I first played the game from a floppy disk, and it ways really nice to have everything load instantly!

krisroadruck 9y ago

Enthusiast here - can confirm, an array of nvme's makes a huge difference over single standard SSD. I set this up last year, check the benchmark results, it's night and day. http://imgur.com/a/N4FpD http://imgur.com/a/N4FpD note: be sure to note the scaling at the bottom. 4-500MB/s old vs 3000+ MB/s new

steveadoo 9y ago
Do games actually load any faster? I went from a Samsung SSD(I think the 850 pro) to an Intel nvme ssd, and load times in games didn't seem much faster. I definitely notice it when booting up VS though.
- hishnash 9y ago
  Gamers might the most vocal high-end PC users out there but they are not the people with the most money. The threadripper is not targeted at gamers. It is targeted at people who make money from using their machines, these people can, therefore, afford to upgrade. Consider a user who does video work. (most modern films and tv is filmed in 8k know) if this is in Raw format as it comes off the camera for a 90 min episode that is 6000 GB. Working on this data (tone mapping, cutting, etc) needs all this data to be fed in and out of the (CPU and or GPUs) so all these PCI lanes are there so you can have very fast access to the raw data and still have space for 2 or 4 full speed GPUs to do that work for you. Forget games no game developer optimizes their games for 4 GPUs these days even Nvida have said that they dont realy want people to do more than 2GPUs in SLI.
  - drewg123 9y ago
    I do a lot of compiles of a codebase which is pretty big (Netflix version of FreeBSD). A full recompile takes me ~1 hr on my box (Xeon E5-2630 v3, 8 cores, 16 threads, 32GB DDR4). Most of this is a parallel make that is 100% CPU bound. So I'm probably going to update to thread ripper when it comes out. Doubling my core count should come close to halving my compile times. I probably will do storage via a ZFS array of small-ish SSDs or NVME drives. I started with a ZFS array of spinning drives when I built this machine ~2 years ago, with an SSD for L2 ARC. I was occasionally IO bound, so I moved most of the build stuff onto its own SSD. That's probably enough, but I want redundancy (without spinning drives to back up to), and I suck at cabling, so I'm leaning towards just using NVME drives in PCIe slots in order to avoid the cables.

dingo_bat 9y ago

I think gaming and ARM cannot be used in the same context. The extra IO is useless to the gamer unless there is an Nvidia GPU on the other end.