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Performance: Solid state drives & FM


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Solid state drives are starting to pop up in laptops. I've never used a PC with one, but it sounds like there are definite speed advantages to a conventional hard drive. It seems like FM's speed depends, in part, on one's hard drive speed. Has anyone played FM on a computer with a solid state drive? What was your experience?

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Solid state drives are starting to pop up in laptops. I've never used a PC with one, but it sounds like there are definite speed advantages to a conventional hard drive. It seems like FM's speed depends, in part, on one's hard drive speed. Has anyone played FM on a computer with a solid state drive? What was your experience?

They do indeed have speed advantages - but they pay for it, in the sense that they wear out much faster than traditional hard-drive. Therefore you want, ideally, to be writing to the SSD as little as possible. Not to mention the fact that on a cost/storage basis, Solid State Drives are currently much more expensive than Hard Drives (though at this point in their development cycle, that is to be expected).

I whould have thought however, that you would not have a problem playing FM on a laptop with a Solid State Drive in it. The only issue is that generally, so far as I know, SSDs are only available on the small "Netbook" range of laptops (though I may be wrong), in which case, you are likely to have User Interface issues due to limitations on the screen resolution these machines have. Many people on these forums have discussed this problem and found solutions however.

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JumbledSausage's response is what you call spreading fud.

At present SSDs don't offer a truly significant speed advantage over HDDs, but with every new iteration two things are happening: price per GB is dropping, and read/write speeds are improving. Thus, given a couple of years, SSDs should become the de facto standard for storage. Their primary advantage is fully silent operation, with the secondary benefit of them being more resistant to shocks.

To answer the question, you shouldn't go out and buy an SSD to improve FM performance, but they are a good choice if you have the cash.

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  • 3 months later...

To answer the question, you shouldn't go out and buy an SSD to improve FM performance, but they are a good choice if you have the cash.

Bump!!! :D

Any guys from Si or very knowledgeable people tell me if its just a performance boost in terms of loading the game (career game). And then the RAM takes over or does the game still read and write during play (to the HD or SSD)?

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But it should also make them last much longer, as they can't wear out?

The mean time between failures for HD is around 600,000 hours while its 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 hours for SSD.

But the main problem apart from cost and storage size is that SSD are not to good and handling constant writing and deleting. Read somewhere that its 10,000 cycles or 10 deletes on the same area of the SSD and it renders it useless.

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If you think about it, the mechanical hard drive is an absurd concept.

Its amazing it has lasted as long as it has ..

I mean, following the logic of the HDD, you may as well have mechanical RAM. No. Because thats insane - so why the hell they thought a spinning magnetic drive was fine for fifty years beats me. Bit like American automobiles and fuel/weight efficiency: 4 tonne cars with 6 litre v8's that make 56 hp. That's the spirit! :thup:

Technology is wonderful ..

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that was what I though too, until I saw a friend of mine with a new macbook complaining that when the ssd is busy he has to take it off his lap due to the heat.

You should have seen one of the early 80's HDD's. They were the size of a vending machine and had 1mb or so capacity .. required about 10 kw just to spin up and made so much noise they had to be stored in sound proofed vaults in the basement.

I'm guessing the first gen SSD's are, although devoid of friction, suffering a little. I read somewhere that they are just clusters of flash soldered together? If true, its not suprising - how hot does an SD card get? And they are supposedly refined. :thup:

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You should have seen one of the early 80's HDD's. They were the size of a vending machine and had 1mb or so capacity .. required about 10 kw just to spin up and made so much noise they had to be stored in sound proofed vaults in the basement.

I'm guessing the first gen SSD's are, although devoid of friction, suffering a little. I read somewhere that they are just clusters of flash soldered together? If true, its not suprising - how hot does an SD card get? And they are supposedly refined. :thup:

Yea, basically. Always best to wait a year or so when these new technologies are introduced. And never get new technology in a laptop, because they're guaranteed to be cheap rubbish :( Even in macs in this case.

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Yea, basically. Always best to wait a year or so when these new technologies are introduced. And never get new technology in a laptop, because they're guaranteed to be cheap rubbish :( Even in macs in this case.

In my experience, always the case in Apple products. :thup:

Although my beige G3 tower is still going strong .. that looks like it was engineered to circumnavigate the solar system and they just had a few hundred thousand logic boards left over.

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In my experience, always the case in Apple products. :thup:

Although my beige G3 tower is still going strong .. that looks like it was engineered to circumnavigate the solar system and they just had a few hundred thousand logic boards left over.

have you noticed how hard it is to find a good value laptop that has a decent processer, hdd, ram and gfx card for under £650?

They all seem to have 3/4 and the 4th is some dire piece of rubbish just thrown in as an afterthought :(

Now i'm seeing 3 decent components combined with an ssd and an extra £250 lumped on :(

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True! In many ways the laptop market of today mirrors the desktop market of yesterday. I'm still a bit non plussed as to why the portable configuration hasn't been modularised, even at enthusiast level. The OEM's love their margins and they arguably lost all control of the desktop market years ago now - almost everyone can or knows someone who can build their own unit now. Taking into account the extra expense but revelling in the additional component choice and long warranties.

I guess the big chips don't want to loose their grasp on the notebook scene as well ..

It is surely the fastest growing sector in consumer electronics right now? Everyone I know has long since dumped their desktops, well not so much consciously decided not to use one, but couldn't live without portability and couldn't justify running two machines.

We see this on here with the vast number of 'new laptop' threads every month, but hardly ever any desktop ones. I wonder how the games indsutry is going to react? Specifically the niche titles like Football Manager .. the rest have consoles to fall back on of course.

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True! In many ways the laptop market of today mirrors the desktop market of yesterday. I'm still a bit non plussed as to why the portable configuration hasn't been modularised, even at enthusiast level. The OEM's love their margins and they arguably lost all control of the desktop market years ago now - almost everyone can or knows someone who can build their own unit now. Taking into account the extra expense but revelling in the additional component choice and long warranties.

I guess the big chips don't want to loose their grasp on the notebook scene as well ..

It is surely the fastest growing sector in consumer electronics right now? Everyone I know has long since dumped their desktops, well not so much consciously decided not to use one, but couldn't live without portability and couldn't justify running two machines.

We see this on here with the vast number of 'new laptop' threads every month, but hardly ever any desktop ones.

They're going to lose control of the laptop market soon too if they don't start putting out more decent products. I'm still seeing laptops with 1gb of ram and a single core processor with Vista installed and being sold for £400.

Anyone who buys that will never ever buy another laptop from the same maker again.

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They're going to lose control of the laptop market soon too if they don't start putting out more decent products. I'm still seeing laptops with 1gb of ram and a single core processor with Vista installed and being sold for £400.

Anyone who buys that will never ever buy another laptop from the same maker again.

Again, 100% agree. But the thing is - people are stupid. We see it every day, in every aspect of consumer life. :thup:

I know for example that what dictates the wholesale price of consumer electronics is not markup or margin or even demand, it is yield. There are only so many fabrication utilities. Remember when LCD first kicked off and everyone was paying £1000 for a 15" TFT? Now they are £100.

Yet .. notebooks .. have remained consistently very expensive with no real justification for it. Oil is at its lowest in 12 years so plastic is cheap as chips, TFT process has been refined and the error margins almost elminated and CPU's are plentiful and very cheap. If a Micro ATX board is £40, why is a portable mobo £350? The answer of course is that it isn't! But the public are blissfully unaware of that fact and continue to believe the hype of smaller is more expensive ..

Go figure!

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Again, 100% agree. But the thing is - people are stupid. We see it every day, in every aspect of consumer life. :thup:

I know for example that what dictates the wholesale price of consumer electronics is not markup or margin or even demand, it is yield. There are only so many fabrication utilities. Remember when LCD first kicked off and everyone was paying £1000 for a 15" TFT? Now they are £100.

Yet .. notebooks .. have remained consistently very expensive with no real justification for it. Oil is at its lowest in 12 years so plastic is cheap as chips, TFT process has been refined and the error margins almost elminated and CPU's are plentiful and very cheap. If a Micro ATX board is £40, why is a portable mobo £350?

Go figure!

never understood that with laptops. Somehow portability has a much greater influence over the price than quality, to the point where similarly spec'd laptops are between 50 and 75% more expensive than a desktop. Its just nuts.

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never understood that with laptops. Somehow portability has a much greater influence over the price than quality, to the point where similarly spec'd laptops are between 50 and 75% more expensive than a desktop. Its just nuts.

Totally is..

But then look at Apple - our earlier example. They were for over a decade selling hardware that was mass produced in China for peanuts, using licensed technology and putting it on people's kitchen tables for twice the price of a Packard Bell Pentium. Yet they have actually grown the desire of the consumer for their product, not reduced it. iPod/iLife played a significant part, but Apples troubles in the 90's were never about the product, but their distribution and warranty service.

Now they have that sorted, look at em go! Macbook Pro £1600. Toshiba Satellite, equivalent or better spec, £5-800. Mind boggles ..

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Totally is..

But then look at Apple - our earlier example. They were for over a decade selling hardware that was mass produced in China for peanuts, using licensed technology and putting it on people's kitchen tables for twice the price of a Packard Bell Pentium. Yet they have actually grown the desire of the consumer for their product, not reduced it. iPod/iLife played a significant part, but Apples troubles in the 90's were never about the product, but their distribution and warranty service.

Now they have that sorted, look at em go! Macbook Pro £1600. Toshiba Satellite, equivalent or better spec, £5-800. Mind boggles ..

The thing with Apple is that they're capitilising on Microsoft's bad press over Vista at the moment. Apple have a solid OS that doesn't slow down as much the more you use it. Microsoft suffer from having a registry system, but still, Vista is much more adaptable than OSX.

It annoys me to death when I see people complaining about Vista when they're trying to run it on something that could barely run XP at 100% efficiency, seemingly no one realised that Vista was intended (as XP was on release) not for the past and current generation of machines, but for the current and future generations.

The only reason that XP is lauded these days is because its so old now that it will run lightning fast on even the cheapest of hardware.

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Anyway ^ in relation to FM. I do wonder whether S.I. have done any real outsourced research into their hardware specs and the target audience. Because the 3d deable has shown up a glaring inconsistency with what they wanted to bring to market and what they have been forced to deliver.

With the game running slower than ever on the modern hardware and having an apparent hissy fit the moment its introduced to integrated graphics, I worry for the future. Especially as I predicted market trends will show, more people who play FM will play it on laptops.

But then FM doesn't have a standard mass market user base does it .. I don't think the majority of people who play FM, play other games. And I certainly don't think many of them do it on £1000 gamer rigs.

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The thing with Apple is that they're capitilising on Microsoft's bad press over Vista at the moment. Apple have a solid OS that doesn't slow down as much the more you use it. Microsoft suffer from having a registry system, but still, Vista is much more adaptable than OSX.

It annoys me to death when I see people complaining about Vista when they're trying to run it on something that could barely run XP at 100% efficiency, seemingly no one realised that Vista was intended (as XP was on release) not for the past and current generation of machines, but for the current and future generations.

The only reason that XP is lauded these days is because its so old now that it will run lightning fast on even the cheapest of hardware.

All true but OSX doesnt have games and it doesnt look like they are going to have games as long as Microsft maintain their strangelhold on DirectX/console technology. ;)

What spelled out their dominance for me was Bethesda's handling of Oblivion, the way it was presented at E3 as a PC title and then Microsoft got on their case and it was eventually released some months later looking like utter crap with a console HUD. ;)

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They would have saved themselves a lot of problems with the 3d if they'd have hired a couple of people to optimist - taking WoW as an example, that game runs on just about anything.

The FM 3d looks childish in comparison to WoW yet requires a much higher spec to run properly.

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They would have saved themselves a lot of problems with the 3d if they'd have hired a couple of people to optimist - taking WoW as an example, that game runs on just about anything.

The FM 3d looks childish in comparison to WoW yet requires a much higher spec to run properly.

Well who knows what they were doing. Its evident that for the last two years S.I. have been all over the place internally. I'm not going to speculate, because I don't know the details, but the product, the handling of the launch, the DRM/activation fiasco, the subsequent release day patch, the dozens of really very critical bugs etc has spoken volumes for their company. I hope its all just teething trouble following the transition and the new relationship with SEGA and we get a much better experience in FM10 than 08 and 09 combined ..

Re: the 3d. I said before somewhere, but I think its a scaled down engine. I honestly believe the 3d is actually very good, but they have chosen to restrict it to the fixed camera views for this release because of time and also the lack of good animations .. didn't Miles say they used stock animations from a SEGA subsidiary? I'm sure they'll do for now, but they will want to improve on it all and I believe they will. :thup:

Oh and have you not had the 'frame' blip yet? Where ocassionally, on setting up a match, it will render a single frame at pitch level - betraying the actual detail level as being a bit better than we perhaps assume given the limited camera options right now - and hinting at a very compelling underline reason for the higher GPU requirements. ;)

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Well who knows what they were doing. Its evident that for the last two years S.I. have been all over the place internally. I'm not going to speculate, because I don't know the details, but the product, the handling of the launch, the DRM/activation fiasco, the subsequent release day patch, the dozens of really very critical bugs etc has spoken volumes for their company. I hope its all just teething trouble following the transition and the new relationship with SEGA and we get a much better experience in FM10 than 08 and 09 combined ..

Re: the 3d. I said before somewhere, but I think its a scaled down engine. I honestly believe the 3d is actually very good, but they have chosen to restrict it to the fixed camera views for this release because of time and also the lack of good animations .. didn't Miles say they used stock animations from a SEGA subsidiary? I'm sure they'll do for now, but they will want to improve on it all and I believe they will. :thup:

Oh and have you not had the 'frame' blip yet? Where ocassionally, on setting up a match, it will render a single frame at pitch level - betraying the actual detail level as being a bit better than we perhaps assume given the limited camera options right now - and hinting at a very compelling underline reason for the higher GPU requirements. ;)

I haven't seen that, no, please describe more :)

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What spelled out their dominance for me was Bethesda's handling of Oblivion, the way it was presented at E3 as a PC title and then Microsoft got on their case and it was eventually released some months later looking like utter crap with a console HUD. ;)

Absoflaminglutely.

If people think I'm a raging lunatic about the flaws in FM, you should see the things I say about the absolute tripe that Bethesda has the front to call a RPG. In contrast, FM is the most perfect piece of software ever written.

I hate Bethesda and their console-loving-stats-shouldn't-matter-90pt-font theology more than I hate having an open umbrella inserted into a bodily opening.

VB

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Absoflaminglutely.

If people think I'm a raging lunatic about the flaws in FM, you should see the things I say about the absolute tripe that Bethesda has the front to call a RPG. In contrast, FM is the most perfect piece of software ever written.

I hate Bethesda and their console-loving-stats-shouldn't-matter-90pt-font theology more than I hate having an open umbrella inserted into a bodily opening.

VB

OT diversion:

I was actually there that year and very lucky to see it in the flesh. It completely blew me (and everyone else) away. We all had to sit down. Unmitigated perfection: you got to remember my generation was the D&D kids, we grew up in each other's bedrooms rolling dice and being heroic and for us this was just the most perfect audio/visual experience. It took us all right back to why we got into games. The visuals and the voice acting, which had a number of European accents and were superbly original and broke firmly with the American Standard Stereotype made us all totally rabid with excitement. Granted in some of the footage below they are using filler, but not all of it was. Much of the original script was lost or replaced with the mindless tat we all know and loathe. Oh and the radiant AI? It sure was. We actually saw stuff that worked, or at least a demo that did. I have no idea what happened to that, presumably it was too CPU intensive? Maybe it never really existed - who knows?

Nothing else at the show drew crowds like that demo.

A colleague put some videos on YouTube ..

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=9oDuzQHTz-4

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=SAOBRXPVs7M&feature=related

etc.

Then they released it.

Print media is a cynical game, all creative industry is, but every now and then something comes along that stokes the fires and re-enthuses jaded souls. Oblivion was it for me ..

It still breaks my heart what they did to that game; many of Bethesda's top creative talent quit in protest, something that doesn't regularly make the front pages of anyone's magazine, but there was a velvet revolution of sorts and it was inevitably ruthlessly suppressed.

Another triumph for the console market ..

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Another triumph for the console market ..

Coding games for the PC market is quite tricky, you have to take into account a large range (both in terms of Size/Power AND Manufacturer) of CPU's, RAM Configurations, Graphics Cards , Sound Cards etc that all fall within the Minimum/Optimum Recomened Specs range.

Coding games for consoles by comparison is blisfully simple, the hardware is fixed and doesnt change until the next generation is released.

New tech is always priced at a premium.

Using a 2 disk "striped" raid will give a performance increase.

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Coding games for the PC market is quite tricky, you have to take into account a large range (both in terms of Size/Power AND Manufacturer) of CPU's, RAM Configurations, Graphics Cards , Sound Cards etc that all fall within the Minimum/Optimum Recomened Specs range.

Coding games for consoles by comparison is blisfully simple, the hardware is fixed and doesnt change until the next generation is released.

New tech is always priced at a premium.

Using a 2 disk "striped" raid will give a performance increase.

True enough. My point really was that when it comes to game development there is always a gulf between what the people want to see, what you want to make, what you can make realistically with the resources you have and the time scale available to you and the end result isn't always anyone's idea of the right stuff.

In Oblivion's case, they were vastly over-ambitious, had a number of key technological and data integrity set backs, ran out of time and money and ran into external pressure from a third party who made the right overtures financially to justify what happened. It was a great Xbox360 game. It made a lot of money. Job done.

Doesn't make it right. But that's the same with FM .. they do what they can, with the budget they have, in the time frame they are contractually obliged to operate within. Staff, hiccups, bugs, disasters personal and private and all manner of other fud happens. It does. Honest!

That's it really; oblivion was a product that went to market and was hugely successful. End of. FM is the same. We all get carried away with the way it used to be when S.I. called all the shots themselves and money was just a pleasant side effect of doing what they loved and were good at. Times change, competition emerges, contracts get torn up and new alliances formed etc. Staff turnover in an outfit like S.I. must be pretty high - they don't pay amazingly well judging by the jobs they have advertised in the past. It must get boring eventually. The pressure must be intense etc. Hiring so many young people must be a chore too, as they are continually leaving for better jobs etc etc etc.

Big business. Big problems. We're just lucky they still do it at all given the way so many other notable sports franchises have been gobbled up by EA or worse. 09 is the first release I have actually bought in many years, the 3d swung it for me. So I don't feel cheated or ripped off at all - I decided to buy the product based on what I knew about the franchise from previous versions and was sufficiently excited/impressed by the 3d and the way it brought the whole ME to life for me, buggy or otherwise, that I was happy to pay my £30. I don't feel that entitles me to rail on endlessly about the flaws in the game and demand this or that - I might do that from time to time, but I don't get personal or try or rant and rage and slam the game. Same with most people on here. We bother to post, because we care about the game and we want to see it improve.

Oh God this is another one of those 4am posts, when I'm roached and just want to love everyone. Tomorrow morning, I'll be mean and cynical and exasperated by nothing much. You watch! I'm going to shut it now .. :p

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Final slightly OT post :

I was around on the Beth forums when the blood-letting began, they confirmed that the Radiant AI demo was entirely scripted.

I also enjoyed the woman who trained dogs, had lots of lines about how she trains dogs, but they'd removed dogs out the game. Which explains why Dogmeat was in F3 because they had to do something with the model they'd created. Gah.

Back to FM.

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  • 3 months later...
The mean time between failures for HD is around 600,000 hours while its 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 hours for SSD.

But the main problem apart from cost and storage size is that SSD are not to good and handling constant writing and deleting. Read somewhere that its 10,000 cycles or 10 deletes on the same area of the SSD and it renders it useless.

Not quite sure about the 10 deletes on the same area anymore.

But here is a very long but probably one of the best introductions about SSDs:-

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531 <-- Must read

&

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535

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