After seeing some folks recommend using SSDs for the game in this thread (http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.php?t=224154), I decided to copy the game over to mine and see what improvements were in store. Well, my jaw pretty-well dropped.
After, I felt compelled enough to create a video showing the comparisons between running the game on a hard drive (Seagate 500GB 7200RPM) and an SSD (Corsair Force F160 SATA 2.0):
I'd recommend viewing full-screen, but it might not matter. For each test I log into Giran and run around, though while on the SSD I also head to Aden and Gludio to further show the seamless entry into each town. I can state with assurance also that the video doesn't do the differences enough justice - I'll never be able to play the game on a hard drive again.
Hope people like this video, because it cost me a staggering 69,000a to make :D
Idk why you are shocked about this lol..... its no secret that SSD are better for online gaming. People still LOL and act like your computers hard drive has nothing to do with lag issues. SSD can improve game play ALOT as long you have good part in the other areas that is needed and great internet provider
I have tested maaaany other games SSD vs. HDD before and not once saw a difference like this. It helps that the L2 game engine is just inefficient to begin with. Using an SSD essentially compensates for that. It's like driving a Ferrari to get to the supermarket. Kind of.
Buy SSD for this game is really throwing your money away. If it needs SSD to run smoothly comparable to current MMOs on plain old hard drives it says something about optimization. That's like saying everyone should stop complaining about patching potholes in the road because you can't tell them difference but your car has air ride suspension. It is really over compensating while ignoring a very real problem.
If people can run much more graphically intense MMOs smoother than L2, the solution shouldn't be "your computer just isn't good enough for the game." The game isn't upto par but people will keep making excuses.
are you using a SSD or one of those Hybrid drives i keep hearing about? My tower is one of the older models I think it is still like SATA1 lol. But was looking and building a new one for christmas.
Buy SSD for this game is really throwing your money away. If it needs SSD to run smoothly comparable to current MMOs on plain old hard drives it says something about optimization. That's like saying everyone should stop complaining about patching potholes in the road because you can't tell them difference but your car has air ride suspension. It is really over compensating while ignoring a very real problem.
If people can run much more graphically intense MMOs smoother than L2, the solution shouldn't be "your computer just isn't good enough for the game." The game isn't upto par but people will keep making excuses.
Buying an SSD is a worthy investment for everything, boot speed, application speed, game speed, etc. etc.
SSDs improve other MMOs as well, they also load faster. This goes for every game from Rift, to WoW to SWTOR.
Smoothness of graphics has nothing to do with drives unless its loading textures and map data. This can become quite intensive in L2 because of the massive viewing and update range (this is the same problem in several other MMOs). But for graphical performance you want a better graphics card.
Lineage 2 is very drive intensive, so yes, an SSD will improve your performance tremendously. You should see my SATA-3 SSD (450 Mbps).
That's 450MB/s, not 450Mbps :P
Chances are the game would work no better between your SSDs, because it's not throughput (bandwidth) that matters, but rather latency and operations-per-second performance (IOPS). The better the latency, the faster data is fetched, and the higher the IOPS, the more operations like these can be done each second. Throughput is fine and good if we're dealing with huge files, but we're not here.
A good comparison is a local and remote server. In your city, latency is going to be low, maybe around 30ms. So you naturally connect to the server very fast, and files will download fast. But if you connect to a server half the world away, your latency might be something like 80ms or higher. As a result, each connection to that server will take longer to initialize, but once connected, the files will download fast.
Buy SSD for this game is really throwing your money away.
I am not suggesting people purchase SSDs "for" the game. I am showing people what's possible with an SSD, so if they were pondering one anyway, or already have one but don't have the game on it, it's worth considering. The benefits of an SSD go far beyond running a game off of it.
are you using a SSD or one of those Hybrid drives i keep hearing about? My tower is one of the older models I think it is still like SATA1 lol. But was looking and building a new one for christmas.
If you are serious about your PC having SATA 1, then it has to be old enough to the point where an SSD isn't going to help much, because there will be some other bottleneck in the machine (the CPU, namely). While you'd still get the benefit of improved access times and much higher operations-per-second on an SSD, your throughput would be throttled, so pretty well any SSD you buy would be going to waste that way.
There are numerous hybrid solutions out there, so I am not sure which one you are referring to, but all of them are good in their own right. OCZ probably has the best-looking solution with its PCIe Hybrid drive, but it's also rather expensive. Something much more affordable like Seagate's Momentus XT would fit the bill if on a budget (though with only 8GB of SSD memory for caching, it's also fairly limited).
Geez this has gotten to be a lot more technical than I meant it to be :D
SSDs improve other MMOs as well, they also load faster. This goes for every game from Rift, to WoW to SWTOR.
I am starting to believe SSDs were made for MMOs, heh. I've tested a lot of games on SSDs before, and while the odd level might load faster, it's rare for a game to require such high I/O where an SSD would actually be beneficial. I didn't really think about it before, but you're spot-on... MMOs can take good advantage of a fast storage device.
Chances are the game would work no better between your SSDs
It does. There's some difference between my slower SSDs to the fastest ones. The drives speed are as important as IOPS, its both how many and how fast. L2 isn't just small files, they are in megabyte size usually (1-100+). As such, faster drives generally tends to have better IOPS.
That said, the difference in speed is often going to be somewhat minor.
Hell, if you really want to go out there, then get SSD RAID.
I am starting to believe SSDs were made for MMOs, heh. I've tested a lot of games on SSDs before, and while the odd level might load faster, it's rare for a game to require such high I/O where an SSD would actually be beneficial. I didn't really think about it before, but you're spot-on... MMOs can take good advantage of a fast storage device.
I have yet to encounter any modern game (from the last 5-6 years) that didn't significantly improve with an SSD drive and I play a hell of a lot of games.
On top of that it has benefits in vastly better respons time for applications and UI, better boot time and faster hibernation.
If you are serious about your PC having SATA 1, then it has to be old enough to the point where an SSD isn't going to help much, because there will be some other bottleneck in the machine (the CPU, namely). While you'd still get the benefit of improved access times and much higher operations-per-second on an SSD, your throughput would be throttled, so pretty well any SSD you buy would be going to waste that way.
There are numerous hybrid solutions out there, so I am not sure which one you are referring to, but all of them are good in their own right. OCZ probably has the best-looking solution with its PCIe Hybrid drive, but it's also rather expensive. Something much more affordable like Seagate's Momentus XT would fit the bill if on a budget (though with only 8GB of SSD memory for caching, it's also fairly limited).
I know enough not bother putting a SSD into this beast xD. I'd get a new system xD. I'm just a bit out of the loop because i tend not to follow the current parts available or i would be tempted to buy stuff way too often xD. Just trying to figure if i should go SSD or Hybrid. Well for the main hard drive, i'd still have like normal HDD for all my other **** that isn't gaming, movies, music, and the like.
Not surprising, really.. I threw away my mechanical drive which was giving me read/write speeds of about 60-70MB/s several months ago.. .In this rig, I have my OS and games running on 2x Corsair Force Series GT 120GB SATA III SSDs setup on RAID-0 which gives me roughly 1,000MB/s read/write speeds.
Here are the results of a test I ran on my two drives:
Most people don't realize that the mechanical harddrives are often the "bottleneck" in the performance of their machines. This is because of how HDD's are marketed. All you'll ever really see is the RPM's (5400, 7200 - and ofcourse the enterprise level ones) and the fact that they support SATA v2 (3Gbps).
The thing is, the mechanical hard drives will never max out the bandwidth that SATA v2 is capable of and even if you get a new board and drive which supports SATA v3 (6Gbps), the drives won't see any increase in speeds. Mechanical drives will still average between 60-90MBps...
To put things into context, my old drive would take about 20 seconds to start Adobe Photoshop CS5.5 while my new drives setup on RAID-0 take only 1.5 seconds on the initial start and less than a second on each start thereafter.
----
@Zoc: I'd definitely go with SSD's over a hybrid drive for my OS. However, I have a 3TB storage drive where I keep all of my personal files which is also bitlocker encrypted. :)
Chances are the game would work no better between your SSDs
Unfortunately this isn't true anymore because we're not working with 16-bit graphics... With 3D models and UV mapping, we're now working with high quality texture maps on these 3D models that contain hundreds or thousands of vertices, landscapes, buildings, ect. So much that the graphics are no longer small enough to be stored in memory. The texture maps for the area(s) visible to you are stored in memory while the others are fetched when required. This is the biggest reason for the pause or delay after teleporting. Yea, you're waiting on network information too but soon as you receive that - it's all about loading data files to render what is around you.
Therefore, if you're systems bottleneck is it's HDD and you upgrade to an SSD, you're going to see drastic improvements as demonstrated in the OP's video. However, if your graphics processor is at it's peak, then you may not notice a big difference until you upgrade it as well.
just looking the video I have to say, how you can get that bad performance with hdd?
my game run on hdd like in your video on ssd.
that long loading screen you had on hdd I had 5 years ago running l2 on a 2x1.33ghz.
now having a i5 on 4,5ghz I won't dump my ssd with l2 for teleporting half second faster:cool:
operating system and nothing else goes on the ssd.
game client and everything else goes on 2nd hd.
ssd's strength is in reading from, not writing to disc. it's like running an operating system off pure ram.
they are not supposed to be used as storage, unless you are rich, in which case i need a new computer. this compaq gets 2 fps in the new zones and im tired of embarrassing myself. ty.
SSDs improve other MMOs as well, they also load faster. This goes for every game from Rift, to WoW to SWTOR.
I was beta testing SWTOR and it was running smoothly with constant 50-60 FPS where everyone else was complaining about lag spikes. And I'm just using WD Caviar black (HDD)
I don't really care about loading. I'm porting in lineage for around 3 seconds tops. If I've been in the town in the past hour it gets even faster. I'm using Windows ReadyBoost™ though. It might have something to do with it. But it does slows the initial load of the game since it's precaching on a thumb drive
After seeing some folks recommend using SSDs for the game in this thread (http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.php?t=224154), I decided to copy the game over to mine and see what improvements were in store. Well, my jaw pretty-well dropped.
After, I felt compelled enough to create a video showing the comparisons between running the game on a hard drive (Seagate 500GB 7200RPM) and an SSD (Corsair Force F160 SATA 2.0):
I'd recommend viewing full-screen, but it might not matter. For each test I log into Giran and run around, though while on the SSD I also head to Aden and Gludio to further show the seamless entry into each town. I can state with assurance also that the video doesn't do the differences enough justice - I'll never be able to play the game on a hard drive again.
Hope people like this video, because it cost me a staggering 69,000a to make :D
Well, I hope you are happy.. You are now on my wife's KOS list..
I just went out and spend £140 on a SATA III SSD drive for L2 :)
Quite, lineage 2 is the most hard drive-active mmorpg I've ever played. Even factoring the compressed textures, it has to load a billion different pieces of everyone once you walk into town.
Buy SSD for this game is really throwing your money away. If it needs SSD to run smoothly comparable to current MMOs on plain old hard drives it says something about optimization. That's like saying everyone should stop complaining about patching potholes in the road because you can't tell them difference but your car has air ride suspension. It is really over compensating while ignoring a very real problem.
If people can run much more graphically intense MMOs smoother than L2, the solution shouldn't be "your computer just isn't good enough for the game." The game isn't upto par but people will keep making excuses.
As others have mentioned, SSD performance helps much more than Lineage2.
As long as you understand exactly what the SSD helps, its a pretty massive upgrade and not too terribly expensive if you grab a smaller one and set it up right. A single SATA3 64GB can be purchased for $90 or so. I've spent more on a single bottle of wine and gotten considerably less benefit from it. :-)
I found a cyber monday deal I couldn't pass up and added a RAID0 array of two smaller drives for my OS and selected apps.
Results include no more delay while teleporting in L2... but also loading windows so quickly that the windows animation doesn't even finish before I get a login screen. Games load faster, application and windows patching take less time, etc.
Another thing, nearly ALL hard disk performance is significantly better than a standard 7200RPM mechanical hard disk. Both reads and writes are significantly faster. SSDs make less noise and take less power as well.
Despite the advantages, I recommend a smaller SSD for boot/selected applications and a larger mechanical one for storage of data files as your greatest benefit are the files you read all the time. This also helps bypass the relatively expensive $/GB as compared to mechanical drives.
Another place where people forget it is for laptops, SSDs mean a significant improvement on laptop performance and a small decrease in power consumption and no heat generation.
With HDD prices spiking because of the problems in asia, it would be silly not to get an SSD. Put your OS, main applications and games on it and you will be happy.
That said, the difference in speed is often going to be somewhat minor.
Yes, that's true. I can understand that one SSD might load the game's elements faster than another, but I think it'd require a stopwatch for the differences to be seen. I might have to test that out soon...
I know enough not bother putting a SSD into this beast xD. I'd get a new system xD. I'm just a bit out of the loop because i tend not to follow the current parts available or i would be tempted to buy stuff way too often xD. Just trying to figure if i should go SSD or Hybrid. Well for the main hard drive, i'd still have like normal HDD for all my other **** that isn't gaming, movies, music, and the like.
For the sake of cost-effectiveness, it's best to go with an SSD for the OS+apps+a couple of games and then have a hard drive on the side for regular storage. Because big SSDs aren't that affordable, it'd be best to put just the games you are actively playing on it so as to not waste space. In the event you use a program like Steam to manage your games, you'd have to create OS symlinks in order to store your games on the SSD.
Not surprising, really.. I threw away my mechanical drive which was giving me read/write speeds of about 60-70MB/s several months ago.. .In this rig, I have my OS and games running on 2x Corsair Force Series GT 120GB SATA III SSDs setup on RAID-0 which gives me roughly 1,000MB/s read/write speeds.
Nice! The IOPS performance on that setup would be sweeeet.
The thing is, the mechanical hard drives will never max out the bandwidth that SATA v2 is capable of and even if you get a new board and drive which supports SATA v3 (6Gbps), the drives won't see any increase in speeds. Mechanical drives will still average between 60-90MBps...
That couldn't be more true. Another thing to take into consideration though is that not all SATA 3.0 controllers are alike. I hate to plug myself here, but this is an article I wrote (http://techgage.com/article/battle_of_the_sata_30_controllers/) not long ago that compared a couple of them. On my personal machine, I am running an X58 motherboard, so I don't have a true Intel SATA 6Gbit/s offering. If I install a SATA 3.0 drive into this rig, it gets throttled due to the ridiculous controller :-/
To put things into context, my old drive would take about 20 seconds to start Adobe Photoshop CS5.5 while my new drives setup on RAID-0 take only 1.5 seconds on the initial start and less than a second on each start thereafter.
Exactly! In yet another plug (http://techgage.com/article/crucial_m4_256gb_sata_6gbits_ssd_review/7), you can see how the faster the SSD, the faster applications will load. On a current SATA 6Gbit/s SSD a certain workload could be done in 229.7 seconds, compared to the hard drive's 638.3 seconds. There's just no comparison.
Still, despite that, the differences in L2 just blew me away. I've noticed improvements in games like Civilization V by moving to an SSD, but even the differences there weren't this extreme. I equated it to icon files for an OS, which used to be like 4K~16K. I remember I used to have thousands of them and whenever I'd move them from one hard drive to another, it'd take forever. On an SSD no such thing would happen thanks to the super-fast access times and huge IOPS. In another example, I can extract the Linux source code on an SSD about 5x faster than on an HDD, due to it having tens of thousands of small files.
To put it into perspective for those still not convinced, while a regular hard drive might be able to manage 50~100 operations per second, a weak SSD can handle 5,000 per second (some are specced at 50,000 IOPS and higher).
Unfortunately this isn't true anymore because we're not working with 16-bit graphics... With 3D models and UV mapping, we're now working with high quality texture maps on these 3D models that contain hundreds or thousands of vertices, landscapes, buildings, ect. So much that the graphics are no longer small enough to be stored in memory. The texture maps for the area(s) visible to you are stored in memory while the others are fetched when required. This is the biggest reason for the pause or delay after teleporting. Yea, you're waiting on network information too but soon as you receive that - it's all about loading data files to render what is around you.
Your theory is a little nonsensical. The bit-depth of data doesn't matter, nor does the number of vertices a model or scene has (that's the GPU's domain, not the storage device's). Also, it seems like you read me wrong... I didn't say that there'd be little differences between an HDD and SSD (I am the OP of this topic after all), but I said the differences between an SSD and another SSD would be hard to spot.
my game run on hdd like in your video on ssd.
You are either running the game on very low detail settings are belong to the extreme minority who don't experience this sort of slow-down. All my friends who watched this said they experienced the same.
I just went out and spend £140 on a SATA III SSD drive for L2 :)
w00t, enjoy it :D I do hope you are planning to install your OS onto it though as well ;-)
Another place where people forget it is for laptops, SSDs mean a significant improvement on laptop performance and a small decrease in power consumption and no heat generation.
It's funny you mention it, because I've been dual-boxing, running the game on my desktop and then another on my laptop... and since moving to an SSD on the desktop, the performance of the game on the laptop has been driving me nuts :D
I don't use machines anymore with only HDD, all my desktops, servers and laptops use SSDs, all between 120-250 Gb capacity.
Server performance increase is massive as well. Though be aware that several Linux distros like Cent-OS doesn't support TRIM, which makes them not so good for running on SSDs.
I don't use machines anymore with only HDD, all my desktops, servers and laptops use SSDs, all between 120-250 Gb capacity.
Server performance increase is massive as well. Though be aware that several Linux distros like Cent-OS doesn't support TRIM, which makes them not so good for running on SSDs.
Your servers are running on SSDs? I am soon to move away from CentOS (to go Debian, likely) so I have been considering making the move to an SLC SSD as well. That along with something like this (https://www.varnish-cache.org/) just sounds amazing.
Wait... this is still the Lineage II forum, right? :D
Woah, how old is your mechanical drive lol.
Im having lags like those (much much weaker tho, like 75% weaker) for like 3 seconds after i teleport to a new spot, after that its smooth as butter.
But yeah, if i had a SSD it would be lower "lag time", alittle bit faster teleports (im still doing less than 5 sec mostly everywhere), faster loading, but IMO not worth the price, SSD's tend to break rather quickly, and they do lose their power every time you do something on it, thats the downside with SSDs, after you've used it awhile, they will lose their capacity, and their speed.
Just get a new (FAST!) HDD and you'll see the same difference, im guessing youre using like "Western digital green 2TB"? (Green as in "safe for enviroment" meaning huge loss of speed).
Just wanted to add my two cents of verification. I had L2 installed on a 7200 rpm drive and had been experiencing lots of graphical lag and temporary freezes of 1-3 seconds, especially while panning around in town. I moved my L2 directory to a spare SSD (rather an old drive and nothing special in the performance department).
The difference is very significant. The lag and freezes are completely gone, even in busy towns.
I wonder whether L2 (gameguard?) is bypassing Windows' drive caching and forcing the drive to read directly. That would certainly explain the performance improvement - SSDs have essentially instant seek times.
Woah, how old is your mechanical drive lol.
Im having lags like those (much much weaker tho, like 75% weaker) for like 3 seconds after i teleport to a new spot, after that its smooth as butter.
But yeah, if i had a SSD it would be lower "lag time", alittle bit faster teleports (im still doing less than 5 sec mostly everywhere), faster loading, but IMO not worth the price, SSD's tend to break rather quickly, and they do lose their power every time you do something on it, thats the downside with SSDs, after you've used it awhile, they will lose their capacity, and their speed.
Just get a new (FAST!) HDD and you'll see the same difference, im guessing youre using like "Western digital green 2TB"? (Green as in "safe for enviroment" meaning huge loss of speed).
Im using a HD103SJ (Spinpoint F3) 1TB BTW.
Go ahead and Crystalmark64 your disk...
I bet it gets 100-150MB/sec max sequential as a single drive
30-70 MB/sec 512K
0.5-1.3MB/sec 4K
0.5-1.3MB/sec 4kQD32
For comparison (all done on Z68 motherboard)
My mechanical drives (2x SATA2 7200 Seagate Momentus in Raid0 to make it more fair)
Seq.= 164.1MB/sec Read 160.2MB/sec Write
512K = 46.94MB/sec Read 36.19MB/sec Write
4K = 0.664MB/sec Read 1.790MB/sec Write
4KQD32 = 2.121MB/sec Read 1.794MB/sec Write
Results
Sequential read is more than 6x better!
Sequential write is 2x better!
512K read is 11x better!
512K write is more than 5x better!
4K and 4KQD32 performance through the roof better!
The differences are staggering in pure numbers... and remember these are not "value" or "green" drives being compared... and the 64Gb Samsung are the LOW END of Samsung's line. (the larger ones have better write performance)
As for durability and reliability, for the most part that notion is outdated.
SSD drives do require a bit more maintenance for RAID0 as TRIM is not supported until Intel's next release. However, Samsung includes software to manually do garbage collection and restore performance. With the above exception, the Samsung drives installed and worked just like a mechanical drive. No crashes, no troubles, just worked.
SSD drives DO have a limited amount of writes... but frankly, under normal home-use that lifespan is just barely shorter than mechanical drives. (let's face it, most home users do not write as often as they read)
As for server-use, I am skeptical.
I guess it depends on the usage as servers tend to write a LOT more often than a desktop computer.
As long as you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the tech, SSDs are currently quite viable.
Im using a HD103SJ (Spinpoint F3) 1TB BTW.
I use 2 of them in stripe mode and still experience serious lags when entering town. Characters appear slow, movement is chppy, not as slow as in OP's video with HDD part, but considerably slower than SSD.
After, I felt compelled enough to create a video showing the comparisons between running the game on a hard drive (Seagate 500GB 7200RPM) and an SSD (Corsair Force F160 SATA 2.0):
What i'm wondering;
What drive did you use to store the Fraps on?
The same SSD as L2 is on, a different SSD/HDD ?
Asking this because i know SSD's have horrible writespeeds (atleast back when they were just new, don't know how they're now), tho your fraps is pretty fluid, so i'm guessing you recorded it on a different HDD.
I have L2 installed on a striped raid(0) config (2x 7200rpm hdd's), which did wonders with speed before, but it's very noticeable that it's getting sluggish overtime (i'm pretty heavy with writing stuff on the HDD), so prolly best to make the move to either different HDD's in raid or go for SSD (normal or raid) with a HDD for writing next to it.
SSDs have excellent write speeds now, much faster than HDDs. The only issue would be space, but considering you can RAID them or get up to 500 Gb size these days, its really not much of an issue.
Though if you're using FRAPS, you might as well record on SSD, then move it to the HDD when done. Or record directly to the HDD if its not a horribly slow one.
Your theory is a little nonsensical. The bit-depth of data doesn't matter, nor does the number of vertices a model or scene has (that's the GPU's domain, not the storage device's). Also, it seems like you read me wrong... I didn't say that there'd be little differences between an HDD and SSD (I am the OP of this topic after all), but I said the differences between an SSD and another SSD would be hard to spot.
I think you misunderstood what I was meaning... I wasn't saying that the bit-depth nor the number of vertices played a direct role in making a difference but instead, I was implying that we're no longer working with small file sizes when dealing with graphics...
SSDs have excellent write speeds now, much faster than HDDs. The only issue would be space, but considering you can RAID them or get up to 500 Gb size these days, its really not much of an issue.
Though if you're using FRAPS, you might as well record on SSD, then move it to the HDD when done. Or record directly to the HDD if its not a horribly slow one.
Exactly, and with RAID-0, you get the combined space of both drives as well as twice the read/write speeds (assuming you're not using a **** controller)!
The only problem is that RAID-0 has two points of failure. If either drive goes bad, you had better hope that you have a backup. Nice thing is that HDD's are cheap anymore and I have a 3TB storage drive that I use as backup in conjunction with Acronis True Image.
I think my example above kills the "bad write speeds" concept.
The write speeds are only slow in comparison to SSD speeds, which are head-and-shouders better than mechanical drives.
RAID0 does indeed have more points of failure, but frankly backing up is good idea no matter what hard disk you use.
As for backup, since Win7's backup program is quite good and recovery using it is very simple, I have no idea why everyone wouldn't be backing up.
(if you aren't, go buy a USB3 1-2TB external... and run Win7 backup. The drive will save you LOTS of headache.)
It's aging, I admit. It's a Seagate Barracuda 500GB, circa 2008. Even so, I have the same experience on a brand-new notebook using a 750GB 7200RPM drive, and given hard drives really haven't progressed much in the past couple of years, I don't think you'd see a great improvement unless you went the 10K RPM route.
SSD's tend to break rather quickly, and they do lose their power every time you do something on it, thats the downside with SSDs, after you've used it awhile, they will lose their capacity, and their speed.
As for durability and reliability, for the most part that notion is outdated.
I am what you would consider a very heavy computer user (I'm hovering over 200lbs, snap!) and have been using my SSD since this past spring without issues. And I run two different OSes on it. I have never felt the need to secure erase it to start fresh... programs still load super-fast and the OS response is great.
I wonder whether L2 (gameguard?) is bypassing Windows' drive caching and forcing the drive to read directly. That would certainly explain the performance improvement - SSDs have essentially instant seek times.
Ugh, don't get me started on GameGuard. It's a piece of **** (c r a p, really?), does nothing to thwart botting, but it still remains to inconvenience legit players...
I use 2 of them in stripe mode and still experience serious lags when entering town. Characters appear slow, movement is chppy, not as slow as in OP's video with HDD part, but considerably slower than SSD.
The reason for that is that RAID0 doesn't improve the access times. If one hard drive seeks at 15ms, then it's going to seek just as fast in RAID0. The benefit of RAID is with the throughput and number of operations that can be performed at once.
What i'm wondering;
What drive did you use to store the Fraps on?
The same SSD as L2 is on, a different SSD/HDD ?
I have Fraps export video to a Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD that I secure erase from time to time, which for the most part rids any potential bottleneck. Smooth video can be captured using a had drive, but all factors need to be perfect, and it has to be a hard drive that nothing else is being accessed on. For hard drive recording PlayClaw might be a good alternative to Fraps if Fraps lags too much.
RAID0 does indeed have more points of failure, but frankly backing up is good idea no matter what hard disk you use.
+1
Ramdisk is much faster than any SSD. Plus, it's cheaper too.
Considering that 64GB of RAM would cost about $400 while a 64GB SSD costs $100, I am going to have to disagree. Yes, RAMdisk is faster, but it's certainly not a better option (not even close).
ok so i dont know anything about computers but i wanna buy one so i can play lineage 2 properly. currently i play on a laptop with the lowest graphic settings possible and i still cant play. teleporting takes 5x as long as other people. i hear people on vent say "oh there u are" and my screen stays black for 30 more seconds lol (if i get through at all cuz 1 out of 3 times i get disconnected when i port)
i cant hunt much cuz i get so laggy i literally cant move or even assist with a macro. my screen freezes (not laggy, but actual freeze) every now and then for 10 to 20 seconds. i cant even think about pvping cuz .. well just no..
this is what i got now:
intelcore2 duo CPU T525 @ 1.5Ghz, 2 gb ram, nvidia geforce 8600 GS, hdd is like 150gb or something
and like i said i cant play properly (cant do aoe or bosses or pvp) so i wanna buy a new pc for more or less 1000 usd. what is the minimal i need to run sieges, aoe, fast porting, etc etc smoothly on good graphics (like u got in ur video with shadow, decent detail and all that) and what can i get for more or less 1000 usd in the store? i cant build one cuz wont be buying it just for me :P what do i need MINIMUM and what do u RECOMMEND?
ps i would kill to play with graphics and smoothness like in ur video with the hard disk lol
ok so i dont know anything about computers but i wanna buy one so i can play lineage 2 properly. currently i play on a laptop with the lowest graphic settings possible and i still cant play. teleporting takes 5x as long as other people. i hear people on vent say "oh there u are" and my screen stays black for 30 more seconds lol (if i get through at all cuz 1 out of 3 times i get disconnected when i port)
i cant hunt much cuz i get so laggy i literally cant move or even assist with a macro. my screen freezes (not laggy, but actual freeze) every now and then for 10 to 20 seconds. i cant even think about pvping cuz .. well just no..
this is what i got now:
intelcore2 duo CPU T525 @ 1.5Ghz, 2 gb ram, nvidia geforce 8600 GS, hdd is like 150gb or something
and like i said i cant play properly (cant do aoe or bosses or pvp) so i wanna buy a new pc for more or less 1000 usd. what is the minimal i need to run sieges, aoe, fast porting, etc etc smoothly on good graphics (like u got in ur video with shadow, decent detail and all that) and what can i get for more or less 1000 usd in the store? i cant build one cuz wont be buying it just for me :P what do i need MINIMUM and what do u RECOMMEND?
ps i would kill to play with graphics and smoothness like in ur video with the hard disk lol
I bough a laptop last Christmas, good one ($1,200). First thing I had to change is HDD, you cant imagine what kind of sh*t HDDs they put in laptops. I literally could run L2 and other games faster from my remote usb HDD!!
Anyway, I bought 125GB SSD, best thing I ever did, my laptop acts faster than my desktop at any point of time.
Ramdisk is much faster than any SSD. Plus, it's cheaper too.
1) RAMDISK is not a storage device, its a jury-rig for performance.
(you are stealing from one resource pile to add to another)
SSDs are permanent storage that add to your total. RAMDISK must be copied to RAM and synched to disk at another time.
2) RAMDISK is indeed faster than SSD... but this performance assumes you are buying enough to cover your L2 needs as well as your computers' needs, or you gain very little as your computer bottle-necks elsewhere.
3) Cheaper than SSD? I am afraid you haven't a leg to stand on on that one.
-L2 directory is 15GB and Windows system files are 15+GB
So assuming you want the same-or-better overall performance boost, you would need an additional 32GB of RAM for RAMDISK.
Assuming your motherboard supports that much RAM to start with, the cheapest 32GB kit I can find is $280, and that's if you had 4 slots, and were willing to put up with only 2GB of system RAM and don't need or want any faster than 1333 speeds.
Even a more realistic 16GB (2x8GB) kit costs $127 at the cheapest... and that's allowing windows system files to load off of hard disk. Note that's also the cheapest and slowest RAM you can find. (better kits are $150+, if you go this route, buy RAM that doesn't suck)
Compared to the $100-120 64GB SATAIII SSDs out there, I think we can conclude that you are just plain wrong about costs. Note that drive would be your boot drive, store windows system files, and L2, and likely another game.
Furthurmore, an SSD drive will be useful in your next build and the one after that as well as Hard Disk tech tends to age slower than RAM technology. (I am hard pressed to use the DDR2 of my last build and wasn't at all upset about reusing the SATAII 7200RPM drives of the build before that.)
Point being... SSDs are a MUCH better tool at this time for most l2 players.
Use the right tool for the job.
1) RAMDISK is not a storage device, its a jury-rig for performance.
(you are stealing from one resource pile to add to another)
SSDs are permanent storage that add to your total. RAMDISK must be copied to RAM and synched to disk at another time.
2) RAMDISK is indeed faster than SSD... but this performance assumes you are buying enough to cover your L2 needs as well as your computers' needs, or you gain very little as your computer bottle-necks elsewhere.
3) Cheaper than SSD? I am afraid you haven't a leg to stand on on that one.
-L2 directory is 15GB and Windows system files are 15+GB
So assuming you want the same-or-better overall performance boost, you would need an additional 32GB of RAM for RAMDISK.
Assuming your motherboard supports that much RAM to start with, the cheapest 32GB kit I can find is $280, and that's if you had 4 slots, and were willing to put up with only 2GB of system RAM and don't need or want any faster than 1333 speeds.
Even a more realistic 16GB (2x8GB) kit costs $127 at the cheapest... and that's allowing windows system files to load off of hard disk. Note that's also the cheapest and slowest RAM you can find. (better kits are $150+, if you go this route, buy RAM that doesn't suck)
Compared to the $100-120 64GB SATAIII SSDs out there, I think we can conclude that you are just plain wrong about costs. Note that drive would be your boot drive, store windows system files, and L2, and likely another game.
Furthurmore, an SSD drive will be useful in your next build and the one after that as well as Hard Disk tech tends to age slower than RAM technology. (I am hard pressed to use the DDR2 of my last build and wasn't at all upset about reusing the SATAII 7200RPM drives of the build before that.)
Point being... SSDs are a MUCH better tool at this time for most l2 players.
Use the right tool for the job.
100% agreed, I recently got an Intel 80gb SSD for win7 and l2 and l2 loads alot faster in town. but there is still graphical lag unless I alt+p if theres tons of ppl around.
Intel core i5-750 at 4.0ghz on liquid
6gigs of ddr3 2000mhz
AMD 2gb HD 6950
Its sad how this computer is soooo much better than the one I had when l2 first came out and it barely plays it any different.
ok so i dont know anything about computers but i wanna buy one so i can play lineage 2 properly. <snip>
this is what i got now:
intelcore2 duo CPU T525 @ 1.5Ghz, 2 gb ram, nvidia geforce 8600 GS, hdd is like 150gb or something
and like i said i cant play properly (cant do aoe or bosses or pvp) so i wanna buy a new pc for more or less 1000 usd. what is the minimal i need to run sieges, aoe, fast porting, etc etc smoothly on good graphics (like u got in ur video with shadow, decent detail and all that) and what can i get for more or less 1000 usd in the store? i cant build one cuz wont be buying it just for me :P what do i need MINIMUM and what do u RECOMMEND?
Technically, you have over the minimum... but I think we both agree its not ideal.
Are you going to reuse any equipment you have? (say monitor or case?) or going to build from scratch? Are you an experienced builder?
The following is NOT the minimum to play L2... its the minimum I'd consider purchasing at this time to help raise your gameplay with $1000 or so.
-i3 2100 $120 or i5-2500K $220 (AMD processors are fine, they just don't seem to have any competition for the i3 or i5 in price/perf)
-Intel z68 motherboard ($100 or so)
-4GB of 1333 RAM ($30 or so)
-64GB SSD ($100-120)
-120GB+ of mechanical storage data drive (starts at $80)
-Power supply from Seasonic, OCZ, Antec, PC Power and Cooling, or another reputable brand. ($60-ish starting)
-Use whatever budget you have left on GPU and balance the power supply to cover your GPU's needs. Nvidia 460GTX or AMD 6850 or above which is around $150.
The above is around $640 ballpark... and allows room for case, optical drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse and growth if you don't need something. Even though L2 doesn't need it, a better GPU like the Nvidia 560Ti or AMD 6950 at around $250 is a good idea for other games. Don't forget a 550W or better power supply from a reputable maker if you go that route.
If you need to skimp and if you get the SSD, get the smallest mechanical drive you can find as they are rediculously expensive right now and replace or add later. If you do not get the SSD due to budget, get the best 7200RPM mechanical you can afford.
I have Fraps export video to a Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD that I secure erase from time to time, which for the most part rids any potential bottleneck. Smooth video can be captured using a had drive, but all factors need to be perfect, and it has to be a hard drive that nothing else is being accessed on. For hard drive recording PlayClaw might be a good alternative to Fraps if Fraps lags too much.
Yeah, that gives best result, was just wondering how u do it in regards with write times of SSD (which got answered by someone else), but the method is the same as i been doing it all the time :)
Technically, you have over the minimum... but I think we both agree its not ideal.
it is the minimum to start and open lineage 2. Actually playing is a different thing though lol
Are you going to reuse any equipment you have? (say monitor or case?) or going to build from scratch? Are you an experienced builder?
The following is NOT the minimum to play L2... its the minimum I'd consider purchasing at this time to help raise your gameplay with $1000 or so.
-i3 2100 $120 or i5-2500K $220 (AMD processors are fine, they just don't seem to have any competition for the i3 or i5 in price/perf)
-Intel z68 motherboard ($100 or so)
-4GB of 1333 RAM ($30 or so)
-64GB SSD ($100-120)
-120GB+ of mechanical storage data drive (starts at $80)
-Power supply from Seasonic, OCZ, Antec, PC Power and Cooling, or another reputable brand. ($60-ish starting)
-Use whatever budget you have left on GPU and balance the power supply to cover your GPU's needs. Nvidia 460GTX or AMD 6850 or above which is around $150.
The above is around $640 ballpark... and allows room for case, optical drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse and growth if you don't need something. Even though L2 doesn't need it, a better GPU like the Nvidia 560Ti or AMD 6950 at around $250 is a good idea for other games. Don't forget a 550W or better power supply from a reputable maker if you go that route.
If you need to skimp and if you get the SSD, get the smallest mechanical drive you can find as they are rediculously expensive right now and replace or add later. If you do not get the SSD due to budget, get the best 7200RPM mechanical you can afford.
i wont be building it and wont be reusing anything. i will be going to the store, buying one and thats it because its not just for me.
but thanks i will use those stats u gave me even to look for one though i dont know half of what they are haha
I'd recommend viewing full-screen, but it might not matter. For each test I log into Giran and run around, though while on the SSD I also head to Aden and Gludio to further show the seamless entry into each town. I can state with assurance also that the video doesn't do the differences enough justice - I'll never be able to play the game on a hard drive again.
Hope people like this video, because it cost me a staggering 69,000a to make :D
Does any1 else notice the zoom **** here or if its not a ****, how do i enable this level of zoom? :)
Does any1 else notice the zoom **** here or if its not a ****, how do i enable this level of zoom? :)
(ppl should rly stop judging this zoom lvl as a **** lol)
just use pageup or pagedown untill the view is farthest away, then just zoom out to the max for the view u see in the video.
(ppl should rly stop judging this zoom lvl as a **** lol)
just use pageup or pagedown untill the view is farthest away, then just zoom out to the max for the view u see in the video.
Recently I bought an SSD too. The difference is rather insane between my old drive and this (though the windows on that hasn't been reinstalled or taken care of for a long while, so it's not quite a fair comparison).
So I've been fooling around and while dualboxing I could almost instantly teleport around on maxed graphics. You blink twice and your machine boots, then right after you see you desktop and click on the browser it pops up instantly.
So I simply love it, even though it's pretty **** expensive.
As for the SSD it's a Crucial M4 128GB. For the moment my motherboard only supports Sata2, but it's still insanely fast, and to think it could be almost twice as fast...
I have a Crucial M4 128GB (I bought this brand for efficiency & reliability) and it performs much faster for Lineage 2. The load times are indeed insane and the fact that loading other characters models have reduced FPS stuttering.
To be honest, I would go for the SSD vs HDD as of right now (price hike) if you don't necessarily need the storage capacity.
I dual box as well, yet sometimes people think there are actually 2 people playing at the same time, ;).
As for this game, I believe even the 2nd gen Phenom II X4 9XX series are capable for this game. The main stress from this game would definitely be the HDD.
Yeah, I have SATA-II only (Maximus III Formula)as well. I'll be upgrading once Ivy is out.
As for this game, I believe even the 2nd gen Phenom II X4 9XX series are capable for this game. The main stress from this game would definitely be the HDD.
The game and engine are old and thus most certainly AMD Phenom II and even Athlon II are more than good enough.
However, Unless your budget is under $120 for a CPU, AMD does not have a competing product to purchase new at this time.
(The Phenom II 955 BE was such a great chip for so long, but at this point the i3 price drops just absolutely remove any gaming price/performance advantage they once had. The new Bulldozer line is so fail that the Phenom II's are actually better in most applications...)
I've been talking about using a hybrid or solid state drive for lineage II for a good 2 years or so.... and how it's massively changing the gameplay..
even if you've got SATA 1 only... you'll see a massive improvement EVEN if your total throughput is gigantically hindered by the old standard.. but it'll still benefit hugely by the access/random/latencies that the SSD has over even the fastest mechanical drives today...
Recently i had the privilege of playing wtih a 230MB/s mechanical drive.. no that's not raid 0 or anything. However even with it's fast read/write speeds... it still couldn't touch a SSD that was rated much lower in sustained read/write speeds.. simply because of the latency and random access advantages.
ok so i went to check out some computers and i was wondering if this would be sufficient to run l2 with high graphics and NO lagg in sieges, pvp, pve, bosses, porting time etc etc:
it was a HP with 6gb ram, 2tb hdd, intel core i5 processor.
wud that be enough? what else do i need to know before i buy it if its enough? also like i said before i have no clue about computers except the very basic. i never heard of a SSD before this thread lol so can i buy one after i buy the computer and put it in? do i replace something for it or what?
ok so i went to check out some computers and i was wondering if this would be sufficient to run l2 with high graphics and NO lagg in sieges, pvp, pve, bosses, porting time etc etc:
it was a HP with 6gb ram, 2tb hdd, intel core i5 processor.
wud that be enough? what else do i need to know before i buy it if its enough? also like i said before i have no clue about computers except the very basic. i never heard of a SSD before this thread lol so can i buy one after i buy the computer and put it in? do i replace something for it or what?
thanks :)
For starters we're missing the information on the videocard (and the proper information of each part, but they should suffice anyways).
As for SSD, it works like a hard drive. You can install your operation system on it and the programs you use often, then it'll provide you faster speed than normal HDDs. For example your PC will boot pretty fast and you'll open programs in no time, and for L2 teleporting and loading objects and players is just fast.
If you're planning to buy one along with your new PC, then I suggest to check if your motherboard supports SATA3 connection. You don't have to replace your normal HDD, you can just make it secondary to store data like music and movies, and keep your OS and most used things on SSD (since SSD's have a pretty high price for each Gbytes).
thanks and could u state a couple of different brand videocards which are sufficient for no lagg at all on high graphics? and what do u mean proper information of each part? i just posted what it said on the cards lol when i go back id like to know what to ask for exactly :p
laptopsss so i was wondering if theres a difference with lineage 2 running on laptops and a pc? as long as the laptop has the proper stats then it will be fine? also can u connect a ssd to a laptop? i imagine sort of like a external hdd?
If it has proper stats, then a laptop should be fine for L2. An SSD is very much to prefer, but only as an internal drive (aka replacing the existing HDD), running SSD externally is not going to help you much compared to the cost.
Get a laptop that has SATA-3 and then get a SATA-3 SSD, then you're golden.
Just keep in mind that most laptops have rather limited graphics cards.
Are there any issues with Kingston SSDs? IMO as long as you take care of ti properly (and backup your data :) ) you should be OK.
I have Intel 320 series SSD in my laptop (Fujitsu Amilo SA3650 with XGP) the game probably starts and runs faster than on my main PC ... ouch. Not to mention OS responsivness ... had to update to Seven though, Vista ran very fast too but 7 just has better support for SSDs.
I heard Macbooks had problems with SSDs only because some previous version of OSX does not support them properly.
I have tested maaaany other games SSD vs. HDD before and not once saw a difference like this. It helps that the L2 game engine is just inefficient to begin with. Using an SSD essentially compensates for that. It's like driving a Ferrari to get to the supermarket. Kind of.
Wanna see a big chance? lol you should test an OCZ Revodrive X2/X3. I am using an X2 240GB SSD on PCI-E with 750mb/sec random read.
Its an true enlightment to have it. Instant teleports to towns, no lagg in walking towns. Dont believe, i can make you an video of it to proof.
I have lineage 2 running on a single samsung spinpoint f3 and it's not too bad. I play in 1080P windowed because it's better for dual boxing, so I guess youtube thought it's not 1080P >_> even though it practically is 1080P.
I recorded me teleporting through a couple of the busiest towns in my server which is bartz. You'll notice some teleporting delay but otherwise it's not too bad as you'll see.
Forget SSD.. If you want L2 to run flawlessly even during sieges, get 16GB of RAM and make a 10GB RAMdisk. put your systextures, textures and animations on the ramdisk and link it back to your l2-folder. Now THAT.. is fast.
Forget SSD.. If you want L2 to run flawlessly even during sieges, get 16GB of RAM and make a 10GB RAMdisk. put your systextures, textures and animations on the ramdisk and link it back to your l2-folder. Now THAT.. is fast.
16GB DDR3 ram is kind of more expensive than 120gb Intel SSD 7-series :D
SSD has more utility since your overall system performance will improve if you put a swap file on SSD and also move the applications (and/or other games) you use over there.
SSD has more utility since your overall system performance will improve if you put a swap file on SSD and also move the applications (and/or other games) you use over there.
No it's not. Ram is crazy cheap nowadays. like what.. $150 for 4x4GB? Worth it imo for smooth sieging etc.
Due to the fact most motherboards only have 4 slots, this isn't actually enough to get the job done. You need at least 18-20Gb of RAM in the system to realistically get a performance boost from a ramdrive. (because you still need 2-4GB for system RAM)
However, a 2x8GB config at $150+ is enough to get the L2 files on ramdrive.
(still can be had for $150, but you are making sacrifices in lower bandwidth and worse-timing RAM thus limiting some system performance.)
Still, $150 seems silly when a single 90-ish-dollar 64GB SSD would do the job.
(and you don't have to settle for crappy RAM)
While ramdrive IS faster, the above solution is not that much faster. (because you left windows system files on slower hard disks)
If you have BOTH ramdrive and SSD, you have a crazy amount of money to spend on one game for a performance benefit that is questionable at best.
The SSD is the best tool for the job and will benefit more than one game.
Oh, and about laptops... todays gaming laptops have slightly underclocked desktop 550ti (560m) and up to underclocked desktop 560Ti (580m) or underclocked 6850s (6970m) or 6870s (6990m). They are more than powerful enough to play L2 and then some.
Even my 3.5-yr-old laptop has a 9800mGTS, which is more than powerful enough to play L2.
Forget SSD.. If you want L2 to run flawlessly even during sieges, get 16GB of RAM and make a 10GB RAMdisk. put your systextures, textures and animations on the ramdisk and link it back to your l2-folder. Now THAT.. is fast.
Due to the fact most motherboards only have 4 slots, this isn't actually enough to get the job done. You need at least 18-20Gb of RAM in the system to realistically get a performance boost from a ramdrive. (because you still need 2-4GB for system RAM)
However, a 2x8GB config at $150+ is enough to get the L2 files on ramdrive.
(still can be had for $150, but you are making sacrifices in lower bandwidth and worse-timing RAM thus limiting some system performance.)
Still, $150 seems silly when a single 90-ish-dollar 64GB SSD would do the job.
(and you don't have to settle for crappy RAM)
While ramdrive IS faster, the above solution is not that much faster. (because you left windows system files on slower hard disks)
If you have BOTH ramdrive and SSD, you have a crazy amount of money to spend on one game for a performance benefit that is questionable at best.
The SSD is the best tool for the job and will benefit more than one game.
Oh, and about laptops... todays gaming laptops have slightly underclocked desktop 550ti (560m) and up to underclocked desktop 560Ti (580m) or underclocked 6850s (6970m) or 6870s (6990m). They are more than powerful enough to play L2 and then some.
Even my 3.5-yr-old laptop has a 9800mGTS, which is more than powerful enough to play L2.
I dunno, but I've tried both running l2 off of just an SSD, and running L2 off of an SSD with the systextures and textures running off of a ramdisk. I noticed a huge difference in crowded areas such as towns etc.
And you dont need that big a ramdisk either. 16GB RAM is enough. The game runs fine with 6GB RAM, and in GoD, Systextures + Textures + Animations = 8.77GB. You do the math.
SS drives are the way to go today, I already have 1 in my system and ordered 2 more today to make a raid array for my Windows installation. The time it takes for L2 to load anything is stunning compared to my older 10k rpm hard drives. :D
oh gaud please..... not the ramdisk **** again... i just got done basting some others in the whole ramdisk arena.
it's a cheap/expensive counter intuitive man's alternative to actually making an upgrade.
Heres the deal, even with a ramdisk hitting speed of excess of 40gb/s (Intel i7 3930K with quad channel DDR3 2133mhz) vs a 500MB/s SSD, would suggest there would be a huge change, but i guarantee.... I've tried it.... on an already well balanced system, the engine just can't run any faster, at all, it's loading system is just to anchient to benefit from it.
Actually i would even say that a 500MB/s SSD is already faster then it needs. I/O per second and such, latencies all play into the game, but once the game hits it's useable limit, anything more is just a waste.
The major issue with ramdisks is that even with a fast HD... it's a little silly.
Having ran 32gb and recently a 64gb Ram system, where i was able to make a 32gb Ramdisk with ease and play around with several games and programs that may or may not benefit from it.... even with 30+ gb/s ram drives which will blow the doors off a intel i7 2700k's dual channel speeds, there was no real difference.
Now if your stuck on lets say SATA I or maybe a poor SATA II controller, where an SSD is being seriously hindered, then sure good chance your going to see improvement
Nvidia has by far one of the sloppiest SATA controllers on the market... even hardrive manufacturers hate to hear from customers about drive issues when they find out they are running on an NVidia controller... Although ATI's sata controller isn't exactly screaming either... but it's far more stable.
Intel follows the rules pretty **** good.. so generally they are always a lot better than the 3rd party controllers that you can find.
Actually i would even say that a 500MB/s SSD is already faster then it needs. I/O per second and such, latencies all play into the game, but once the game hits it's useable limit, anything more is just a waste.
This deserves more +'s than I have in my inventory. It's my lack of Adena :eek:
Now if your stuck on lets say SATA I or maybe a poor SATA II controller, where an SSD is being seriously hindered, then sure good chance your going to see improvement
VERY good point. My SSD is in fact SATA2, and not SATA3, so the difference in effect between a ramdisk and a Sata3 SSD is considerably smaller, and perhaps not even noticable.