Gran Turismo 5 loading times slashed with SSD install

@Jay Z
Mine 6 month ago, FOR THE SECOND TIME, after a friend fixed it a year ago...>.

@ThePlake0815 If a friend fixed it for you, you can't really complain about it breaking the 2nd time to be honest.

@Jay Z :( yeah same here pal - i have the 160 gig slim now at a discount through their warranty program.

@koehler83 It stated also, that SSDs don't fit in the smaller HDD bay in the Slims.

@BlingOnMyWrist But hey, I'm just going by what I read above. I have neither a Slim PS3 nor a SSD...

@koehler83
he said they don't fit... you should probably read the article as well as look at the chart......

@BlingOnMyWrist

anything that fits in a laptop should fit in a Slim (9.5 mm drive height).

@darkfocus

Except the author of the article is wrong. The PS3 Slim, much like the old form factor, will accept any 9mm thick 2.5" disk drive; most of the 2.5" SSDs made within the last 18 months have those dimensions as they're made with slim laptops, netbooks, and (larger) tablets in mind . You CAN squeeze in an SSD thicker than 9mm as long as you don't use the HDD sleeve.

Seriously, Joystiq needs to check their facts a little better...
They made two massive mistakes within 2 hours of each other! (this and the fact they got something completely wrong because they didn't actually seem to read the source they linked to on the 4oD and ITV Player article)

@Indefinite Implosion
Yeah, this is pretty damn embarrassing. SSDs come in 2.5" configs first then 3.5". More often than not the 3.5" drives are just 2.5" with a removable spacer. There's a few exclusive 3.5" drives out there and fewer yet that actually need that space.

I usually don't rag on an author's post, but this is pretty bad and he's been served.

@Mmmmz

Joystiq is primarily a console blog and they're horribly out of touch with the PC market. It's kinda obvious when posts still make 3 year old Vista jokes and still call Crysis a super computer eater. Not knowing the configuration of a SSD is understandable because people who don't build their own systems (which is all but a small fraction of the population) have no idea how big they are.

However, calling the SSD impractical is fair, given a good one is more expensive than the entire PS3.

I'm surprised. When you're in the gaming industry, I say you should at least have really good knowledge of Computer Science, History, and Politics.

@Indefinite Implosion It makes no diff Hinkle is talking out of his rear end -- it doesn't ever matter when a Joystiq blogger does because you're commenting (me too). Joystiq got its pageviews. They're off to more important things like laughing at the 2010 VGA live blog transcript.

@so wrong

well, if you want to get specific, 2.5" drives can have heights of either 9.5 mm (what most laptops use) or 11.5 mm (more often used for enterprise solutions). i don't have a PS3, but i guess it's theoretically possible that the PS3 could have a 11.5 mm bay, and the Slim a 9.5 mm.

However, i seriously doubt that's the case. i'd bet that Joystiq is just mistaken.

@Derppy

It's probably because it's compressed, and needs to be processed as it's loaded. It's not simply a matter of the read rate.

GT5 does take longer to load than other games. I don't think it's so bad, but you're quite right that ti's pretty annoying when you're doing the first couple of baby licenses.

@Derppy
Depends on the data that's being loaded. SSDs are a bit over-hyped in their current form. In some cases they really shine but it all depends on the game and that data.

For instance, I had a sandforce SSD, an OCZ Vertex 2, and it didn't load Sims 3 much faster at all. I think the stopwatch said about 20 seconds savings for a 3 minute load. Hardly the next coming considering the price and low space.

Other things loaded a bit faster, like the OS but overall I found few real world applications that made it worth it considering the prices vs space.

Well, The Sims 3 isn't a good test case because it was optimized with low end systems in mind. My Vertex2 loads up Win7 in 5 seconds and I went from having lengthy load times in Dragon Age to near instantaneous loading. They really are all they're cracked up to be, assuming the developer expected people with better than 5400 rpm drives would be using the product.

@BananaBoat

yea, without TRIM, i wouldnt use an SSD, it's cuts performance pretty quickly overtime.

@BananaBoat

TRIM only applies when writing to the drive. You're right about speeds eventually declining without TRIM, but "write amplification" should be limited only to write operations such as when the game is installing, so you're right that the speed benefits of installing to SSD vs HDD will lessen over time without TRIM. However, the speed of loading a game (primarily a read operation) should still remain quite fast versus HDDs.

Because of this, I believe SSDs are still advantageous over HDDs, at least once their price comes down.

You bring up a good point, though, so it depends on how much writing is done to a drive during load; best practice should be for developers to minimze write operations during loading to maximize SSD efficiency, at least until the PS3 supports TRIM.

@BananaBoat

People saying SSDs will get slower over time:

Yes, trim helps keep things fast. But it's not the only way- a lot of SSDs have garbage collection built into their firmware (see the new "stick" SSD in the new Macbook Airs, OS X doesn't support trim). The only disadvantage to controller-side garbage collection is it may occasionally interrupt the host system and can't operate as efficiently because it doesn't know when you're on "downtime".

Anandtech.com writes all about it, including a graph of the Air's new SSD vs being abused over time. It holds up quite well without TRIM.

@EatMoreBread

Lack of TRIM still greatly impacts read speed. However, the impact is grossly exaggerated. A fully junked out SSD is still somewhere around 30 times faster than a 15000 rpm mechanical drive.

@LaughingTarget - I'm more worried about the write times. Will my game hang every time it needs to write data, once the drive is junked? It's not a risk I'd be willing to take, considering the cost of the decent sized drives compared to much higher capacity HDD alternatives.

I'm sure an SSD would perform fine (especially the newer gen ones), I'm just not sure how much of a real world improvement you'd be likely to see in games, since they aren't designed to take advantage of the additional read speed. One guys data on one game doesn't really prove much, especially considering other factors (like how fast the HDD was. 5400 or 7200? Defragged and new, or fragmented and old? Platter density? etc) and since SSD's aren't cheap, it is hard to make the plunge based on this alone.

The bottom line is, while you may see improvement for GT5, you might not see squat for your other games (I doubt performance would decrease, unless junked performance on the drive is really bad). Is it worth the money to find out? Maybe. I mean, you could always swap the drive right back out, and use the SSD where it belongs (as of now) as a boot drive for a TRIM enabled OS, if it wasn't working out on the PS3.

@BananaBoat

The write speed on a junked drive without TRIM support (basically, if you're using your drive on anything other than a Windows platform right now) will effectively be cut in half. It's worse than the read speed problem, but again, it's not that big of a deal when compared to mechanical drives.

For example, AnandTech scored a Western Digital Velocirapter 600 GB drive with a sequential write of 147 IOPS and random write at 1.9 IOPS. My Vertex2 scores around 215 IOPS for sequential write and 160 IOPS for random write. When my drive is junked out with crap, my sequential write drops to around 190 and random to 89 (because I'm on Win7, I get most of this back when its deleted). The read speeds also crush the Velociraptor. My drive does 220/57 and the Velociraptor does 149/0.07.

As you can imagine, games are the beneficiary of random write and read capability and in games like Dragon Age I've improved my loading performance from 30 seconds on my old 10,000 RPM drive to near instant with my Vertex2. Some games that are mainly targeted at the casual crowd will usually not show as much improvement as fewer resources were put into the engine as they're developed for low-end systems, like the Sims 3 I mentioned above.

Yes, these drives are still pretty damned expensive. The main problem with the PS3 and why it isn't showing such a drastic performance improvement is that GT5 was only optimized with a standard PS3 in mind. Additionally, the PS3 is at a significant disadvantage compared to modern computers since the RAM in the unit is effectively hobbled. The PS3 only has 256 megs of RAM to work with, so the SSD in a PS3 is mostly sitting idle because the PS3 can't keep up with the data access rate. For comparison, my system runs 12 gigs of RAM which is why games like Fallout 3, Metro 2033, and notoriously slow loading games like The Witcher (loading on my system for this game is around 4 seconds) mostly pop up instantly.

While the gains are huge on the PS3, they don't truly give you an idea of how an SSD really performs. I suspect that Sony will use SSD storage in the next generation system and build the hardware to support it.

@ohheysean

My SSD ran me $230 for 80GB, but its the best on the market (Intel)

@BeatFreaker

No, 40 seconds isn't too long. 40 seconds 100 times in a row to get through licenses....annoying as f'in hell.

@BeatFreaker

40 seconds is plenty of time to pack a bowl up and hit it once (or twice)

@Chazzr
Funny you should say that, since modern consoles (disc-based) are when load times began. Before that, good-ol' cartridge based systems truly were instant.

@BeatFreaker - I agree with you.

As an older gamer who remembers waiting 25 minutes for the

Not sure what happened to that comment.

As an older gamer who remembers waiting 25 minutes for the less-then-64k Arcadia to load from tape on my C64, the GT5 load times are irrelevant to me.

That's the problem with many people these days - if something isn't instant, they can't be bothered with it.

@Paranoimia your comment wasn't finish loading. next time install on joystiq to reduce load times.

@Paranoimia

Man, I had an Apple II back when my friend had a C64. I found the C64 load times unbearable. Fortunately, i had an intellivision and he had an atari... both with instant load times.

But as patient as i am in life (i am), i'm not in video games. Cutscenes drive me up a wall, and too many load screens (Dead Rising 2 anyone?) do too.

@oO Wallace Oo

But can he run Crysis?