The Dev has spoken! Where to put WoW folder! Acard wins! [Archive]

Sam DeathWalker

02-11-2009, 06:58 AM

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14697554675&postId=146961034803&sid=1#0

Hi Samdeathwkzz,

The game requires all of the files to be present at the time the game loads. All data is scattered all over so you can't really throw parts of World of Warcraft onto a RAM disk. Maybe you'll encounter a mob in Eastern Kingdom or a player with a certain pet that makes use of an expansion file. You can still use one copy of the game to launch multiple instances so if you have enough RAM to do that, more power to you. If you do not have enough, you'll have to use a different storage medium.

High speed SSDs (especially if they're in a stripe RAID) with large read numbers are great for the game and can help you load things quickly. Hard drives aren't bad either.

World of Warcraft uses occlusion but I'm not sure if it preloads player data that are close to you.

Occlusion:
In computer graphics, the term is used to describe the manner in which an object closer to the viewport masks (or occludes) an object further away from the viewport. In the graphics pipeline, a form of occlusion culling is used to remove hidden surfaces before shading and rasterizing take place.

Basically this means that Silencer is correct that you want media that has low access times over media that has high transfer bandwidth.

So, a pair of cheap 36G raptors in raidzero is not sufficient, but you can use that for basic WoW storage at little cost.

Then you need to get in order:

12-24G System Ram (I7) is best. (this solution is like 6 months away)
2 Acard in 4 raid0 ram (the $400 Card) is 2nd best. (acard infos here: ACard ANS-9010 RAM Drive ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=19039')) (this solution is actually available now.)
1 Acrad in 2 raid0 ram (the $400 Card) is 3rd best.
Intel SSD 4th (some infos here: Running 5x WoWs on a capped server using the latest intel X25 SSD ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=18624&')), given that you can get the Acard for about the same price this solution seems unwise).
Other SSD 5th (if cheaper then Acard - should be). Some infos: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-flash,2127-10.html
2 more raptors for 4X Raid0 is cheap mans solution 6th (way cheaper but access times way worse then Acard).

Notice on the Acard you dont use the CFL or whatever that is just have the wow folder in the two cheapo raptors and read the whole folder to the Acardd before you start wow and read the whole folder back to the raptors when you end, I guess one raptor is just as good as two and a lot safer.

So just take that list and buy the best you can afford. End of story.

KEEP IN MIND this infos in MORE important then your CPU or your Video Card, those two (if decent) are not the bottleneck its getting infos from the wow folder to your system ram and/or video card that is more important. In other words going from raptors to SSD or Acard will help your fps more then going from dual to quad cores or going from a 9600 to a 280.

Ok here is a .11 ms access time ssd drive for $165 (i.e. for wow about as good as the Intel SSD): This seems a very very resonable and cost effective solution. Better to go to the Acard if you need more then 16G or you have the $400 (plus $12 per G of ram).

http://www.sandisk.com/OEM/ProductCatalog(1321)-SanDisk_SSD_SATA_5000_25.aspx ('http://www.sandisk.com/OEM/ProductCatalog(1321)-SanDisk_SSD_SATA_5000_25.aspx')

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Sandisk-SSD-SATA-5000-2-5-16GB-SDS5C-016G-000010_W0QQitemZ120374412391QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC _Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item120374412391&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C 240%3A1318%7C301%3A1%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50

Sajuuk

02-11-2009, 10:28 AM

Grats on 40.

weeep

02-11-2009, 12:11 PM

I dont get all these speculations about storage performance.
1) My 5 chars are porting from any zone to Dalaran in ~5 seconds.
2) I do not lag in Dalaran or WG except video card lags. I'm on high pop server btw.
3) All zones and NPCs load instantly.
4) The only time my HDD is busy for few seconds is when I'm changing zones. FEW SECONDS, I was monitoring system HDD activity counter for looooong time

AND I'M USING CHEAP SINGLE HDD, NOT EVEN RAPTOR!

What's the point in all these super expensive SSD's, RAM drives, etc? Making you port to Dalaran in 1 sec instead of 5?
Symlink your WoW folders, get at least 8 Gb RAM - and your multibox performance will not differ from singlebox.

Kaynin

02-11-2009, 12:39 PM

Sam, pineapples may be apples, but apples may not be pineapples!

combhua

02-11-2009, 01:58 PM

While I strongly believe in communicating deliberately and only after careful consideration, I don't see mal-intent in Sam's post. Maybe we're being a bit hard on him.

Keeping in mind the perhaps excessive flair of his posts (which anyone reading a few threads on this board quickly sees) as well as the dependability of information coming from someone answering the Blizzard forums, his post still provided support (weak or otherwise) that access times are more important than throughput if your concern is dealing with Dalaran/Wintergrasp stuttering and loss of follow. Whether you're a believer in the value of throughput or access times is certainly a fair discussion that I've seen here a number of times, but I believe this info is worth not squelching.

As someone currently reading through these boards with the hope of improving my Dalaran stuttering, I found the information shared reenforcing some things I've read in other places and providing bits of helpful information to me, including options that I don't quite feel are personally worth it.

I've seen many, many posts with helpful intent declaring more firmly a specific position on various debatable issues. Those posts were assumably taken with the usual caveat of not simply taking everything you read on the internet at face value. I share the sentiment of mild annoyance regarding some other posts (and posters) being unsubstantial, vague and just plain confusing.

Respectfully

Tonuss

02-11-2009, 03:07 PM

Basically this means that Silencer is correct that you want media that has low access times over media that has high transfer bandwidth.

So, a pair of cheap 36G raptors in raidzero is not sufficient, but you can use that for basic WoW storage at little cost.
Erm... not sufficient for what, exactly? o.O

Most people here are running 4/5 instances of WoW on a single computer that isn't anywhere near to cutting-edge specifications. While I feel that it's best to avoid cutting corners in building a multi-boxing rig, I also think that you need to figure out a point of diminishing returns. You alluded to this when you said get the best you can afford, but I do not think that that is necessarily the best approach. I think the best approach is to determine what you want to be able to do, then consider which is the most reasonable solution. ie, if you want to run four 800 x 600 tiled windows on a 1600x1200 display and you want all of the effects cranked up, you'll need more processing muscle than someone with the same setup who has the graphics cranked to minimum.

But I think there's a point at which spending more money for the ultimate setup only gets you a very small incremental improvement, and after that you're just wasting money. If you have the cash to burn and/or really want to go that route, I understand (I like to splurge on hardware myself). But I'm not sure just how much improvement you'll get from four striped 10k raptors over a much more modest setup. I get good performance running with a couple of inexpensive 400GB SATA drives, with each one hosting two full WoW folders. I could probably squeeze out more performance from striped SSDs or a fast RAID array, but it would make almost no difference in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish with my group. It's fun to know that you're running that much horsepower under the hood, but it's not terribly practical IMO.

When/if I redo my multiboxing setup, I'm likely to go with four inexpensive SATA-II drives instead of a single high speed RAID array. If I stop being lazy and decide to run everything out of a single WoW directory, then it's likely that I'll stripe two inexpensive SATA-II drives. Either way, it would work for me without being unreasonably expensive. I think any multiboxer should look at it that way-- where is my performance "sweet spot"? After that, if you are inclined to spend money for high-powered hardware, more power to you (literally, even!).

Sam DeathWalker

02-11-2009, 04:15 PM

What misinformation?

Fursphere are you saying that Silencer is wrong? Or maybe that he dosn't know what raid is as well as you do?

Best upgrade with current specs? ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=18976')

Yep, I've done various ways of running WoW, including RAID0 300GB Velociraptors, RAID0 36GB Raptors, RAID0 320GB 7200rpm, and an SSD. The key is the access time. An SSD can locate a file in 0.1-0.3ms, while the fastest Velociraptor is around 4.10ms. That's a huge difference when you're trying to locate hundreds of files on a drive. Just think of every piece of gear on every player in your local area when you visit a battleground or Dalaran - every piece of gear has textures and animations that have to be loaded. When you enter an area with 200 players, and each player has roughly 50 textures to load.. that's a sudden request for 10,000 files from your hard drive. These data files needed to be transferred aren't very large (evidenced by the comparatively ugly and pixellated textures), so the transfer rate doesn't matter at all as much as the access (seek) time.

My next step will be hosting WoW from Acard's ram drive with 16-32GB of memory.. which supports RAID0 from one Acard box. I'm positive this will be faster than any hard drive option short of a true main memory ram drive, but I don't want to take 12GB of space away from system memory to dedicate towards WoW, nor do I want to have to rebuild the ram drive after every reboot. Acard's unit has a battery backup - system ram drives don't.

The purpose of the thread was to get get all the proper information in one spot instead of 20 different threads, now that we have Dev confermation of Silencers proclomation of "10,000 files". As well as find a fairly cheap .1 ms SSD alternative for those not wanting the Acard.

Whatever I am slowly coming to the conclusion that some mods are a bit more interested in who the poster is rather then what information is in the thread. At some point I am going to stop wasting my time posting solid information and just go back to bragging. Fursprere I really don't care for your allegations that I am purposely spreading misinformation. Unless you have some actual information that is counter to what I have said why do bother talking? You do realize I was programming in binary and building things with TTL before you were born. You have how much money invested in computers? 1/10th of what I do? You have build how many computers in your life? 1/100th of what I have? Say something intelligent on topic or really don't say anything at all.

zanthor

02-11-2009, 04:36 PM

What totally blows my mind is that the blue responding doesn't know what he's talking about.

You can put wow on 1000 hard drives if you want. All you have to do is SymLink the files appropriately and wala, wow never knows it.

So you COULD put your data directory on a ram drive and symlink it...

but seriously, i run 5 copies on my machine with a plain ol' 300gb sata drive... load times are NOT an issue, so I zone slower than a guy with a SSD, with 8GB ram I'm not swapping to disc (and if I was, it would be a DIFFERENT drive than my wow drive)...

Anyhow, once again a lowbie tech support monkey spouts half truths and is believed immediately by an end user. Never mind that he probably wouldn't know raid 0 vs 1 vs 5 if you hit him with it.

TeamFrosty

02-11-2009, 04:43 PM

I have doubts if Sam even understands what a RAID is and what it does at this point.Just to clear things up a bit... A "RAID" is a party consisting of 5 or more players teamed together in order to successfully tackle exceptionally hard encounters either built into the game, or for Player vs Player (also known as PvP) purposes. Hope this clears this issue up. :D

Sam DeathWalker

02-11-2009, 05:03 PM

Tech support verified what Silencer has been saying all along, that when you encounter a new player you have to load that players textures, in other words wow only loads what it needs to based upon who is near or in your field of vision. That means when you encounter 100 new players you in fact do make tons of accesses, which means that access time is more important then transfer rate which makes media with low access times supeior for wow then media with higher access times and higher bandwidth.

Whats so complex about that.

Ya you can play well in a low populated zone with a single normal hard drive. But go into a big city in WotLk and see 200 new people and see what happens.

Sam DeathWalker

02-11-2009, 05:16 PM

Blizzard does not in any way support Acard.

Blizzard says that products with lower access times are supeior for playing WoW then products with higher access times and higher bandwidth.

Acard wins as it happens to have the lowest access times. Of course I7 and x58 is better yet, so ya I7 wins ...

Why do I care if Acard makes the best products or Intel does. Im advising people to use the best regardless who makes it.

I provided a LINK to the Blizzard post where does it say anything about Acard?

If all character textures are always kept in the video card ram why would you need to access anything? If all character textures are placed sequentually in the data folders then bandwidth is more important. I don't think was a given that the textures need to be loaded on demand from random positions in the wow data folder, but that does seem to be the case.

At any rate if you felt that the issue was not open to argument then where is your post suggesting that people use I7/X58 and if not that then Acard?

puppychow

02-11-2009, 09:04 PM

Blue posts are GM and support posts, very few devs post on Wow forums (Ghostcrawler, Tigole ocassionally). While I have great respect for the jobs GMs do, they generally are in the support biz and not the development biz, and really don't always know how WoW works.

For example most games, including wow, create their own file databases (patch.mpq, data.mpq, etc) which is a single file that in turn encapsulates thousands and thousands of files. As far as Windows is concerned its one file, its opened by WoW and internally accessed as thousands of files by WoW. A hard drive doesn't care at all what a "file" is, the OS just tells it what sector to go read from next.

Wow will always keep the data mpq files open, and load up the specific textures/etc it needs from them. So yes, the hard drive is going to be randomly accessed, but because its kept as a few single files as far as Windows is concerned, Wow gets the greatest benefits of defragmentation and file placement (outer vs inner position on platter drives).

The Acard does theoretically, and usually in real-world tests, perform better than the Intel X-25E SSD. The biggest drawbacks is that the controller onboard is complete crap compared to Intel -- going from a single acard to raid0 dual acards SHOULD double performance, but it doesn't come anywhere close, because of the crappy controller. Because the RAM always needs power to keep the data, it draws much more heat than the Intel product. And lastly the scalability isn't as great obviously, 16GB is "ok" but just barely enough to hold wotlk. The Intel SSDs are also undergoing around $100 price cuts every month since launch, and they are just barely slower than the acards for a price thats getting better and better.

This current generation (intel X-25, OCZ Apex) is great for running wow, and pretty darn good for running Windows itself off of (the X-25 specifically), the next gen should be even better for running Windows 7 + wow.

Valdemarick

02-11-2009, 09:59 PM

I just want to point out the obvious flaw in the "200 players * 50 textures = 10,000 files" presumption.

Those 200 players will not each have 50 unique textures associated with them. In fact, when in a battleground consisting of the same capped level, there will be much of the same armor on each "spec" of a class.

I realize that doesn't change the fact that the seek time on SSD is comparatively lower than on a standard platter-based drive... but claiming there are 10,000 files being read at time of zoning is extreme exaggeration.

For reference: I am 2x multiboxing from the same WoW install directory, off of a 300gb raptor. Once initial load times have completed (which IMO are not significantly lengthy), I experience no other machine lag, even in well-populated areas.

Sam DeathWalker

02-12-2009, 01:27 AM

Ya both the above posts make good sense:

More infos on fps and SSD:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=14

can have on minimum frame rates in a game. The Crysis test is a bit exaggerated since it's streaming data as fast as possible, which you don't always do in a game, but if you've ever felt your game grind to a halt and hear your disk thrash this is a good test of that.

The X25-M has a 33% advantage here over the VelociRaptor, and I won't even mention the utter destruction of conventional 2.5" HDDs. Compared to other SSDs, the Samsung SLCs come the closest but Intel still manages a 25% advantage. The JMicron based MLC drives suffer terribly here, Intel's MLC drive is 63% faster. I will also point out that for a couple of runs the JMicron MLC drives managed a minimum frame rate of 3 fps, several of those lovely pauses happened in the middle of the benchmark which really changed things. The phenomenon was random enough that I reported the more common frame rate but it's worth pointing out that the pausing issue can happen while gaming, which would be bad if you're playing any sort of multiplayer game.

Average frame rate is obviously affected, but you can see that the numbers are much closer indicating that the minimum frame rates are at least not sustained for long periods of time.

What can we conclude here? SSDs can be good for gaming, but they aren't guaranteed to offer more performance than a good HDD. And where SSDs do offer an impact on gaming performance, Intel's X25-M continues to dominate the charts.

Here is some very interesting infos'

Using 1 Mitron loading quake was same as NINE Raid0 Mitron SSD drives:

http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/

As you can see in all of the games, we are averaging a load speed increase of 68% over the Western Digital Raptor 150 compared to the single Mtron 16GB. The speed increase is truly incredible with this solid state drive. Now, please remember the Horsepower/Torque analogy that I discussed earlier in this article. Even though we are adding more horsepower (more drives and sustained throughput), latency and random access time (torque) remains the same. For Quake 4 we displayed an identical load time telling me that this game has a large amount of small blocks of files during load. However, for games that required a little more large file seeking on the drive we displayed minor increases in load time while scaling in raid. FEAR is the only game that actually scaled tremendously with more drives. When I loaded up FEAR on the 9 drive setup, Level 1 was pretty much loaded as soon as I clicked the mouse. Pretty incredible to say the least. Based on all of my results, not to mention having the ability to personally get a taste of all of these different test setups I am going to say the ultimate current choice in SSD technology is going to be a 2 X 16GB Mtron Pro Raid 0 setup for gaming.

This means that you might just be best off with a single ssd and no need to raid.

Clanked

02-12-2009, 01:48 AM

If all character textures are placed sequentually in the data folders then bandwidth is more important. I don't think was a given that the textures need to be loaded on demand from random positions in the wow data folder, but that does seem to be the case.

I am rather curious how you could have ever possibly imagined this being true.
You turn a corner, and there is a player: He could be wearing t4 gear, or t7 gear.
This is an extremely crude mockup, but please. Explain how sequentual loading would work.

[T1----------T2----------T3----------T4----------T5----------T6----------T7] <- Hard Drive section with tier gear on it.

If it was sequentially read and loaded (ie, where bandwitdh is important) than to load t7 gear, you would have to load all the previous tiers as well. So in memory, you would have t1 through t7, just to display the t7 gear. Since that doens't pass the common sense test, they do it exactly how anyone would imagine them to.

They go straight to where the T7 files are located, and load just them.

Sam DeathWalker

02-12-2009, 01:57 AM

Load all tauren gear if one is near.... Yes load T1-T7 even if you only need T1, why not? How do you know that around the next corner isnt someone with T3 on?

You think that when you zone they only load zone textures for the area that is currently visible? No they load ALL the world textures for the WHOLE zone. Why do it different with character textures?

I mean why do they try and get the memory footprint (like about 600K per instance of wow) of the game so low, why not use the full 2G windows allows (bad for boxers but good for everyone else). Why isnt as much in memory as possible?

Sure if I was making a game I would keep as much of it in system ram as is possible.

Sam DeathWalker

02-12-2009, 02:04 AM

I am really getting sold on the Sandisk:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/flash-ssd-charts/Random-Access-Time,731.html

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Sandisk-SSD-SATA-5000-2-5-16GB-SDS5C-016G-000010_W0QQitemZ120374412391QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC _Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item120374412391&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C 240%3A1318%7C301%3A1%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50

Keep in mind the artical with the 9 mitrons was using the $500 drives with .1 access time. The Sandisk are .11 access time ... for $170.

Getting one of these 16G for $170, and MAYBE if you need get another and raid0 them seems just such an incredible cost effective solution.

They are Sata only but still if you want more bandwidth or capacity get two and raid0 them .... So close to the Intel solution yet much cheaper.

Clanked

02-12-2009, 05:50 AM

You know, I thought about putting a statement in my first post along the lines of: "Sequential loading would only be useful for something like geography textures"
But then I thought to myself "nah, he should be intelligent enough to know the difference between what is required of zone loads, and player loads"

I guess I was wrong.

Sam DeathWalker

02-12-2009, 06:57 AM

What is the difference between what is required of zone loads, and player loads. And why is it "required"?

Its only necessary if you limit the amount of ram your game uses to be a lot less then the total of all textures in the game. Also with proper organization you can load things sequentially even if most of the seeks are random. Wouldn't you load all of a spicfic set of say T4 armor and not just the bracers? Or are you of the opinion that loads are of each spicific item that is visible only? Do they load just the visible range or the visible range and say 40 yards beyond? Do they load all of the NPC textures in a zone when they load the zone or are they requried to do something else? If they load all the npc textures when you zone they why not load all the player textures of everyone currently in the zone also?

Fear loads the whole zone and I would assume character textures are well.

Well I guess WoW has a lot more character textures then what I would have thought. Would be interesting to see how much of the data files are character textures as vs. other information.

KvdM

02-12-2009, 07:22 AM

There is no difference. Balancing seek times vs streaming is a major issue when it comes to loading game content (especially on even slower media like cd and dvd-rom). Loading more data then is required is often done because discarding the bits that aren't needed is faster then seeking for the required data. I'd expect that a lot of character texture data is even part of the same texture file, because switching between textures/materials/shaders is a very expensive operation on a video card.

As for why doesn't the game keep all its content in memory, I'm currently looking into that issue myself too. It seems that the blizzard devs have forgotten to inform the windows memory manager that their game has a large memory working set. It should be possible to remedy this problem very easily, but I haven't found any software yet that can change this setting.

Clanked

02-12-2009, 07:23 AM

The world never changes, the ground will always be the same texture, the building will always have the same textures. There isn't much variation, and going into it, you know exactly what textures need to be loaded to display the zone. Therefore a sequential load is a good idea. I'm sure when you are sitting at the loading screen after hearthing to orgimmar, there is lots of sequential loading going on for the geography.

Players on the other hand can be wearing any of the thousands of different pieces of armor/weapons/shirts/etc. So they require random fetches from the hard drive for each different model/texture they are wearing.

So, in short. You will always know what geography textures will be needed, because they are static. You will never know what player textures are needed.

Sam DeathWalker

02-12-2009, 07:25 AM

Well there is a 2G limit to any application under 32 bit windows ... but its dosn't seem wow is using that 2G limit, maybe on the assumpiton that computers dont have 2G, an assumption made when wow was first disigned but not a very valid one today.

Ya as KvdM says the issue is not so dry and "obvious" as some would make it seem.

You know you do not need textures of players that are not currently in the zone with you.

At any rate this is a dead horse, the Dev stated that the data is randomly read and that good enough for me. Buy stuffs with lower access times vs. items with higher bandwidth but also higher access times.

KvdM

02-12-2009, 07:39 AM

You will never know what player textures are needed. And that's exactly why you don't load them one by one. In fact, one of the tricks that I've seen our tech coders use is to place game data onto the hard drive several times. Why? Because loading extra data (even when not needed) is so much faster then seeking for the data when you do need it. (note that this does depend on the size of the extra data)

As for why the game doesn't use 2GB, that's also simple. The more memory you reserve, the more resources you need to keep track of it, which can also slow down the game. So you don't want to reserve more memory then is actually needed.

weeep

02-12-2009, 12:09 PM

Ya you can play well in a low populated zone with a single normal hard drive. But go into a big city in WotLk and see 200 new people and see what happens. Nothing happens. People load up in a second or two and there is no HDD activity after their initial load. And there should NOT be any HDD activity. If you experience constant HDD activity in crowded place, something is wrong with your software setup or you have insufficient RAM.

combhua

02-12-2009, 12:29 PM

At any rate this is a dead horse, the Dev stated that the data is randomly read and that good enough for me. Buy stuffs with lower access times vs. items with higher bandwidth but also higher access times.First, that probably was not an actual developer. I'm a software developer and I think it's presumptive to assume we might know what hundreds of other factors surround the specific decisions related to their loading algorithms. The differences between the two strategies are small enough that we would need intimate knowledge of the industry as well as specific Blizzard approaches to solving that problem. And remember, it's not an either/or. It's a spectrum of possibilities. To continue on the example being used, when encountering a rogue wearing t7 helm, the devs could load just the specific helm, the rogue t7 set, all t7 sets, all rogue sets, all ilvl 213 rogue items, all leather items, all items in the zone, all items on the continent, all items in the game. Some possibilities are obviously more likely, but you get the idea.

Tonuss

02-12-2009, 02:52 PM

You think that when you zone they only load zone textures for the area that is currently visible? No they load ALL the world textures for the WHOLE zone. Why do it different with character textures?Wouldn't that place a significant load on systems that are closer to the recommended specs for WoW? Wouldn't it also mean that lag in a place like Dalaran would be about the same regardless of how many players were actually there (once you crossed a specific threshold, anyway)?

Without knowing how much space is required by model/texture data, we're really just making wild guesses at this stuff, IMO.

Sam DeathWalker

02-12-2009, 04:13 PM

Nothing happens. People load up in a second or two and there is no HDD activity after their initial load. And there should NOT be any HDD activity. If you experience constant HDD activity in crowded place, something is wrong with your software setup or you have insufficient RAM.

Is that in fact true? My computers are far from me so I cant see the HDD light. When you go to Org or some heavy populater area does the hard drive churn constantly or not? For an issue that is "obvious" and "clear" we sure are getting different opinions on both sides.

Without knowing how much space is required by model/texture data, we're really just making wild guesses at this stuff, IMO

That is sure a fact, and I was hopeing the Blue would clear that up. Maybe someone else should ask also, I mean we are going to be spending $1000's on equipment, it might be to our advantage to spend it in a manner that gets us the best results.

Acard is best but not best for the buck (Sandisk wins there). I7/X58 is better then Acard though.

I think I ll get an Sandisk and compare it to 4Xraptors in Raid0 and see what the result is, I have the raptors already and the Sandisk is only $170, just waiting on others to get solid infos is taking to long. What happened with that guy that was supposed to post his benchmarks? And don't like 3 or 4 people have Acards yet, and X-25's?

KvdM

02-12-2009, 05:08 PM

The differences between the two strategies are small enough that we would need intimate knowledge of the industry as well as specific Blizzard approaches to solving that problem.I've got years of experience working as an online gameplay programmer on some of the bigger tripple A titles. Of course I can't tell you the exact implementation of the loading system that Blizzard is using, but based on my experience I can tell you what type of loading system they're using. This is because loading content isn't something that only affects Blizzard. Other developers have to build similar solutions as well and there are already well-known algorithms available for doing this.
And remember, it's not an either/or. It's a spectrum of possibilities. To continue on the example being used, when encountering a rogue wearing t7 helm, the devs could load just the specific helm, the rogue t7 set, all t7 sets, all rogue sets, all ilvl 213 rogue items, all leather items, all items in the zone, all items on the continent, all items in the game. Some possibilities are obviously more likely, but you get the idea. Their developers probably know what they're doing, so I don't think they'd make the beginners mistake of only loading an item or a group of items. Its not only inefficient for loading data from the HD to main memory, but it is also too slow for rendering hundreds of characters. Having to upload items seperately to a video card's memory and swapping between too many rendering contexts will simply ru�n a game's framerate.

The normal way for handling your game content is to split it up into one or more static blocks of data that are always in memory (like all players items and player character data) and multiple streaming blocks that are loaded when needed (while switching zones). I've also worked on a game that only loaded data just before it is needed, but such systems simply are not fast enough for a typical MMO.
Wouldn't that place a significant load on systems that are closer to the recommended specs for WoW? Well, how do you think the minimal specs of a game are calculated? Its calculated by adding up the size of the static blocks with size of the largest streaming blocks (and of course heap memory, etc)
Without knowing how much space is required by model/texture data, we're really just making wild guesses at this stuff, IMO. It's an educated guess based on experience, knowing the limitations of the hardware that the game runs on and knowing the available solutions to the problem. Having said that, there is of course always the chance that someone at Blizz headquarters will now think to himself "so that's what we've been doing wrong all these years", but I highly doubt that :)

Tonuss

02-14-2009, 11:31 PM

I don't know if anyone posted about this before, but at Storage Review ('http://www.storagereview.com') they apparently run a simple I/O access test with WoW whenever they test a new hard drive, and they've got a relatively small database of results. As expected, two SSDs are far and away the fastest, but one comparison caught my eye. The following lists the model and some specs, along with the I/O-per-second scores (for reference, the two MTRON SSDs scored 3,333 and 3,030):

Samsung Spinpoint F1 with NCQ (1000 GB SATA) - 787

Samsung SpinPoint T166 with NCQ (500 GB SATA) - 515

Aside from price (~$100 for the 1TB vs ~$60 for the 500GB) and size, the primary difference between the two drives is the size of the cache buffer. 32MB for the 1TB drive, 16MB for the 500GB drive. Doubling the cache size meant the difference between a drive that posted one of the highest scores (the second-highest for a 7,200 RPM drive) and a drive that languished much farther down on the list. The only 7,200 RPM SATA drive that beat it was the Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000... which has a 32MB buffer.

It makes sense, if access times are so important to WoW. The memory buffers on a hard drive are much, much faster than accessing data directly from the platters (which is the whole reason for the cache in the first place) and thus bigger works out better for a game moving so much data at a moment's notice. Consider that you are looking at a cost of $100 per drive for performance rivaling 10k/15k Ultra320 SCSI drives. On the other hand, if you have money to burn then you are looking at possibly a 3.5x to 4.5x performance increase from using an SSD (or even bigger, depending on how well other brands perform).

EDIT: Hmm, looking further into the list, Seagate's ES.2 1TB drive with a 32MB buffer places pretty low on the chart. It uses 250GB platters versus 334GB platters on the Samsung Spinpoint. Very curious...

Tonuss

02-14-2009, 11:35 PM

Well, how do you think the minimal specs of a game are calculated? Its calculated by adding up the size of the static blocks with size of the largest streaming blocks (and of course heap memory, etc)I was thinking about Sam's statement about character textures. I can see the idea behind loading the data for the zone map when you enter the zone, but the data for all classes/gear? If that were the case, then systems that are well ahead of the minimal requirements wouldn't lag so badly in highly-populated areas, wouldn't they?

Sam DeathWalker

02-15-2009, 03:19 AM

From the above linked storagereview benchmarks:

World of Warcraft Performance
A capture of a role-playing game that issues disk accesses when switching continents/dungeons as well as when loading new textures into RAM on the fly.

World of Warcraft Performance

Rank Drive Name Model Results in IO/Sec
1 MTRON MSP-SATA7035-64 (64 GB SATA) MSP-SATA7035-064 3333
2 MTRON MSD-SATA3035-064 (64 GB SATA) MSD-SATA3035-64 3030
3 Fujitsu MAU (147 GB Ultra320 SCSI) MAU3147NP 885
4 Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS (300 GB SATA) WD3000GLFS 840
5 Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 Desktop Mode (147 GB Ultra320 SCSI) ST3146754LW 833
6 Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000BLFS (300 GB SATA) WD3000BLFS 833
7 Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 with NCQ (1000 GB SATA) HTE721010SLA330 806
8 Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 Server Mode (147 GB SAS) ST3146854SS 787

You can see, according the them, wow is 4X faster on the Mtron SSD vs. a Veloraptor.

Also they indicate that textures ARE loaded on the fly.

Interestingly the 36G raptors are way worse then the 300G raptors ... hum ... How can you possibly umm duplicate the same test anyways. Wont you always run into different characters?

The fastest Raptor / VeloRaptor has 16M cache