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

[Sam DeathWalker]

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]

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]

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]

Ya both the above posts make good sense:

More infos on fps and SSD:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...px?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]

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]

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]

I am really getting sold on the Sandisk:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/f...-Time,731.html

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Sandisk-SSD-...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]

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]

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]

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.