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Is performance improved on an SSD?
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| Marcus | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 16:58 | Message # 1 |
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Astronaut
Group: Users
United Kingdom
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| Sorry if this has already been asked, but I was wondering. Since my Crucial M4 will be arriving soon, I would like to know if there's any substantial increase in performance if SE runs off it. Would it aid the speed of texture generation at all?
Thanks in advance.
AMD Phenom II x4 960T @3.6GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Kingston Hyper X Blu
MSi R6850 Cyclone 1GD5 950MHz Core 1150MHz Mem
Gigabyte GA-880GM USB 3 motherboard AM3+
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| Talyn | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 17:47 | Message # 2 |
 Explorer
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Portugal
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| Are you talking about a SSD (Solid State Drive)?
As I understand, the speed of texture generation is linked with the CPU Speed and in some mesure with the Graphic Card.
I don't see how a SSD can improve the speed of texture generation but it should definitelly improve a lot your loading times when you start SE.
But I could be wrong, maybe SpaceEngineer can correct me if I'm totally wrong 
PC: Intel Core2Duo E6850 @ 3.00 GHz & 4GB DDR3 @ 1333 - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS with 640 MB VRAM
Laptop: Intel Core2Duo T9400 @ 2.53 GHz & 4 GB DDR @ 1066 - NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
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| Red_River | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 19:10 | Message # 3 |
 Astronaut
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Canada
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| this game benifits from SSD a lot and you should see a huge difference in performance because of that.
I see new textures loaded by GPU all the time. the higher your LOD the more time you spend loading new textures for planets.
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| Talyn | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 19:25 | Message # 4 |
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Explorer
Group: Users
Portugal
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| I don't see the hard Drive mentioned here but I may be wrong
http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/23-201-3619-16-1327360109
PC: Intel Core2Duo E6850 @ 3.00 GHz & 4GB DDR3 @ 1333 - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS with 640 MB VRAM
Laptop: Intel Core2Duo T9400 @ 2.53 GHz & 4 GB DDR @ 1066 - NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
Edited by Talyn - Saturday, 05.05.2012, 19:26 |
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| SpaceEngineer | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 19:54 | Message # 5 |
 Author of Space Engine
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| Hard drive affects only on start-up time and loading of textures of Solar system's planets, which is stored on disk, and some other textures, models and shaders (galaxies, atmospheres, solar eclipse shaders, etc). Generation of fractal landscape and textures of procedural planets is done fully on the GPU (graphics card) and does not use the hard drive, system RAM and even the CPU. So I should say no, an SSD can't improve performance of procedural planets. Powerful graphics card (or having a small screen resolution ) will do.
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| Marcus | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 19:56 | Message # 6 |
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Astronaut
Group: Users
United Kingdom
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| Okay, thanks guys. Once the SSD arrives, I'll shove Space Engine on it and post back with results!
AMD Phenom II x4 960T @3.6GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Kingston Hyper X Blu
MSi R6850 Cyclone 1GD5 950MHz Core 1150MHz Mem
Gigabyte GA-880GM USB 3 motherboard AM3+
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| Marcus | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 19:58 | Message # 7 |
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Astronaut
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United Kingdom
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| Quote (SpaceEngineer) Hard drive affects only on start-up time and loading of textures of Solar system's planets, which is stored on disk, and some other textures, models and shaders (galaxies, atmospheres, solar eclipse shaders, etc). Generation of fractal landscape and textures of procedural planets is done fully on the GPU (graphics card) and does not use the hard drive, system RAM and even the CPU. So I should say no, an SSD can't improve performance of procedural planets. Powerful graphics card (or having a small screen resolution ) will do.
Ah, you just posted that right before I posted. Cheers for the info SE. I'll put Space Engine on there anyway as it's only ~500MB.
AMD Phenom II x4 960T @3.6GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Kingston Hyper X Blu
MSi R6850 Cyclone 1GD5 950MHz Core 1150MHz Mem
Gigabyte GA-880GM USB 3 motherboard AM3+
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| SpaceEngineer | Date: Saturday, 05.05.2012, 20:02 | Message # 8 |
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Author of Space Engine
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Russian Federation
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| Compare it with an SE copy on a regular hard-drive, in the same scenes, it will be interesting to see the differences.
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| Marcus | Date: Sunday, 06.05.2012, 10:04 | Message # 9 |
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Astronaut
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United Kingdom
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Status: Offline
| Will do.
AMD Phenom II x4 960T @3.6GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Kingston Hyper X Blu
MSi R6850 Cyclone 1GD5 950MHz Core 1150MHz Mem
Gigabyte GA-880GM USB 3 motherboard AM3+
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| Marcus | Date: Saturday, 12.05.2012, 23:16 | Message # 10 |
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Astronaut
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United Kingdom
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| I have no comparison videos, but I'm sure I do see a difference now that I'm running it off my SSD. The textures seem to load faster. What happens with the textures once loaded? Are they put onto some form of cache on the HDD? If so, what about offloading the cache into the RAM; let it fill up to the desired amount and remove the oldest rendered textures in that session.
To be honest, I probably have this all wrong. If so, could you enlighten me on how the rendering system organises the textures? 
AMD Phenom II x4 960T @3.6GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Kingston Hyper X Blu
MSi R6850 Cyclone 1GD5 950MHz Core 1150MHz Mem
Gigabyte GA-880GM USB 3 motherboard AM3+
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| Red_River | Date: Sunday, 13.05.2012, 15:09 | Message # 11 |
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Astronaut
Group: Users
Canada
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| the textures will load into your GPU and be processed from there.
SSD just makes the loading of textures way faster which means faster generating and less time waiting for the terrain to finish rendering.
at some point you will run out of VRAM and your GPU will use the drive swap file to store the textures. this is when an SSD is going to be a lot faster over a HDD as well.
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| Marcus | Date: Monday, 14.05.2012, 15:43 | Message # 12 |
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Astronaut
Group: Users
United Kingdom
Messages: 44
Status: Offline
| Thanks for the info. The difference did definitely become more apparent. Hey, even LOD 2 is slightly more playable!
I'm sure if one could utilise standard RAM, it'd accumulate the textures into the cache faster since RAM is a lot faster than a HDD. Therefore, allowing the oldest textures from that RAM to be swapped into the HDD after. Or would that eventually bottleneck as well?
And I've heard that RAM can still be used somewhat after reading a few threads about allocating more than the amount of vRAM a GPU has, I did try it and it didn't make much of a difference, personally.
Just a theory, hopefully my objectivity isn't too naive.
AMD Phenom II x4 960T @3.6GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Kingston Hyper X Blu
MSi R6850 Cyclone 1GD5 950MHz Core 1150MHz Mem
Gigabyte GA-880GM USB 3 motherboard AM3+
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| SpaceEngineer | Date: Tuesday, 15.05.2012, 00:23 | Message # 13 |
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Author of Space Engine
Group: Administrators
Russian Federation
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| Marcus, Red_River, your theories are absolutely wrong
First, a little question: What is the reason to read a texture from the HDD and then cache it back to the HDD? Why do you think this will improve things?
1) All textures are stored in VRAM of course - the graphics card can't render a texture from RAM, because the PCI-E bus is very slow compared to the modern internal GPU<--->VRAM bus. RAM or HDD can be used just as a cache - upload the old textures there to free VRAM for the new ones, then download them back if they're needed (see paragraph #3).
2) SE reads the textures from HDD only for Earth, Mars and other planets of our Solar System. Because they are based on real photo textures. Textures for all other planets are generated procedurally on the GPU, nothing is read from the HDD.
3) SE does not use any sort of cache for planetary textures, nor RAM or HDD, because generation of the textures takes only 1-3 milliseconds, which is VERY, VERY MUCH FASTER, than loading it from a HDD or SSD. Cache in RAM is also not necessary because the driver already has a RAM cache which should work automatically (but it doesn't do it on old ATI and NVidia drivers for some reason - so update your drivers as soon as an update becomes available!).
4) When you start SE, it doesn't load all shaders at the loading phase. Because the number of shaders are over 9000, and their loading time will take for eternity. When, for the first time, you reach a planet with two suns or with a solar eclipse on its surface, SE will load the corresponding shader, and at that moment you may notice a huge lag. This is because OpenGL doesn't give me the binary code of the shader, but only GLSL source code - it loads the source, compiles and links it - it may take almost one second! I dream of getting rid of these ugly lags by changing to a deferred rendering pipeline, where I can render a complex scene in several passes, which will help to avoid using a huge number of complex shaders.
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