SSD drives and SF2 any performance tests?

[Icarus999]

I hear the new Super fast SSD drives are giving huge performance gains with many games. Have any of us third wire flight simmers taken the plunge yet? Care to share your results?

[+ianh755]

My Merged install is 25GB and I've used both a 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD and a standard 7200rpm HDD (to save space on the SSD) and in-game there's no real FPS benefit (although I use a GTX580 so it's not really struggling anyway). However the load times for the initial game bootup and then Flight loadscreen are reduced by about 1/2 to 2/3 on the SSD.

Edited December 2, 2011 by ianh755

[harryleith]

I just built a new system, but couldn't justify the cost of an SSD yet. The Windows Experience Index benchmarks rate everything 7.6 to 7.9, except the drive, which only rates 5.9. Drive speeds are definitely a bottleneck. However, I'm not sure how much real-world impact it will have, with a good chunk of RAM and a decent card being more significant factors. (My new machine has 16Gb and a 560Ti card and plonks along nicley!)

[Panama Red]

SSD's only aid in loading times, not FPS in games.

[Gunrunner]

It only improves load times with SF2, however, on heavily modded, full details games, in addition to enough RAM (both system and GPU), it's a good way to drastically reduce them.

 

A warning though, most SSD's achille's heel is dealing with a large number of very small files, offering good performances at first, then quickly slowing down or even regularly freezing, and guess what... a heavily modded SF2 install consist of thousands of small to very small files, so you have to be careful when chosing your SSD.

[Icarus999]

Cool, thanks for the input.