# Games | SSD or HDD



## Tibor Hazafi (May 29, 2015)

Hi all,
If I have microlags in some games, is there any chance to smooth the gameplay if I install them on SSD instead of HDD. Or does it only effect on loading time?
Thanks,
hazazs


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## rtwjunkie (May 29, 2015)

What games?  Your tiny lags are probably due to Windows hitting the pagefile so that it can load up new game files into RAM.  SSD is really only good for loading times to get the game into RAM.  Really, I don't bother.  I just have dedicated game HDD's, so nothing is interfering with mt game access on those drives.


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 29, 2015)

rtwjunkie said:


> What games?  Your tiny lags are probably due to Windows hitting the pagefile so that it can load up new game files into RAM.  SSD is really only good for loading times to get the game into RAM.  Really, I don't bother.  I just have dedicated game HDD's, so nothing is interfering with mt game access on those drives.



For example Battlefield 4 or CoD - Ghosts cutscenes. But the game runs with fix 60fps without problem. So it is interesting.
I have 8GB RAM so I hope the problem isn't the pagefile. Anyway I set it fix 2GB, is it OK?


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## AsRock (May 29, 2015)

Faster loading and gameplay how ever the later is rare in most cases and when loading while playing happens, The loading can be annoying at time's like with Skyrim were it pops up a hint and gone soon after lol.

But SSD for gaming faster loading is more of a benefit and open type game's there is much less chance off on game loading.

Check your ram usage while playing, i will not build a good gaming rig with only 8GB it's minimum these days.


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## Batou1986 (May 29, 2015)

In my experience games that use texture streaming (GTAV UE3/4) do run smoother from an SSD


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## rtwjunkie (May 29, 2015)

Batou1986 said:


> In my experience games that use texture streaming (GTAV UE3/4) do run smoother from an SSD


 
Which, if he had more tha 8GB of RAM it wouln't matter.  My money is on his system dumping stuff from RAM in order to accomadate the streaming for the cutscenes, because it passes through RAM first.  Ghosts uses alot of RAM already from what I understand.   

I've been saying for awhile now, we are at the end of the "8GB is perfectly fine for gaming" Era.


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## R-T-B (May 29, 2015)

> I've been saying for awhile now, we are at the end of the "8GB is perfectly fine for gaming" Era.



Indeed.  With 64-bit finally getting used in many games, 8GB is looking quite smallish.  Heck, it might not be long until my 24GBs in my rig feels tight...


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 29, 2015)

Thanks for the answers, I will monitor my RAM usage. By the way I thought that the HDD is the source of the problem, because at two larger microlags the HDD LED flashed brighter and longer, and maybe there is a connection. Maybe the microlags come from slow or bad HDD read, I don't know. HDD Sentinel says my HDD's condition is 100%, but maybe it needs a longer stress test for proper condition status.


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## Batou1986 (May 29, 2015)

rtwjunkie said:


> Which, if he had more tha 8GB of RAM it wouln't matter.  My money is on his system dumping stuff from RAM in order to accomadate the streaming for the cutscenes, because it passes through RAM first.  Ghosts uses alot of RAM already from what I understand.
> 
> I've been saying for awhile now, we are at the end of the "8GB is perfectly fine for gaming" Era.



1 problem with that
my ram usage is no where near 8gb usually around 5300Mb total system usage while playing GTA V
my money is on not all games simply load all assets into all available ram, such as GTAV and UE4 even if you had 36 GB of ram GTAV would not load completely into ram and you will still be waiting on data from a drive.
I dont know the reasoning behind this but that's how it works, disabling the windows page file simply means you skip the "page" part of data moving from storage to page to ram or vram.

I dont disagree that 8gb is minimum for a modern gaming setup just saying 16gb + isn't magic bullet.


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## rtwjunkie (May 29, 2015)

Tibor Hazafi said:


> Thanks for the answers, I will monitor my RAM usage. By the way I thought that the HDD is the source of the problem, because at two larger microlags the HDD LED flashed brighter and longer, and maybe there is a connection. Maybe the microlags come from slow or bad HDD read, I don't know. HDD Sentinel says my HDD's condition is 100%, but maybe it needs a longer stress test for proper condition status.


Is the HDD you're using only for games, or are there other things on there the system would use, such as paging file or windows?


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## newtekie1 (May 29, 2015)

rtwjunkie said:


> Is the HDD you're using only for games, or are there other things on there the system would use, such as paging file or windows?



I was going to go there too.  I run almost all my games off my HDD and don't really get lag, but the HDD is dedicated to running games and data storage.  So when I'm playing games, only the game is accessing the HDD.  However, when a backup or my AV runs and start accessing the HDD, GTA:V start to lag like crazy...


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## qubit (May 30, 2015)

Frame rate and hitching are different things. You have mixed them up in this poll.


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 30, 2015)

rtwjunkie said:


> Is the HDD you're using only for games, or are there other things on there the system would use, such as paging file or windows?



I have an SSD for Windows (including pagefile), and everything else is on the HDD (games, movies, music and other data). The SSD is only 120GB, so it is not able to install 3-4 20GB+ games on it.
Should I turn off the pagefile instead of setting it 2GB?


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## Jetster (May 30, 2015)

Load times and map changes will load faster from an SSD. Other than that no difference.


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## P4-630 (May 30, 2015)

Tibor Hazafi said:


> I have an SSD for Windows (including pagefile), and everything else is on the HDD (games, movies, music and other data). The SSD is only 120GB, so it is not able to install 3-4 20GB+ games on it.
> Should I turn off the pagefile instead of setting it 2GB?



A pagefile on SSD should not be a problem, I never turn the pagefile off, I have been reading about it on the internet that it's best to have a pagefile.


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 30, 2015)

qubit said:


> Frame rate and hitching are different things. You have mixed them up in this poll.



Then what could be the reason of hitching/microstuttering?


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## P4-630 (May 30, 2015)

Tibor Hazafi said:


> Then what could be the reason of hitching/microstuttering?



Maybe it depends on the version of display driver version you are using.


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 30, 2015)

P4-630 said:


> Maybe it depends on the version of display driver version you are using.



There is a chance, AMD hasn't updated its WHQL driver since december 2014...


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## newtekie1 (May 30, 2015)

Tibor Hazafi said:


> Should I turn off the pagefile instead of setting it 2GB?



If anything you should make the page file bigger.  My general rule is 8GB of RAM = 8GB Page File, >16GB RAM = 4GB.


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## P4-630 (May 30, 2015)

newtekie1 said:


> If anything you should make the page file bigger.  My general rule is 8GB of RAM = 8GB Page File, >16GB RAM = 4GB.



I always let windows manage my pagefile, I have 16GB ram and have a 2.4GB pagefile


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 30, 2015)

newtekie1 said:


> If anything you should make the page file bigger.  My general rule is 8GB of RAM = 8GB Page File, >16GB RAM = 4GB.



Do you think games use more than 10GB of RAM (8+2)? Because if the answer is no, then I don't see the point in setting it 8GB. If you say YES, then I will give a try.


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## AsRock (May 30, 2015)

I still today keep mine off, with no issue's with any games at all, and yeah i know windows will make one of sorts still but it's not effected any of my games having it turned off.

How ever a few years ago having 8GB and pagefile turned off would course the Win7 OS to pop up memory low message. But with 16GB i have only come across 1 game that had a issue with it which was Titan Quest.


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## newtekie1 (May 30, 2015)

Tibor Hazafi said:


> Do you think games use more than 10GB of RAM (8+2)? Because if the answer is no, then I don't see the point in setting it 8GB. If you say YES, then I will give a try.



Check out GTA:V's page file use...

http://tpuminecraft.servebeer.com/pictures/GTA5Page.jpg

I have 24GB and I still have the page file set at 16GB.  There is no reason not to have a decent sized page file.


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## qubit (May 30, 2015)

Tibor Hazafi said:


> Then what could be the reason of hitching/microstuttering?


Microstutters are to do with things like the performance of the graphics card (especially dual/multi GPU setups) game engine issues, driver issues and maybe one or two other things.

Hitching can be due to things like loading graphics data from storage on the fly, this will _always_ hitch, no matter how fast your SSD and is worse when using high res modes and high res textures where more data needs to be pulled in. It can also be due to driver issues, or other running programs on the PC suddenly taking up resources which interrupts the smooth processing of the game. Hitching can either be very intermittent or almost continues depending on the exact details of the problem.

For example, I ran Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare when it first came out and it played well enough (I had only one 780 Ti back then) in 1080p, with only slight hitching sometimes. Bump the resolution up to 4K DSR however and it hitched unplayably, although the card wasn't overloaded. One of the updates I saw for that game was to improve hitching issues, in fact. Also, there's a setting in the game which allows more data to be preloaded at the expense of longer level loading times. It made no difference when I tried 4K at the time though. I haven't played the game for ages now, so I couldn't tell you what 4K DSR hitching performance is like now.

DSR = Dynamic Super Resolution, an NVIDIA feature. I think AMD has something similar under a different name.


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 30, 2015)

newtekie1 said:


> Check out GTA:V's page file use...
> 
> http://tpuminecraft.servebeer.com/pictures/GTA5Page.jpg
> 
> I have 24GB and I still have the page file set at 16GB.  There is no reason not to have a decent sized page file.



I see the point in GTA5 now, but today I have monitored the RAM usage during Mortal Kombat X and the stutter happened while the RAM usage was under 3GB, so something else could be the problem. Maybe one thing qubit mentioned.


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 30, 2015)

qubit said:


> Microstutters are to do with things like the performance of the graphics card (especially dual/multi GPU setups) game engine issues, driver issues and maybe one or two other things.
> 
> Hitching can be due to things like loading graphics data from storage on the fly, this will _always_ hitch, no matter how fast your SSD and is worse when using high res modes and high res textures where more data needs to be pulled in. It can also be due to driver issues, or other running programs on the PC suddenly taking up resources which interrupts the smooth processing of the game. Hitching can either be very intermittent or almost continues depending on the exact details of the problem.
> 
> ...



I have a VGA with one GPU (R9 280X) with Omega driver. Nothing special runs in the backround, just (maybe one of these is the source of the problem):
-ESET smart security (Game mode enabled, so during games it doesn't work)
-D3DOverrider (to force VSYNC and Triple buffering)
-Fraps (to monitor FPS)
Should I lower the resolution even if the game runs with 60fps fix? Except those microstutters of course (1-2 per hour). Or as you said is it "normal"?


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## P4-630 (May 30, 2015)

Tibor Hazafi said:


> I have a VGA with one GPU (R9 280X) with Omega driver. Nothing special runs in the backround, just (maybe one of these is the source of the problem):
> -ESET smart security (Game mode enabled, so during games it doesn't work)
> -D3DOverrider (to force VSYNC and Triple buffering)
> -Fraps (to monitor FPS)
> Should I lower the resolution even if the game runs with 60fps fix? Except those microstutters of course (1-2 per hour). Or as you said is it "normal"?



Hmmm, I had frame drops using fraps in GTA V, using Steam fps counter now when I need it, no more frame drops.
D3Doverrider, don't you have these settings in AMD control panel?


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## Tibor Hazafi (May 30, 2015)

P4-630 said:


> Hmmm, I had frame drops using fraps in GTA V, using Steam fps counter now when I need it, no more frame drops.
> D3Doverrider, don't you have these settings in AMD control panel?



Interesting, then I will try games without Fraps. No, sadly AMD control panel doesn't have the proper settings. It has VSYNC, but Triple buffering is only for OpelGL like Nvidia.


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