Vicky 2 on a Solid State Drive

[nocturne927]

I'm about to install an SSD on my system. Has anyone else tried running this or other Pdox games on one of these? Measurable performance impact maybe?

I'm willing to try it out and post some reference stats/benchmarks whenever it gets here, for whoever's interested.



P.S. If this belongs the Tech Support forum, I apologize!

 

[Arathian]

yeah, this is better off in the tech support forum mate.

 

[Syntax Error]

I've only played V2 on an SSD and the save times are the longest pauses in the game for me. AHD seems to have reduced the save time considerably, however, so that makes more frequent save periods feasible. I kind of wish they have a 3 month autosave interval; that's perfect for a wartime situation.

 

[nimrod123]

personally i want a autosave feature more like the debug mode for PoN. that means that the autosaves stack and don't over write

 

[unmerged(24731)]

Any program based on text files is going to be a slow resource hog. That said I would not have these games be done any other way simply because they are almost infinitely customizable. The performance hit is a small price to pay.

 

[s1234567890m]

personally i want a autosave feature more like the debug mode for PoN. that means that the autosaves stack and don't over write

i thought there was an option for this in the settings.txt file

 

[podcat]

SSD drive is amazing for loading up fast.

i thought there was an option for this in the settings.txt file

there is. debug_saves=<month interval>

so debug_saves = 12 saves your game automatically once a year and doesnt delete

 

[unmerged(262687)]

The only thing I'm actually interested in for computer upgrades is an SSD. Keep us posted, and maybe post some benchmarks (time loading V2 from desktop to "new game").

 

[xianglingrui]

ssd is pretty quick. but i don't know how quicker in comparison. I would guess it is at least 10% faster, and the performance won't get hurt when motherboard overheating.

 

[Brownbeard]

I have SSD. I bought it a week before V2 came out.

Use it as boot partition to speed up Windows. I do not see a significant speed boost for V2 when I install or SSD or on regular hard drive. Almost the same.

 

[Jazumir]

Well, yeah Victoria II isnt exactly the kind of game that benefits from using an SSD (as long as you have sufficient RAM). I mean, the whole game-directory is something like 1GByte. A SATAIII-SSD should be able to load that in like 3 seconds (maybe 5, cause there´s a lot of files). Alas, loading is not all that´s done, while ´loading´, as the data must be interpretated, too, and that seems to be a large chunck of Vicky´s loading times (when compared to other, mostly more 3D-graphic focused, games, which profit a lot more from an SSD).

 

[nocturne927]

Well, yeah Victoria II isnt exactly the kind of game that benefits from using an SSD (as long as you have sufficient RAM). I mean, the whole game-directory is something like 1GByte. A SATAIII-SSD should be able to load that in like 3 seconds (maybe 5, cause there´s a lot of files). Alas, loading is not all that´s done, while ´loading´, as the data must be interpretated, too, and that seems to be a large chunck of Vicky´s loading times (when compared to other, mostly more 3D-graphic focused, games, which profit a lot more from an SSD).

There we go, that's what I was curious about. Thank you!

 

[Alex_brunius]

Well, yeah Victoria II isnt exactly the kind of game that benefits from using an SSD (as long as you have sufficient RAM). I mean, the whole game-directory is something like 1GByte. A SATAIII-SSD should be able to load that in like 3 seconds (maybe 5, cause there´s a lot of files). Alas, loading is not all that´s done, while ´loading´, as the data must be interpretated, too, and that seems to be a large chunck of Vicky´s loading times (when compared to other, mostly more 3D-graphic focused, games, which profit a lot more from an SSD).

What you are missing is how many files are in the gamefolders. If it only was copying a single big file with information you would be right, but that isn't whats happening.

If you ever copy a Paradox game folder to say tryout a mod you will notice this, even if your normal harddrive can copy a movie or other large file at a speed of 100-150MB/s the Paradox game folder takes much much longer then those few seconds to copy.

This is because there are access and search times involved for each and every file. Even if these are only around 1/100:th of a second they quickly add upp as there can be tens of thousands of files in the folder.


When it comes to straight performance of copying a single file SSDs are not that much better.
What SSDs are GREAT at is copying or reading a huge amount of small files with access times around 1/10000:th of a second!


This is why even if Paradox games are small their loadtimes benefit greatly from SSDs due to the large amount of files that need to be read.

I would actually say that Vicky's loading times benefit more from an SSD then your average 10GB shooter will.

 

[nocturne927]

What you are missing is how many files are in the gamefolders. If it only was copying a single big file with information you would be right, but that isn't whats happening.

If you ever copy a Paradox game folder to say tryout a mod you will notice this, even if your normal harddrive can copy a movie or other large file at a speed of 100-150MB/s the Paradox game folder takes much much longer then those few seconds to copy.

This is because there are access and search times involved for each and every file. Even if these are only around 1/100:th of a second they quickly add upp as there can be tens of thousands of files in the folder.


When it comes to straight performance of copying a single file SSDs are not that much better.
What SSDs are GREAT at is copying or reading a huge amount of small files with access times around 1/10000:th of a second!


This is why even if Paradox games are small their loadtimes benefit greatly from SSDs due to the large amount of files that need to be read.

I would actually say that Vicky's loading times benefit more from an SSD then your average 10GB shooter will.

Interesting, I anticipated the same thing after exploring the Vicky root folder

SSD users on this thread: Do you guys want to think up some benchmarks and other tests we can run and then post the results in the tech support forum?

My rig has 8gb of RAM, so while I don't experience much, if any slowdown, I'm going to see if there's a measurable impact running off the new drive, especially in the late game stages.

 

[Sentinal 6]

I install all games on a dedicated game SSD. The only PI title that I have played so far on a SSD is Europa Universalis III Chronicles. There have been no issues. I plan on installing VICIIAHD soon.

Have a great day.

 

[kingsword]

SSD wouldn't really benefit for Paradox games since they only load upfront once. It's not like the game constantly load levels, textures or sounds during playtime. I'd rather keep the space for something else.

 

[ThunderHawk3]

I'd just like to pipe in and say that an SSD is invaluable for modding work, when you're opening and closing the game frequently. I have several copies of Vic2 on my SSD.

However, I don't think it makes the game run any faster.

 

[Millipede69]

I'm about to install an SSD on my system. Has anyone else tried running this or other Pdox games on one of these? Measurable performance impact maybe?

I'm willing to try it out and post some reference stats/benchmarks whenever it gets here, for whoever's interested.



P.S. If this belongs the Tech Support forum, I apologize!

There is one drawback to using an SSD for paradox games... If you like mods you dont get to enjoy any interesting loading screens that the mod makers create. :<

 

[heliostellar]

P.S. If this belongs the Tech Support forum, I apologize!

yeah, this is better off in the tech support forum mate.

I disagree... you aren't debugging the game but providing some general feedback about a rather unique experience. I'd love to hear more about this...

 

[unmerged(227184)]

Afaik, Paradox games load up the contents of the files when you start the game and dump it into RAM. That's why you can edit the txts and localizations while the game is running without changing the game until you exit and start again. (You can edit graphics too but need to delete the caches so the game can rebuild them... so I dunno if it's running the caches from disk, or dumping the caches into RAM too.) This is also why some players need to edit their exe's properties to run EU3's MEIOU mod (the so-called "2gb fix"--MEIOU has way more content than vanilla, so those of us on x64 systems need to let EU3 address RAM past 2GB for it to work properly. I mention it b/c EU3 and Vicky2 use the same engine.)

So I'd imagine that loading would be much faster. Saving games might be faster, depending on how much of the time is spent creating the data vs. writing the file to disk. But the game itself would probably run at the same speed, because once everything loads up (again, afaik) all the work is done by the CPU, GPU, and RAM.

SSD is definitely an upgrade though however you look at it. (I'd love to get one myself but the hard limit on rewrites to sectors makes me wary... wouldn't affect 99% of users [limit is like 10k or something] but my drive is so partitioned-up that I worry about my swap or temp space dying. :laugh