Trainz 12 on a SSD?

[William0d0]

I just ordered an SSD from Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233191 a 120 Gig Corsair GT SATA III.:udrool:

There was only enough money for 1 upgrade, either the video card or an SSD. Stutter is my biggest problem so an SSD seemed the logical choice.

With next day shipping the total cost was USD $189.02.

Since my 2 WD black caviar drives (raid 0) already give me a great boot time, the SSD will only be used for games and not for the OS.

I can't wait till it comes in.

I plan to post a few FRAPS videos loading and changing views with different routes so you may all judge the difference.

...

Is it here yet, is it here yet?:hehe:

 

[fran1]

William0d0,
I could be wrong (nothing new), but won't the SSD speed up the seek time meaning it'll take less time to find assets. It still has to go through the CPU and GPU before it gets to the screen, so according to that you'll see no improvement. I hope I'm wrong.

 

[William0d0]

William0d0,
I could be wrong (nothing new), but won't the SSD speed up the seek time meaning it'll take less time to find assets. It still has to go through the CPU and GPU before it gets to the screen, so according to that you'll see no improvement. I hope I'm wrong.

The motherboard, cpu and video card can all transfer data much faster then mechanical hard drives. An SSD will (I estimate) bridge that gap.

There will be a full and honest report regarding Trainz performance posted as soon as I get my hands on it.

 

[fran1]

The motherboard, cpu and video card can all transfer data much faster then mechanical hard drives. An SSD will (I estimate) bridge that gap.

There will be a full and honest report regarding Trainz performance posted as soon as I get my hands on it.

I noticed an improvement when I went from 7200 rpm drives to velociraptors@10000rpm.
If you can, do a comparison of average FPS over a 5 mile route sector, I'm thinking about SSD's and will be very interested in the result.

 

[William0d0]

I noticed an improvement when I went from 7200 rpm drives to velociraptors@10000rpm.
If you can, do a comparison of average FPS over a 5 mile route sector, I'm thinking about SSD's and will be very interested in the result.

An SSD will not make the video card render frames any faster (FPS).

The goal is to lessen the stutter you get when you change views and when different scenery assets load. And of course to load routes faster.

Name a built-in route and built-in session and I will include it in my report. I'm not going on any KUID hunt across the globe.

Keep in mind, if you drive strictly "in cab" and don't change views you probably won't see much if any difference in performance.

 

[LouP73]

I'd put my TS12 on my SSD but it has grown too big now

LouP

 

[steamboateng]

If my memory still serves me well, the major advantage of ssd's is a faster write time.
My guru's over at Digital Storm recommend that the OS should be the primary canidate for installation on an ssd.
Graphic intensive apps are next canidate.
I have my Win7-64 bit OS on an 80 Gb ssd.
I installed another 120 Gb ssd several months ago. That has TS12 (only) installed.
I have no issues with TS12 since installation, and am presently building a very large (1800 baseboards) route with it.

 

[JCitron]

I won't get any SSDs anytime soon. I want to see the manufacturers:

1) Increase the capacity to the 2 to 5 TB range
2) Increase the reliability to that of an off-the-shelf hard drive.
3) Improve the consistentcy between manufacturers of SSD devices and controllers.

Right now their capacity is too small. A 250GB device just doesn't cut it for graphics-related applications where there are tons of really huge files. Yes they can be RAID'd, but that would be an additional thing to considering the reliability of the devices still.
As said above a RAID would be too risky right now with these things. These devices still don't have a very long lifespan. They have something like 10,000 writes before they fail. Given the amount of data that Trainz writes to the disks, I can see this as being a big issue, particularly with long time route builders that have been working on a single route for over 4 or longer. Imagine having the device fail on write, or fail completely and all the work is lost. The argument can be stated that this will happen with hard drives too, yes it does but hard drives have a much longer MBTF rating and do last for many years (usually) before the finally die.

And finally the manufacturers need to improve their consistentcy across their different controllers. Intel, Corsair, etc. all use slight variants in the same technology. Right now Intel is one of the best. What happens when some odd manufacturer's components get integrated into a motheboard? A system will work with only specific brands of SSDs, and then eventually those SSDs will no longer be available. I've seen this before with memory D-RAM, flash devices, and other components.

So, I'm waiting this one out for a bit to see what happens.

 

[Mick_Berg]

I won't get any SSDs anytime soon........Right now their capacity is too small. A 250GB device just doesn't cut it for graphics-related applications where there are tons of really huge files. Yes they can be RAID'd, but that would be an additional thing to considering the reliability of the devices still.
.

I have my Trainz on a 60gig SSD ($60) and it works fine. Much faster to load and move about in Surveyor and Driver than it used to be. I also have Blender on the SSD but this is mainly for convenience in content creation. Obviously my OS has had to remain on the HDD. But for $60 the improvement is very much worth while.
Mick Berg.

 

[JCitron]

I have my Trainz on a 60gig SSD ($60) and it works fine. Much faster to load and move about in Surveyor and Driver than it used to be. I also have Blender on the SSD but this is mainly for convenience in content creation. Obviously my OS has had to remain on the HDD. But for $60 the improvement is very much worth while.
Mick Berg.

There's no doubt these things read quickly, which is why they're used in server-class SCSI drives now for caching, but the problem is still their capacity and reliability. I've worked in the computer industry for decades including in operations where I performed daily backups, etc., so data device reliability is a big concern for me.

You must not have a lot of content because I have over 150GB with my Trainz plus content installed. I do have a lot of custom items I have made, but never uploaded, so this must have something to do with it as well as well as multiple installs of Trainz for various reasons. The other thing too is Trainz assets now are getting bigger because of their new design methods with better texturing, lod, etc., and this will add to the space problem as time goes on.

If we could put the assets on a seperate drive and have the program on another, that would make things a lot easier for asset management. I'll stick with tried and true hard drives with large capacities capable of handling my assets and other data for now until their longevity increases as well as their capacity. I've recently looked at multi-seek, 10KRPM SCSI drives for my desktop computer. This would give decent performance for Trainz. At the moment I'm running the program on an Alienware laptop, which has a decent performance given it's a laptop and not a desktop machine.

 

[Mick_Berg]

You must not have a lot of content because I have over 150GB with my Trainz plus content installed. .

I guess I don't, relatively. I think I have about 10gigs. But to me it is a huge amount, and 90 percent of it I never use, and have never even seen! But to be honest, I only ever use one route, that's the ECML, and some tiny little routes of my own. I must admit that I am completely UK-Steam oriented as far as Trainz is concerned..

Mick.

 

[William0d0]

My TS2010 and TS12 are at around 40 gigs each. I was only planning on putting TS12 on it, so plenty of room to spare.

I may put MS FSX on it, but that is only around 14 gigs. So still plenty of room to download many more Trainz assets.

 

[William0d0]

Well, I got the SSD installed and Trainz 12 copied to it.

Played around a little with a few routes.

So far it looks to be a good upgrade.

UMR is really snappy now. Changing views, switching locos and zipping around the route are all much better.

One thing I did notice right away is that the amount of improvement seems to be related to how much a route is stressing the video card.

For instance The Loops by Msgsapper loads faster and runs better but there is still some stutter changing views. I think it's hitting the limits of my video card.

With the new Nvidia 600 series video cards out maybe the GTX570's will drop in price. I really need to upgrade from my GTS450.

 

[fran1]

Well, I got the SSD installed and Trainz 12 copied to it.

Played around a little with a few routes.

So far it looks to be a good upgrade.

UMR is really snappy now. Changing views, switching locos and zipping around the route are all much better.

One thing I did notice right away is that the amount of improvement seems to be related to how much a route is stressing the video card.

For instance The Loops by Msgsapper loads faster and runs better but there is still some stutter changing views. I think it's hitting the limits of my video card.

With the new Nvidia 600 series video cards out maybe the GTX570's will drop in price. I really need to upgrade from my GTS450.

I'm getting convinced, glad it's worked for you. Do they fit in a bay or slot in? Sure I've seen they go in a spare GPU slot.

 

[William0d0]

I'm getting convinced, glad it's worked for you. Do they fit in a bay or slot in? Sure I've seen they go in a spare GPU slot.

It came with an adapter to mount it in a 3.5" drive bay. Plugs into SATA III port.

I seen some SSD's on a PCI card, would not be good for me. Motherboards P67 chipset only allows one PCI slot to run at X16.

 

[fran1]

It came with an adapter to mount it in a 3.5" drive bay. Plugs into SATA III port.

I seen some SSD's on a PCI card, would not be good for me. Motherboards P67 chipset only allows one PCI slot to run at X16.

Thanks for that.

 

[William0d0]

Some early results in:

On the left:

2 WD 1TB Black Caviar 7200 rpm SATA III hard drives.
Intel SATA III ports.
SATA II cables.
RAID(0).

On the right:

1 120gig SATA III Corsair series GT SSD.
Marvell SATA III port.
SATA III cable.

Since I use my computer with Avast and several other items running in the task bar, this test was conducted without closing anything.

See sig for specs.

Will be posting some FRAPS videos shortly.

 

[fran1]

Massive improvements except for the seq write speed which is slower by about 20%, glitch in the system maybe?

 

[William0d0]

Massive improvements except for the seq write speed which is slower by about 20%, glitch in the system maybe?

Could be a glitch. Or maybe something about the seq tests that a RAID(0) can work well in.

 

[William0d0]

Early results revisited

@fran1, I started doing some digging.

First thing I found was I could not run the firmware update software for the drive. It would not see the drive, at all.

Some research later. This drive doesn't like being run on the Marvell SATA controller.

Time for some cable swapping.

I moved the Hard Drive Raid(0) from the Intel SATA III ports to the Intel SATA II ports.
Moved the SSD from the Marvell port to one of the now free Intel SATA III ports.

Rebooted.

RAID still works fine, SSD now shows on the Intel controller. Firmware update software shows the SSD having latest version.

Yippee, moving forward.

Ran the same tests as posted earlier.

I still don't like the seq write speed. I think it may have to do with the motherboard bios settings. There are options for AHCI 'OR' RAID.

Gonna look into it further.