Benchmark, HDD vs SSD.

[SamSmoot]

Endwalker benchmark.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/bench...n=na_benchmark

I initially ran it from the HDD I downloaded it to. Total load times: 49 seconds. Most of it on one visually complex zone.
Copied it to SSD, ran again, total load times dropped to 16 seconds.

(Overall score with i7-9700k and RTX2070 GPU: 17k unchanged by drive type,)

[White_Wolf_X]

SSD always.

[Darkobra]

Damn. Didn't think an SSD would make such a difference to a game so old.

[DeaconMoore]

Waiting for a spinning disc is slower than waiting for electrons, shocker.

[SamSmoot]

Damn. Didn't think an SSD would make such a difference to a game so old.

Main advantage is with zone transitions. Every time you change zones, it has to load all the contents of that zone into RAM from fisk / SSD.

[TristanX]

Add disk cache to SSD. Using Primocache at 4GB RAM cache. Loads even faster.

FINAL FANTASY XIV: Endwalker Benchmark
Tested on:  7/11/2021 20:40:29
Score: 25055
Average Frame Rate: 172.2879
Minimum Frame Rate: 83
Performance: Extremely High
-Easily capable of running the game on the highest settings.
Loading Times by Scene
  Scene #1	0.93 sec
  Scene #2	1.961 sec
  Scene #3	2.673 sec
  Scene #4	1.221 sec
  Scene #5	0.581 sec
 Total Loading Time	7.366 sec

DAT:s20210711204029.dat

Screen Size: 2560x1440
Screen Mode: Full Screen
DirectX Version: 11
Graphics Presets: Maximum

System
Microsoft Windows 10 Pro (ver.10.0.19043 Build 19043)
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor            
32714.391MB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080(VRAM 10078 MB)

You can find the benchmark log file on the same folder.

I have Windows 11 now. Will do another round.

[Larirawiel]

Damn. Didn't think an SSD would make such a difference to a game so old.

The age of a game does not matter. It is important how much a game has to load and how the files of a game are organized. When the game has a few big files then the advantage which the SSD has over a HDD will not be so big then otherwise. And then there are some other special things, that come to play like that NTFS is not efficient when there are many files in one directory etc.

Cheers

[Sebazy]

It could potentially have a very slight impact in gameplay as well depending on if SE have changed how assets are handled in raids.

Case in point, if you go back to BCOB T5, the PS3 client had a known issue where Twintania's dive-bomb marker wouldn't always load in on time. If I remember correctly, it was later improved but it points towards assets not being entirely cached into memory until they are actually called. SE have shown a trend of trying to keep the various game clients as tightly unified as possible so I would expect that all of the clients would handle this sort of situation in the same way. It was likely just a perfect storm of slow IO and CPU decompression performance that made this situation show up with such severity.

I suspect it might be a difference in MS if there is one at all. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's there, particularly if you're loading off a slower drive.

[_Pigzig]

youre not supposed to use an hdd as main disk grandpa
go have some prune juice and let me install the ssd

[Sotaris]

Damn. Didn't think an SSD would make such a difference to a game so old.

Can't tell if you serious or just trolling.