PC games run much better and faster on an SSD,we all know that.. but i was thinking on buying an SSD strictly for gaming. Do games for dolphin run better running from an SSD? Also, woul olphin run better from being read from an SSD? please leave comments and thanks for reading.
A hard drive is already much faster than an optical drive like a console would use, so in most situations, a SSD for disk images won't help Dolphin. It'll load a little faster if Dolphin itself is on an SSD, though, and you'll get less shader cache stuttering if your documents folder is on a SSD with fast write speeds.
As AON3 said, a SSD would help with Shader Cache stuttering but that's all. Current development builds have disc accurate read speeds, so, independently of how fast your medium (e.g. SSD) is, Dolphin would still trottle the read speeds to something closer to a real GC/Wii drive...
Shader cache stuttering improvements from an SSD are only marginal though... The stuttering happens because of the time it takes to compute the shaders when they are first accessed. Having an SSD kind of greases the wheels and gets rid of any secondary delays, such as accessing the ISO and/or saving the shader to the cache, but nothing can be done about the computation time.
So nothing would happen to performance?
Well an SSD certainly wouldn't hurt! And it does improve things, just not as much as you probably want...
The internal game performance would be pretty much the same. though, an SSD certainly has it's benefits.
Hi,
Sorry for digging up this corpse of a thread, but I didn't see the point of creating a new one to add this:
SSD does help. Previously I was having constant ~100-200 ms audio/video pauses in almost every game when it was loading something (e.g. a sound effect for the first time, new camera angles or opening doors in RE1, etc.). At first I thought it was the same stutter as with shader cache, because it didn't do this on subsequent loads of the same asset, but when I tried the Ishiiruka build and enabled async shader compilation - the stutter remained as it were before. So, even though my HDD has a 150 MB/s+ reading speed, it really doesn't matter because of its access times, which are apparently slower than the real console. Moving the games to a SSD finally fixed these issues, and for the first time I'm having a constantly smooth Dolphin experience.
Moving the games or dolphin to the SSD?
aidenn Wrote:it really doesn't matter because of its access times, which are apparently slower than the real console.
That's wrong. Access times for a typical HDD are still much better than the GC/Wii optical disk drive.
Yeah, I'd think so, but then what causes the hiccups if not access time? Speed of my HDDs is way above what should be necessary, so that's the only thing that comes to mind. Especially when the issue goes away after copying the ISO to a SSD.
And there's also the issue of spin-up/down when the game does not stream data continuously. Consoles typically spin the optical media all the time, even if it's not accessed, and PC HDs OTOH tend to spin down between reads.