Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're talking about game file i/o or input/output as it pertains to your SSD or hard drive or your other storage device so when I say game file i/o what I mean is what type of files in terms of size our games are loading how big those files are how many they're loading and what that means in terms of the performance you should be looking for in your drive or whether that's an SSD or a hard drive and what it means in terms of how optimization is for modern games so just a bit of background I did a full test on this it was mostly an experiment for internal testing so I could build a test methodology for SSDs but I wanted to publish it because I think it's really cool information you can't do necessarily a whole lot with this it's sort of just cool to know but it will inform you how to select the drive in the future so let's let's look at the methodology here I use this program called HD tune Pro and it is currently logging the active file transfer is going on on my system and there are actually a lot of them you can see this is the activity graph here and this is the block size or the actual size of the files being moved around from and to the disk and reads and writes and what it's doing right now is mostly measuring transactions with Windows that's going to be log files caching temporary files because I'm not actually actively doing anything with this computer but it's got browsers open those might be caching things there might be temporary files windows itself creates and stores a log file for error checking and it's got all kinds of event managers so there's constantly data being written to and read from your device and this is important to know because with an SSD you have a life span and yes it is very long in general its measured in program llores cycles or p/e cycles and generally it's something like 3000 for an mlc SSD if you don't know what that means check the links in the description below but over time you're going to be writing a lot of data to it especially if you leave your computer on all the time this probably won't impact the vast majority of you your systems usable life will be depleted long before your drive is depleted so don't panic and start training your system off all the time just for that reason turn it off maybe for other reasons like power consumption but just good stuff to know so constantly Windows is doing things in the background whether or not you want it to which is the nature of Windows is it not I use this tool to measure games so I would launch I launched five games I launched watchdogs titanfall battlefield 4 grid Autosport and Metro last light which is a very popular benchmarking tool for GPUs and other hardware using these games I tested and using HP tune I tested how long they take to launch and what types of files they're loading during launch or rather what size of files not what type but what size files they load during launch and what size files they run read and write during gameplay and we will call reading and writing collectively IO transactions or accessing pretty plainly and looking at all this with the tool running I can see that as an example here just in the background right now we've got a heavy amount of 4k read going on we've got a heavy amount this is less than 64 K the big bar means everything less than 64 K we have very little greater than 64 K and we have a lot in the 8k to 32 K range that's just Windows now looking at a game I actually ran these benchmarks they're pretty extensive and you can see this is the game play when you're actually playing a game reads so every read that your SSD is doing meaning every file for titanfall or whatever it's it's calling for that file programmatically it grabs it it reads it it tells the CPU or the RAM or whatever whatever it wants to know maybe it sends it over to the GPU if it's a texture file and then that's considered a Reed & Reed's are measured generally from 0.5 K or 512 bytes up to 1 K 2 K 4 K that's kilobytes by the way 8 K 16 K 32k 64 and greater than 64 and what I have here is a percentage breakdown because looking at the file by file breakdown it's it's very it's a skewed chart but you can see a very big table of how many files in my full article below so what we see here the big one just to address the one jumping out at everyone that big yellow line is Metro last light so that is Metro and this is specifically the 32k file reads that Metro does Metro actually reads more than ten thousand files for its benchmark test when you run it three times in a row at least so maybe it's more like three thousand per test but that was ten thousand for six minutes of gameplay with Metro and it reads a bit less when you're doing loading when you load the software but it's it's still a lot so 32k is very popular now what I want to address here the reason you care about these numbers is because an SST reviews you will see two things you will see sequential read and write and you will see random read and write random is almost always every name a website it is almost always measured in 4k random and what that means is that it's simulating a real-world environment basically the the tests the reviewers the testers and the SSD companies and heart and hard drive companies back in the old days all got together and sort of independently tested it they said okay it looks like 4k is the most common file size in a Windows or application environment so we will use 4k random for testing drives random is important because that is the type of data it's moving around we don't necessarily know what it wants or when it wants it just at some point Windows or the game will want a 4k file so that is why 4k is always tested in SSD reviews my purpose here was to see is that still true does it matter for you if you're a gamer as you can see 32k is very popular now as is 16k and part of that is the games industry changing part of that is just because games are different and normally lesser optimized on a lot of other software especially windows because if we switch back here to HD tune Pro which is running in Windows you can still see it's almost all 4k it's been running now for eat and a half minutes almost all 4k reads with some rights and a lot of 16k rights so what we learned from this chart is that games like 32k 16k they still like for just not quite as much as you might expect what that means is he shouldn't read too far into the 4k random tests and perhaps look at sites like ours which in the future will be running these more real world gaming synthetic gaming tests where we look at the 32 K and 16 K performance of SSD is not just 4k now scrolling down or on in the video just switching the slide we can see right performance this is a lot different it's a lot more normalized in writes it's still very populated in 4k files part of that is because it's just a very efficient file size from a game developer or application designer perspective you can fit a lot into 4k especially depending on your compression and I it's good for hard drives which is what a lot of stuff was originally built for and still built for just based on a hard drive transaction speeds and allocation size so we have a lot that's still greater than 64 K my guess is that these files are probably your savegame files so what the watchdog's save game file is pretty big and it might also be for other things like log files if they save any kind of recording of the match in the background that's what that would be so generally this is a very unpopular size for reads unless you're playing a movie right it's it seems to be more common in games and perhaps for those reasons I listed so those are the popular sizes there let's look at the actual amount of files we'll skip over to that and you can see all this in my article below now the amount of files for the reads and writes I just talked about in your game meanwhile gaming including your level loads and your cell transitions what we're doing is reading let's see the most we read is Metro last light at ten thousand two hundred and ninety four files that are smaller than 64 K this does not count greater than that size it's writing eleven hundred files that's a lot of files to move around during your gameplay so in Metro last light you're actually much more likely to have a storage bottleneck than in other games for this reason as for whether you'll see that that's tough to say because a lot of those files are gonna be during the level load which I said is included in this so you're calling a lot of those before you actually see it on the screen what that means is that with a solid-state drive and we all know this already it's going to load the level faster because simply you can move like 10 times faster if not more right so it quick that's disclaimer any solid-state drive doesn't matter what it is as long as it's a reasonable solid-state drive and not a hard drive you're almost definitely not gonna notice a speed difference between SSDs if you plug in a 3k HyperX SSD and then you plug in some really high-end Samsung drive like an 840 pro I would put money down that 99% of users will not be able to tell the difference in loading a level in a game they'll be able to tell differences in encryption time and in Adobe premier and code time and things like that gaming not so much so don't take this too crazy right it's just it's really just a cool information thing like I said don't base too many decisions off of it because ultimately you're not gonna be able to see the difference it's useful though for applications if you're using professional stuff looking at other games Metro is an outlier titanfall I found very interesting titanfall only reads 8 files when you're playing the game so it loads it all that's it that's all it wants for one level is 8 files it writes to 352 it's writing almost 300 megabytes and it's reading to 156 kilobytes and those that's a lot of writes so you might be wondering why doesn't my Drive balloon when I'm playing games and that's because these are mostly cache and temporary files so it's dumping it all as soon as it no longer needs the data which may be at the end of the level or it may be at the end of the session if it's some kind of anti cheat thing or logging stuff like that some of it will be permanent like kilobytes on your save file but that's not that's about it watchdogs 725 read 5 5 5 right not too exciting there for the rest of it and then now we can look at the load time or the load file sizes and the distribution there this is the file size and count of files during loading a game so this is different from plain it's the initial startup and that's useful for if you're trying to figure out how long it will take you to load that application or game in this instance 32k is extremely popular in loading and that's probably just a package thing I'm not a game developer right if you're a game developer I would love it if you can email us hit the contact form and and we can talk about how you guys build packages for games for easier distribution and optimization but 32k is very popular here 16k very popular 4k very popular then after that it's eight and everything else so 4k is still a front-runner but you can see 32k is pretty big here and that's probably things like maybe your movies or your promotional videos for Nvidia or Intel or AMD that type of thing at the beginning of it those would be bigger files in terms of the rights 4k is very popular it's actually more than 60% for three out of our five and more than 50% for four out of our five so 4k writes very important for loading a game some reason why that is I would have to guess it's probably log files in case your game crashes astray in loading or it's probably maybe Steam is doing something if it's a steam operated game things like that Windows is probably writing things too because those will be in here as background noise because it's probably logging your events as an happen so 4k is very popular than 16 after that so what do we learn from this data well you the cool stuff in my opinion is just how many files games are loading it is mind-blowing to think that while you're playing Metro it is transacting 11 thousand files reads and writes that is a lot of files that's a lot of textures a lot of objects in the game a lot of models and then of course you've got all your if there's any events it has to grab that event data from the drive so there's a lot of cool stuff going on animations as well rigging and and that's just cool to me it doesn't necessarily make your drive faster to know that but it's cool and that's part of the fun of doing hardware and gaming work and you can't apply this knowledge not necessarily the game is because here's why you're like I said if you buy a $300 SSD versus a 1 dollar SSD it is gonna run cska or watchdogs effectively identically it's gonna be the same loading time it's gonna play just as seamlessly or not seamlessly and those seamlessness actions will be a result of the game's optimization more than your drive on an SSD now in a game like Skyrim you might notice a little stutter if you're playing on a go play Skyrim on a hard drive and especially if you load it with like 4k texture packs and mods if you Zone in Skyrim you zone by cells there's no loading screen except in some areas but work with me here so if you load a new cell you're dumping data for the old one that you're not gonna be in anymore and you're loading fetching data for the new one and this can create a stutter because of your storage bottleneck all pcs are bottlenecks on storage at this point with an SSD that's gonna vanish for the most part and it doesn't matter what SSD you use so this data isn't gonna make your drive faster but when you're selecting the drive what it can do is help you understand from an application level if you're doing things with Photoshop or with premiere or with encryption this is very useful information and you'll see I'm I'm going to benchmark all of those things just like it did games and you'll be able to research your drives and see ok this is gonna be the fastest at encrypting huge amounts of data this is gonna be the fastest at encoding h.264 files from Adobe Premiere and that's and that's important stuff to know this stuff is just cool but there's nothing wrong with that so if you're really curious about how SSDs work please subscribe to the channel check out the links in the description below check out the newest article I just wrote it kind of gets you started on this stuff and as always let me know in the comments if you have a question I will more likely see comments on the website than YouTube these days but do let me know II think if you have questions and I will do my best to get to you so subscribe as always and thanks retiming I will see you all next time peace