Anyone have 1st hand exp with SSD and CiV?

[blasto]

I'm curious if anyone upgraded to an SSD drive after they were already playing CiV and what sort of difference that it made if any to gameplay turn loading and stuff. ?

I'd suspect that all delays are processor driven, but I'm still curious.

 

[FeiLing]

I'd bet the video/game start will be much faster (for me it's about 8 seconds blank/before I can skip the video. Also loading saves/starting a new game will load much faster... but that's not exactly worth it.
The time it takes for a turn will not be influenced. That all depends on solely the CPU and the bad programming. A faster disk will not help there.

 

[blasto]

The time it takes for a turn will not be influenced. That all depends on solely the CPU and the bad programming. A faster disk will not help there.

You don't know that for sure though. There might be a lot of disk swapping going on.

 

[FeiLing]

Surely not, unless you got like no RAM, but that is a different story.

Only thing it does is the autosaves if you set them for e.g. to every turn - I don't notice a difference of turn length though even if it autosaves (on a hdd).

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

the only thing for me and SSDs is that they are cost prohibitive. I do plan on getting one but only a 60g because they are cheaper and i only want it dedicated to the OS.

I have 7200rpm drives but ive never tried a 10k drive either. the 7200 drives are just SO cheap now.

And FeiLing is right about turn times. Even the best rigs have slow turn times in late games turns and it isnt a hard drive issue. I only wish it were that easy to fix.

When I load Civ V for the first time each day I always get the first sentence of dialogue "Welcome, my son ..." before it cuts to the main menu.

 

[steave435]

the only thing for me and SSDs is that they are cost prohibitive. I do plan on getting one but only a 60g because they are cheaper and i only want it dedicated to the OS.

I have 7200rpm drives but ive never tried a 10k drive either. the 7200 drives are just SO cheap now.

And FeiLing is right about turn times. Even the best rigs have slow turn times in late games turns and it isnt a hard drive issue. I only wish it were that easy to fix.

When I load Civ V for the first time each day I always get the first sentence of dialogue "Welcome, my son ..." before it cuts to the main menu.

Uhhm...When did you check prices last?
The flood in Thailand made prices skyrocket a few months ago, and they haven't recovered.

You're probably both right about the performance though, even if they programmed it badly so that it reads a lot from the HDD Vista and later will cache the data in the RAM anyway.

 

[anandus]

I'm curious if anyone upgraded to an SSD drive after they were already playing CiV and what sort of difference that it made if any to gameplay turn loading and stuff. ?

I'd suspect that all delays are processor driven, but I'm still curious.

Your suspicions are correct.
I had Civ 5 on my SSD (had, as it didn't matter much and I needed the space for other games, like Skyrim) and it didn't matter anything, I didn't even notice the booting of the game speeding up, which I had suspected.
And in-game it didn't matter anything at all (but that was to be suspected, no data is pulled from the hard drive then).

Apart from that: An SSD is great and many other games, like Skyrim, and the system as a whole do benefit.
If you were doubting whether or not you should buy one I can wholeheartedly recommend it!

My specs (in case you wanted to know): Intel Q8300 (@3Ghz), nVidia GTX460 1Gb, 8Gb Ram, 64Gb OCZ-VERTEX2 SSD
(The SSD is only 64Gb, so basically I can have Windows on it and a handful of games, most of my games are on a Steam-dedicated drive, a good old 10k raptor).

 

[blasto]

Cool. Thanks for the feed back. Disappointing, but not surprising. I have a nice Raptor that I have been happy with, but also have been eager to try an SSD. Guess I'll hold off until my next 5 year interval PC upgrade...

 

[steave435]

Even with the games on an another disk, the index is on the OS disk though, so they still benefit a bit.
Have anyone tested the effect of overclocking though? I have an i7 2600k, but haven't bothered since none of the threads get even close to 100% according to the G15 display no matter what I'm doing.

 

[blasto]

FYI- I have had good results with turning off page files altogether. THough not necessarily with CiV. If you wonder what good is a page file when newer systems have 4GB+ of RAM, well, not much other than thrashing your HDD real good.

Although occasionally I'll run into a game that requires having one set. The last time I saw that was WoW.

 

[beckner2001]

I just registered to post. I have been having CiV freeze on me. Like others, CiV was the only game to freeze my system. I have an Phenom 4X black edition, 1 tb hard drive, ATI 5750,4 GB RAM, 800W power supply.
I was getting Windows checking my hard drive after restarting from a CiV freeze. It would boot up fine and work perfectly for everything else but CiV.
I decided to get a 64GB PNY SSD to see how good they were.
Windows boot up time before SSD = 1 minute or so.
Windows boot up time after SSD = 30 sec max.
Time from Desktop appearing to Steam login appearing before SSD = 20-30 seconds.
Time from Desktop appearing to Steam login appearing after SSD = 1-3 seconds.
Time from Double clicking CiV shortcut to DX10/DX11 start button appearing before SSD = 3-30 seconds.
Time from Double clicking CiV shortcut to DX10/DX11 start button appearing after SSD = 1-2 seconds.

In game performance was very good. No freezes as of yet, even started a Huge game to check, not that I got very far with it (Huge = boring to me). Every setting on High.

I diabled a few things with noticible speed differences: Disabling "Reward Pop-ups" was by far the most noticible for improving speed. I love playing duel, and turn times are now less than 1 sec. I know duel is faster than standard already, but my turn times in duel were still a several seconds before getting the SSD.

I will check all my settings tonight and post them later. I hope this helps you out.

 

[FeiLing]

Turned page file off immediately too (as I have 8 GB, wouldn't do it with only 4 GB though).
Never had any problems. I know though that Warhammer... Dawn of War... I think II (maybe I as well) requires a page file (omg developers, seriously?). In that case you can create one at minimum size (16 MB) as the game won't use it. Just checks if there is one and won't install/run if there isn't (again O.M.G.).

 

[anandus]

Slightly offtopic, but I wouldn't recommend disabling your pagefile, even with 8Gb. Although I do recommend putting the pagefile on a different disk than your SSD.

 

[blasto]

Thanks for those SSD stats beckner! That's a nice difference. Though as stated before, your late game turn changes will probably still be long. But any time savings is worthy IMO.

Other things I would throw out there..

When I do set a page file, I usually lock it in to minimize HDD fragmentation.. usually to equal my physical memory. 6GB

Regarding freezes, the few times I have ran into this with CiV, its always been because I didn't have the latest driver for something or another. For example, the last time it was an upgraded NVIDIA driver that was a whopping 2 days newer. There is no doubt that CiV is particularly sensitive to out of date drivers.

Before that I had to upgrade my MSI BIOS and before that it was another video driver update, both manifested CiV lock ups.

 

[blasto]

Slightly offtopic, but I wouldn't recommend disabling your pagefile, even with 8Gb. Although I do recommend putting the pagefile on a different disk than your SSD.

Do you have a reason? I haven't had one for years and I run very hardware intensive games with no issues and there is no improvement when its on, but sometime there is when its off.

As far as I can tell, its an old legacy function left over from memory restrictive days and it doesn't seem to help even though base memory still IS restricted. It only makes sense on low mem machines.

And why wouldn't you want it on the SSD? Wouldn't that be the point? Read/write wear in aside, the point of an SSD is speed. Using the SSD for your primary OS drive with the page file makes the most sense.

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

Uhhm...When did you check prices last?
The flood in Thailand made prices skyrocket a few months ago, and they haven't recovered.

You're probably both right about the performance though, even if they programmed it badly so that it reads a lot from the HDD Vista and later will cache the data in the RAM anyway.

yeah, looks like prices jumped some. i can still get a 500gb 7200rpm sata 6.0 (which i use) drive for under $100 where as a 64gb SSD runs the same price. christmas sales were nice but i was already tapped out by the time i saw them. shelves are probably still stocked in warehouses with pre-flood drives.

(i havent pulled the trigger on an SSD because i still dont OC or need to format C: very often. but im still one headache away from really wanting one, haha.)

Spoiler :

i spoilered this in case website name dropping is frowned upon . i use newegg a lot but not exclusively. i dont buy from brick and mortar stores anymore.

 

[steave435]

And why wouldn't you want it on the SSD? Wouldn't that be the point? Read/write wear in aside, the point of an SSD is speed. Using the SSD for your primary OS drive with the page file makes the most sense.

Sure, a swap on a SSD will be faster, but it is very rarely used at all so you'd generally be better of putting the swap somewhere else and using the space saved for storing other data. The swap doesn't have to be on your OS disk.

 

[Helmling]

I'm curious if anyone upgraded to an SSD drive after they were already playing CiV and what sort of difference that it made if any to gameplay turn loading and stuff. ?

I'd suspect that all delays are processor driven, but I'm still curious.

I have SSD.

Civ V is still agonizingly slow in the late game, more so the higher the difficulty.

 

[snoochems]

I have 2 nice SSD in RAID0. Very quick. The opening video lasts about 3 seconds. Loading games seems to be faster, but not significantly as I think it is still pretty CPU bound. Same goes for end turns etc.

 

[ense7en]

Sadly SSDs don't help with Civ next-turn wait times much.

I do love them; they are great for many games, just not Civ...