PCLe SSD

[AmericanSteam]

I am seriously thinking of purchasing a 500 GB PCle SSD. I know these run on a faster buss than SATA 3 6Gb/sec. Would there be any noticeable improvement in playing TSWas regards to stuttering and improved fr/s?
This is my current choice: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-960-EVO- ... +mb960+evo Another option: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Single-400 ... 6009678011 My MB can accept either one of these.

[buzz456]

Probably not so you would notice.

[plethaus]

Actually I think an m2 SSD might be fast enough to be noticeable when loading new tiles etc. There are way, WAY faster than a regular SSD. This is just conjecture though, I don't even have the motherboard capable of booting an m2 SSD.

[JerryC]

Try this article. viewtopic.php?f=33&t=17309

[Ericmopar]

Linus Tech Tips and others have be testing out SSD vs PCIESSD and they say to save your money, that the PCIESSD don't help gaming at all.
Actually, they've been saying the same thing about M.2 drives.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

I believe in M2 SSD's. My VR rig has a 1 TB Samsung 961, the OEM version of the 960Pro. It is very fast on loading Windows 10, about 3 seconds. The 960Pro and possibly 960EVO come in 2 TB capacity, expensive, but still a very good bang for your bucks.
Probably the speed is a little overkill for gaming rigs, as these SSD's seem to be designed for server applications, being able to supply those 10 core Intel CPU's.

I did not intend to install TSW on it, since that rig is meant for VR games. But since my desktop gaming rigs with 4 GHz AMD FX series processors and 980Ti graphics cards perform only average in TSW (in my opinion of course) I installed TSW for comparison too.

TSW loads in about 15 seconds, but I still get some stutter and the occasional white flash. Perhaps TSW's world generation still has some bottlenecks or is choking other processes as you move along the tracks and new vista's get loaded?

Any SSD will give you smoother game play in TS17, far less stuttering when crossing tile boundaries. The perceived performance still depends on the other components of your computer: CPU power, memory size and speed, other processes running in the background.

Mainstream SSD's perform at around 550 MB/s on reading, and that read speed is delivered over both SATA and PCIe buses. M2 SSD's are capable of over 3 GB/s on reading.

[buzz456]

I have to say right away that I am obviously a huge fan of Train Simulator used to run Flight Simulator a lot but I am not a gamer. Having said that I refuse to think I need to own the second coming of a Cray computer to enjoy my simulator. Now if you are a extreme gamer or just a hardware aficionado who craves to have the fastest biggest most expensive rig available that's fine but if we want TS in any form to be a commercial success we need to have a sim that will run on a reasonable game machine.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

Exactly!

And the XBox is even lower in specs, so if to successfully conquer that market, optimum performance needs to be delivered on that platform too.

UE4 probably allows for automatic scaling to be coded into the graphics part of games, but the whole train simulation won't be so easy to scale down I think.

As for gaming rigs, there is no such thing as a future proof investment in computers. Only Apple seems to hold a reasonable value over time. Waiting for the next best invention is no good either. You just need to make do with what your budget can buy. I hope mine will last like 10 years, by that time I am hopefully retired.

[peterhayes]

As the majority of stutters in TS2017 are due to "hard page faults" ie where the data is still to be loaded into the cpu/RAM (working set) retrieving (READING) that data from a conventional HDD is up to 200 times slower than retrieving it from a NVMie .m2 SSD. So if the stutter is say 0.1 (1/10th) of a second using a 7200rpm HDD that stutter now becomes 0.0005 second ( a 2,000 of a second)
So yes SSD's will make for smoother running in TS2017 but they won't necessarilly increase frame rates per se when running.

Buzz

I need to own the second coming of a Cray computer to enjoy my simulator

Couldn't happen - a CRAY runs on a totally different platform to your average PC and would be a dog at running TS2017!!
IMO a SSD is not a super computer!!

pH

[buzz456]

If you would read here regularly Peter you would know that I have been running and highly recommending SSD drives for a couple of years now.

[peterhayes]

Buzz
Apologies - I was trying make a point (very badly unfortunately) that you do NOT need a supercomputer to run TSW/TS2017.
Just a balanced one!
Sorry!
pH

[Chacal]

Although the Cray family of supercomputers provided a lot of computing power, it was a bit lacking in the interface department.
To talk to a Cray, you had to connect a mainframe computer (the IBM 370/168 was commonly used) to one of its I/O channels through a channel adapter.
Now the IBM 370 series wasn't known for its human interfaces either, but at least it was possible for compiled Fortran programs to display vector graphics on special screen terminals.
Still, all this makes the Cray a bit awkward for gaming.

[buzz456]

I was just trying to make a point my friend perhaps using a bad example.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

I was just trying to make a point my friend perhaps using a bad example.

Are Cray and other mainframe supercomputers still in use, for those secret military programs like nuclear bomb simulations and such?

Isn't cloud computing using 1000's of PC's more efficient/cheaper?

[peterhayes]

Edwin
Supercomputers are still used - nice article - http://www.cray.com/company/history and http://www.livescience.com/6392-9-super ... uters.html. The Hadron collider in Switzerland would use one!
Yes linking 100's of PC's together does make a powerful beast the SETI experiment was one example. https://www.seti.org/

When I was working for a pharmaceutical company back in the day - they installed a new computer which was housed in a huge air conditioned room, 30 x 20 m, they had to install a separate 11,000 volt cable to run it, it had 64KB of RAM, and was fed with punched cards and tape. My iphone is several hundred times more powerful than that!!

pH