Has anyone used a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD with WoW?

[WoWAltoholic]

One of the biggest quality of life changes I made when I build a new PC for WoW three years ago was going from a HDD to a SSD. The reduced load times made a world of difference.

We are now seeing NVMe SSDs come to the market with the Intel 750 and now the Samsung 950 Pro. It is technically 4x faster than a SATA SSD, has anyone bought one and used it for WoW?

Reviews say there is little performance benefit from it even with gaming load times: http://techreport.com/review/29221/s...ssd-reviewed/4

But i am wondering if it has any impact on WoW specifically where you get frequent load screens (progression night anyone?)

[DeltrusDisc]

You can never be fully rid of load screens as they come from the servers, too. An SSD is pretty much going to negate any loading your computer has to do to the bare minimum, however you still need to factor in your ISP/internet itself, and Blizzard's servers.

You'd likely see maybe a few seconds shaved off loading time per night of raiding. No, not per loading screen, per night on average, if anything. These things are going beyond useful luxury level for gaming into straight up epeen luxury, and that's coming from Mr. Excess DeltrusDisc. :P

I think in bigger, newer games, they may show a better improvement. Also with file transfers and the like. But with WoW load screens? Don't even think about wasting your money. Just put it towards CPU/GPU upgrades. At least wait for these things to come down in price, if you must have one.

[Rixis]

It's of little use you loading in on good SSD when half your raid team load in on a HDD and you're stood waiting for them anyway.

[DeltrusDisc]

It's of little use you loading in on good SSD when half your raid team load in on a HDD and you're stood waiting for them anyway.

This is a very valid piece I forgot to mention. XD Nice for speeding up single player stuff, but when you're talking about raiding.. yeah... It will be nice not being *that guy* that everyone hates waiting for butttttttttttt...

[WoWAltoholic]

Thanks for the feedback and talking me down

[DeltrusDisc]

Anytime! Thanks for taking the time to post and ask instead of buying and then blowing up here in a fit of regret-induced rage!

[Karon]

Please don't believe what delttusdisc wrote. The loading times have absolutely nothing to do with the server or your Internet connection. The fact that there is little to no network activity during loading screens will prove it if you want to see it for yourself.

[Evildeffy]

Please don't believe what delttusdisc wrote. The loading times have absolutely nothing to do with the server or your Internet connection. The fact that there is little to no network activity during loading screens will prove it if you want to see it for yourself.

In WoW the loading screen deffo has something to do with your internet connection to Blizzard's servers.

Step 01: Retrieve position from server.
Step 02: Render position files.
Step 03: Confirm position from server.
Step 04: Unlock loading screen.

This is why when WoW is lagging to hell (new expansions/raids) the Blue Bar Boss whoops your ass every time.

You think network connectivity requires you to send in Megabits per second for this stuff? No, it's closer to Kilobits per second and probably along the lines of 64 - 128 kbits.

The rest gets loaded after.

When you have 2000 people in 1 spot doe the load of your internet connection rise to maybe half a Megabit.
Netcodes aren't sloppy from companies who take games serious (like Blizzard).

So yes... DeltrusDisc is actually correct.

[Lathais]

Please don't believe what delttusdisc wrote. The loading times have absolutely nothing to do with the server or your Internet connection. The fact that there is little to no network activity during loading screens will prove it if you want to see it for yourself.

Please, do not listen to this guy at all. He is clueless to think that an MMO that needs data from the server before it even knows what to draw has nothing to do with internet connection. It looks like little to no data, because it's a really small amount by today's standards, but the servers can only put out so much data at once. What it is sending to you it is literally sending to millions of others at the same time, so it's a pretty small amount to each of is individually, but you do in fact have to wait for it. Sometimes, you are waiting for the server to process some data before it can send you a small amount as well.

[Karon]

In WoW the loading screen deffo has something to do with your internet connection to Blizzard's servers.

Step 01: Retrieve position from server.
Step 02: Render position files.
Step 03: Confirm position from server.
Step 04: Unlock loading screen.

This is why when WoW is lagging to hell (new expansions/raids) the Blue Bar Boss whoops your ass every time.

You think network connectivity requires you to send in Megabits per second for this stuff? No, it's closer to Kilobits per second and probably along the lines of 64 - 128 kbits.

The rest gets loaded after.

When you have 2000 people in 1 spot doe the load of your internet connection rise to maybe half a Megabit.
Netcodes aren't sloppy from companies who take games serious (like Blizzard).

So yes... DeltrusDisc is actually correct.

What you just showed takes a fraction of a second. So unless your pc can actually load everything in less than .1 second, or the servers are overwhelmed, my statement stays true. The first scenario is unlikely to happen in the next few years and the second scenario happens every two years for a few days if at all. So yeah...

[Evildeffy]

What you just showed takes a fraction of a second. So unless your pc can actually load everything in less than .1 second, or the servers are overwhelmed, my statement stays true. The first scenario is unlikely to happen in the next few years and the second scenario happens every two years for a few days if at all. So yeah...

Except you are considering it like a Single Player game where only 1 player is logged in and ignoring the location and status of every other player and NPC across the server.
Which is also maintained by the very server you are requesting all the data from.

The amount of data itself may be little by today's standards but every object that you can click, see, etc. that is not a part of the environment is processed by a single server per realm, pinged and queried every few seconds to see the status.
Thus your requests are queued and processed in due time when the server has designated an allotment of time for it.
Until it gets to that area you are to wait in the loading screen.

So Deltrus' statement remains correct and yours does not.

WoW is not a single player game, there is an entanglement of local loading and server processing times.
However you should note that Deltrus did not state that the loading was JUST on the server side of things.

He stated it's for both and that an SSD will resolve your local loading times to a minimum, the rest of it is the server's allowance.

You are severely underestimating the load on a server on any realm to think everything is instantly active and going.
If WoW was fully local it would have almost 0 loading screens whatsoever because it doesn't have to connect, compute and verify.

WoW is an MMO where anything and anyone has to be tracked and processed.. this simply means you WILL have to wait at times and loading screen is a part of that.
This is at any given time during the operational time of any server.

Regardless your statement was directly stating that loading screens have nothing to do with communication between client and server.
This is very much a false statement.

I refer to fighting the "Blue Bar Boss" again simply when the servers are having issues, Telia is messing up again, Blizzard being DDoS-ed etc.
If your statement was at any point true this phenomenon would not exist period, the fact it exists negates your statement instantly.

[Wries]

I think I recall.. was it Synthaxx? Who made a test some years ago with lots of raided SSDs and their effect on WoW loading screen times? I think the conclusion was that they did help. But not to that much of a useful degree.

Just try yourself loading up a place in WoW from a completely cold boot of Windows. Then compare that to closing the client, relaunching and loading the same place again. It goes marginally faster because Win 7 and onwards caches what you just did in RAM, so the next time your disk is pretty much out of the equation (provided you have enough RAM for windows to leverage).

So a faster SSD might help your first loading screen into a new place. But "progression night" wouldn't see much benefit because most necessary things should be stored in RAM already. Any extra time should be credited towards your latency and server delay hocus pocus. All in all we're talking abysmal differences anyway.

[Deleted]

meh, running a SAMSUNG MZHPV128HDGM in PCIe mode.
I can honestly say I have noticed no difference over running it off a normal SSD.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I think I recall.. was it Synthaxx? Who made a test some years ago with lots of raided SSDs and their effect on WoW loading screen times? I think the conclusion was that they did help. But not to that much of a useful degree.

Just try yourself loading up a place in WoW from a completely cold boot of Windows. Then compare that to closing the client, relaunching and loading the same place again. It goes marginally faster because Win 7 and onwards caches what you just did in RAM, so the next time your disk is pretty much out of the equation (provided you have enough RAM for windows to leverage).

So a faster SSD might help your first loading screen into a new place. But "progression night" wouldn't see much benefit because most necessary things should be stored in RAM already. Any extra time should be credited towards your latency and server delay hocus pocus. All in all we're talking abysmal differences anyway.

Yeah. Towards the end of the day, I have over 15GB of "standby" data in RAM (currently 4.0GB actually in use). If I open anything I've already opened this session, it is there instantly.