Guild Wars 2

What I mean is , when I cross a zone border and get the loading screen , how much of that is actually data loading from my hard drive , vs. me getting switched to another server within the server farm ?
I ask because I am about to replace a failing motherboard and 3 drives. I can use SSD’s to cache the drives in my setup , but if it won’t help load times in game , then it would really be a waste , I could use that money for a better motherboard/cpu/ram.

I see a lot of drive activity on Process Explorer when monitoring the game when I zone. I’m talking 20-40MB/s for 15-20 seconds at least. If you are zoning into somewhere crowded, a fair chunk I imagine is assembling the character models and textures of the players near you. And after that it’s not necessarily syncing with the server being the next most time consuming activity, a considerable amount will still be your CPU processing all that data being read from the drive.

I’m sure someone with the game on SSD will chime in to tell you that’s it really is noticeably faster.

Isoz.7210:

vs. me getting switched to another server within the server farm ?

Do you mean the time it actually takes for the server to let you enter a new map? If so, that’s instant. Or did you mean, when swapping instances of the same map, how much is loaded vs how much is already cached in memory? It looks like most data is loaded again, but I’d have to reboot to actually test that.

With an SSD, I can load into LA at the mystic forge in 9s. Of course, that’s not an accurate measurement because it all depends on how many people are there. Selecting Farshore Waypoint as a test, I can load in 4s. Waypointing back to the mystic forge costs a 2s loading screen.

If you use the command line option -maploadinfo, you can see additional details, like the time, number of models being loaded, server IP, progress and the streaming download.

Depends on your HDD. I had a 10.000 RPM WD before and already good loading times
and the SSD wasn’t really that much faster. At least no compare to how much faster
Windows Updates are with the SSD.

@OP I moved from a crappy hhd to an 512gb ssd and the charging map times were reduced by quite a lot.

Now I find spending money in kitten is never a waste of money. The whole experience with the pc is incredibly much faster. Cutting money on the storage and having to wait for things to open (SO, browser, game, programs…) seems even a bigger waste now. Time cannot be bought.

Beldin.5498:

Depends on your HDD. I had a 10.000 RPM WD before and already good loading times
and the SSD wasn’t really that much faster. At least no compare to how much faster
Windows Updates are with the SSD.

And it depends even more on the ssd. If you’re comparing it to a very old ssd, yes, the 10.000rpm hdd still has a chance. But newest ssd have twice the speed in read and write than 10000rpm hdd/s.

Also, finding one is hard and they are tremendously expensive.