Guild Wars 2

So I just upgraded my computer from a 7200 HDD to an OCZ Vertex4 SSD. I can’t stand load screens and this was my biggest upgrade for reducing them. On my 7200HD I would get loadtimes between 20-30 seconds normally. And now with the SSD I’m getting loadtimes of, wait for it….20-30 seconds. I have tried multiple areas and back to back jumps.
Steps I did when installing…
Remove old HD
Make sure BIOS was setup for AHCI before installing windows. Made sure hibernate was off
Once windows was installed I pluggedd my old HD in.
Copied GW2 to the new drive as well as updated all motherboard, drivers, windows components (service pack 1, Rapid storage tech, video drivers, etc.)
Setup power settings, preferences, etc.
Updated Vertex to 1.5 Build (was already 1.5 but did a check just in case)

Think everything was done properly and windows is booting up crazy fast compared to the HD. But it just seems GW2 loading times were unaffected. Shoudn’t I see a performance increase? Is GW2 just not optimized for SSD’s yet?

Any help is appreciated.

Specs:
Windows7 Pro 64
P55LE EVGA Motherboard (SATA 3gb I know
i3 2.93 Intel 530
EVGA 560 1.5g
12GB Ram
128 OCZ Vertex4
Seagate 7200 1TB
650 Corsair Performance Power Supply
Running alot of cooling as well. Can show benches if needed, but guarantee I’m in the low range on both GPU/CPU.

Any help is very much appreciated, would really like to get these loading screens down to acceptable levels. If not I need to send this drive back I guess.

Afaik the sata port is really kittening your SSD at best it should be atleast SATA II or SATA 3.

Edit : Oops nvm.

Yeah this is a Sata III drive but the motherboard is Sata II ports (3GB). Backwards compatible

Yeah my bad. You can try running HD test or Crystal Disk test if you’re getting atleast half the speed.

Here’s the Crystal Info:
——————————————————————————————————————
Edit: Performance image
[Imgur](http://i.imgur.com/9tsqP.png)

OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
Date : 2012/09/28 0:06:07

— Controller Map —-———————————————————————————-
+ Intel® 5 Series/3400 Series SATA AHCI Controller [ATA]
– OCZ-VERTEX4
– ST31000528AS
– TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S203N

— Disk List —-——————————————————————————————
(1) OCZ-VERTEX4 : 128.0 GB [0/0/0, pd1] – oz
(2) ST31000528AS : 1000.2 GB [1/0/1, pd1] – st

(1) OCZ-VERTEX4
——————————————————————————————————————
Model : OCZ-VERTEX4
Firmware : 1.5
Serial Number : ********************
Disk Size : 128.0 GB (8.4/128.0/128.0)
Buffer Size : >= 32767 KB
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 250069680
Rotation Rate : —-- (SSD)
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ACS-2
Minor Version : —--
Transfer Mode : SATA/600
Power On Hours : 8 hours
Power On Count : 5 count
Temparature : Unknown
Health Status : Unknown (100 %)
Features : S.M.A.R.T., 48bit LBA, NCQ, TRIM
APM Level : —--
AAM Level : —--

There’s no speed indication. Anyway test with HD Pro (trial) or AS SSD (http://downloads.guru3d.com/AS-SSD-Benchmark-download-2569.html). Loading times should jump tremendously vs normal 7200 rpm drives.

Sojo.1405:

Think everything was done properly and windows is booting up crazy fast compared to the HD. But it just seems GW2 loading times were unaffected. Shoudn’t I see a performance increase? Is GW2 just not optimized for SSD’s yet?

It depends on how much GW2 reads the disk during those loading times. Were you seeing GW2 read the disk a lot (HDD led almost 100% on)? Copy the game back to the HDD and run it from there, is the HDD reading non-stop?

If not, then the storage medium is not your bottleneck, your CPU+RAM is (probably your CPU, since its a dual-core i3 with hyperthreading).

Load times on an SSD (im also doing this with a Vertex 2) are pretty much the same to be honest. Side by side with a mechanical drive, it’s “slightly” quicker, but it only shaves a second or two off.

Your processor is likely a cause of the slower loading times. That being said, running an SSD on a Sata2 port will cap it a little bit too.

SSD vs HDD will only show major improvments on boot up with ‘all’ computers.

Only with higher end computers will you see faster loads times in games, even then it will be a small inprovment in ‘most’ games.

I recently moved my GW2 game over to my SSD and the load times were, well tbh i couldnt see that much of a difference, though there was maybe 1 or 2 seconds difference.
My main improvment was loading times of the main map ..befor, i would get a very slight delay in icons appearing, now its instant.
Same goes for when the game is loading many players and npc textures at once like in lions arch. The SSD removed or reduced the slight stutter that used to occcure from the slower response times of a standard HDD ..even one that was 2×500gb 10k rpm drives in raid 0.

A SSD is one of the last things to replace for a performance increase when dealign with a desktop PC, since although it does improve performance it will only be by a small amount when dealign with games.

in all honesty you current bottleneck is highly likely to be your CPU.

Don’t really agree Nova, there is a massive difference even on low end computers when it comes to booting up, loading applications (not just games) and loading times within applications. Yes, even if the computer is low end.

It really depends on storage media usage. Anything that reads it a lot (like windows loading up) will benefit hugely, while apps that rely more on cpu processing won’t benefit as much.

While using an SSD on a Sata 2 port will reduce its throughput, SSDs are not only about MB/s — most of the latest SSDs have an access time around 0.05ms vs the best 7200rpm HDDs of ~12ms — that’s 240x higher!

It’s probably because of the way GW1 and GW2 store their data. Everything is compiled into one .dat file. Every time a file loads it has to de-compile it out of the .dat to put it in the cache. This puts a lot more strain on the CPU which is probably the bottlenecking factor here.

Sojo.1405:

Running alot of cooling as well. Can show benches if needed, but guarantee I’m in the low range on both GPU/CPU.

You are really only on the low end on the CPU part, you GPU is more than capable for running GW2 at the “Best Appearance” preset, when paired with a good enough CPU:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-6.html

Also make sure you are running firmware 1.5 on the SSD drive. Tom’s hardware has a review of the 128gig Vertex 4 and performance drops way off if you have more than 64 gig on the drive with firmware 1.4

Article here

Indeed SSD’s run faster the more space they have free ..i personaly try keep my ssd below 75% usage. Which means i can usualy only have my OS + 2 mmo’s ..atm thats Tera Online and GW2

the same load times could be caused by the server you are on when playing the game. the SSD may load the local files up fast but it still has to wait for the server to synchronise and give the ok before it removes the loading screen. so it may be the servers speed that is causing the time it takes to load rather than the local files.

or just your internet connection
not saying you got a low one but some connections even tho they are lightspeed fast still gotta go trough a few gates making your load time longer

To help you out (Tech Person for a living, just recently made this switch)…
There are a few things to turn off, and there are a few things to run to improve performance.

Perform it all at your own risk…but this is a standard protocol performed to make the switch.

1) a)Turn off Hibernation
b) Turn off sleep mode, and set HDD power down to off.
2) Turn off paging file (control panel/system/advanced system settings/performance settings/advanced/virtual memory. Click no paging file.

3) Turn off Drive Indexing (my computer/right click drive, settings/uncheck drive indexing. (Hit ‘ignore all’ for the files it doesnt want to touch)
4) Set your pc to Hi Performance.

5) Very important. Turn off Superfetch.
(Google it, I don’t want to lookup the long regedit link, but just search for “Microsoft disable superfetch” and youll find the registry entry to change (make a backup first)

6) Enable a large system cache within registry. (Again, look this one up but if you cna’t find it, i’ll send you the reg entry)

7) Disable the ‘service’ of superfetch and disk defrag. (Control panel/admin tools/services. Double click superfetch, and change startup to disabled. And repeat for Disk Defrag)

8) Run Windows Experience Index (Control Panel/Performance Information and Tools/

The windows experience allows it to detect its an SSD and perform better.

I am now in an instance 15-25 % faster then previous. Hopefully that all helps.

Sorry my work blocks this site so couldn’t respond. But as far as the questions…
I have a 25MBPS pipe with 256 up and a ping of around 73 going to texas servers.
My SSD is under 50%
My firmware is 1.5, updated it even after it came with 1.5
I understand the CPU is my bottleneck, but I can get a 30 ° OC @ 3.1. Yes its not running on 4 cores but to see no difference in load times with my rig, well it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Prophet, great post let me run through this…
Had Hibernation, Disk Defrag, Hi Performance and sleep mode off from the get go
Yeah meant to turn the page file off, doing it as I type this.
Indexing is Off, thx
Never heard of Superfetch, its disabled now
Going to look up the cache file edit: ok registry is updated

And I ran Experience before with a 6.9. will do again and post results after (but its a CPU 6.9 so not going to change prob

Going to also do a crystal speed test. Will post results. But also just like i said above. Everything is loading crazy fast (steam games and windows) it just seems GW2 isnt taking advantage of my SSD…

Also, if you notice, gw2 is in its own directory, but all the DATA is somewhere else…not sure why they did it this way but it seems inefficient. Either way, I would look at both the folder gw2.exe is in, and ensure the folder security settings are mirroring other games. Also theres another folder within program data or program files, and another folder in your users directory (hidden), tied to guild wars that accesses your graphic settings and the like. You might look at all these and ensure they all have the right settings on them.

You might also right click gw2 shortcut, and set it to “run always as administrator” as it might be jumping through hoops to get the best performance…

Also check your performance setting…ensure windows itself is set to “High Performance” for the power side of things.

Here’s the Crystal report after all the changes Prophet. And yeah I already had it as administrator beforehand thx.
[Imgur](http://i.imgur.com/9tsqP.png)

That look about right? About to go compare.

In a test where I ported from Way Points across Lion’s Arch I got the following results:

on 1TB WD 7200RPM Blue: 17.5 Sec Avg. Load Time ( SATA III )
on 60GB OCZ Vertex 3 : 7.0 Sec Avg. Load Time ( SATA III )

My load times are almost exactly the same as Sorcerer of Swords.1483. The SSD drive should be pretty much plug & play. Don’t need to tweak/fix/stuff around with anything.

I average 5-8sec teleporting/loading anything in GW2 on with a 120GB Sandisk SSD running on a Sata2 port. I highly doubt the Sata2 port will be affecting it much.

I know it’s a silly question, I can see you’ve still got your old 1TB mechanical HDD installed. Did this also have Win7 installed? So you’ve got 2 HDD’s installed with Win7 installed on them?

Are you 100% SURE your running the game from the SSD & it’s not still running from the mechanical drive?

Bummer for you. My screen load times have been drastically reduced. Also the minor “hitch” rubberband effect I noticed when my character was moving around the world is gone as well.

20-30secs with your ssd is much slower. I load under 10secs on a Crucial M4 on a Intel Sata3. Due to your Sata2 ports, you gim-ped your SSD read speeds, to a point.

Now you say you have a 25Mbps down and 256Kbps up connection. The up speed is just too slow. 256Kbps is max, but most times you will only see half that.
That will affect on how data you will send back to servers, which shows why you have same load times from the HDD to SSD.

Also I would do a fresh install of GW2, instead of coping over.