Is a SSD mandatory?

"

DDusk wrote:

Since the new load times have been introduced I have a terrible time playing for the first 5-8 min of the game. Even died to stuttering.

I got a gtx 980ti with a previous gen i7 and 16gb ram...

What should i do?

It's a QoL that is all so no not mandatory.Having said that lowend SSDs big enough to put POE on are pretty cheap now,cheaper than some games.

"

Perq wrote:

"

Nenjin wrote:

"

Perq wrote:

SSD is mandatory if you want to consider your PC decent. Not only for PoE.

I mean - it is end of 2016 and some people still don't have SSD for games. .-. What is the point of buying i7 and 1080 Titan, if you wait 5 minutes on each loading screen?

HDD is obsolete. Deal with it.

Lol. This guy. If load times are the only thing holding a PC back then it's still doing pretty good. When content streaming is so intense in-game that your PC stutters, then it's time for an HDD.

For me with no SSD, POE just locks up for 30 seconds the first time I start it in a day. A bit longer if it's at peak times. Then from there it's smooth sailing.

Modern games can take up to 40Gb. Loading all of that shit from HDD takes ages. It is all cool that you can get 200 FPS, but what is the point if you have to wait 3 minutes every 30 minutes of gameplay. I'd much rather get ~70 FPS and be able to load stuff instantly.

Lets ignore that everything else is going to run faster. For typical user, there is no point getting HDD instead of SSD. Seriously, Sir This Guy.

It's a good thing there are currently no games that preload 40GB's of data in to RAM! That would be silly considering the majority of computers in the world only have 16GB or less! Also kinda silly to assume a game needs to preload absolutely everything. Starting this year games have been regularly hitting up to around 70GB in size yet still demanding only 6 or 8GB of RAM.

Also, your perception of the impact a HDD has on things might be skewed by playing games that struggle to stream data off of the HDD without stalling gameplay while the data loads (or I guess stutter may occur in some cases instead of stalling). I wouldn't be surprised if the improved DirectX 9 and all new DirectX 11 stuff coming real soon will more or less resolve the stutter issues with the Asynchronous loading scheme GGG implemented a while ago. Presumably they'll gain the ability to store data in a format that is smaller, easier to process and without losing quality in the process.

An example would be something like the upgrade from MPEG2 to .h264 for video files, while there is no performance gain there are file size, HDD throughput and quality improvements from the transition. Since its introduction there is now improved hardware support for the format which completely mitigates the performance impact.

"

DDusk wrote:

Since the new load times have been introduced I have a terrible time playing for the first 5-8 min of the game. Even died to stuttering.

I got a gtx 980ti with a previous gen i7 and 16gb ram...

What should i do?

You know this just dawned on me. You have a $1k video card, a $500 processor but you don't have an SSD? :0 :0 :0

Will. Never. Understand. People.

It's like my uncle. He's a mechanic. He takes 12 hours to take an engine apart ($80/hour), so that/s almost $2k in labour (he's gotta put it back together) and when he suggests to his customers that should replace a seal because it won't last till the next major service (say like a timing belt/water pump), they decline. 6 months later they are back bitching and he's gotta dig that engine apart to replace a $5 seal and give his customer another hefty bill. And I bet the guy is saying "see that's how they screw you, they try to upsell you on seals" lol.

The reason you probably can't run PoE well is because you probably half-assed your PC and have uber components snuggled in tightly with trash. It's like getting a NASA computer and hooking it up to a 56k modem... go go gadget, wait, I had something for this...

"

Nenjin wrote:

Waiting 30 seconds every 30 minutes? How about...waiting 30 seconds once?

Speed is in the eye of the beholder. If you can't stand seconds of boot/loading time, then you can't. Personally, having used computers for 25+ years, I remember 5 minute load times. Now? Waiting 15 seconds for Windows to boot, or a level to load, is trivial considering what it costs to solve the problem.

So Mr. ITS MANDATORY, YOU SCRUB. It's not. Not unless you've put yourself in the place where ANY DELAY AT ALL is unacceptable. This is a reality only for gamers for the most part. The rest of the world still accepts that things take time to happen, whether that's loading windows, opening your harddrive or reading in a document. It's not a matter of whether it takes time, it's how much time.

So it means this should be a standard, because you used computers for 25+ years now. What.
Any professional who needs access to big files FAST will tell you that SSD is mandatory. Nobody has time to wait, especially when it doesn't cost you much more.

But feel free to sit on your slowest possible computer, and keep saying to yourself that it is ok to wait, while I'll enjoy modern technology. :-) I won't try to convince you to anything, anymore, but please try to understand that it isn't 90' anymore.

"

raics wrote:

"

Perq wrote:

But I get what you are trying to say - SSD used to be a novelty, especially when they were VERY expensive for very small storage space. Nowadays, you can get reasonable sized SSD for the price of overly-huge HDD.

Indeed, I was laughing my ass off in the beginning of SSD craze, they were pretty bad compared to current models, reliability was sometimes questionable and you had to pay an arm and a leg for sizes that belong in nineties.

You couldn't really choose between one or the other until recently, you needed HDD for storage space one way or the other. You can get an SSD of reasonable size for a reasonable price now, right, but on the other hand things take up more space too, 40gb game installations, flac music, hd videos, gazillion megapixel pics even on your phone. I'd say HDD or SSD is a dilemma only for notebooks, for your home computer it's still HDD + SSD or just HDD.

If you have good enough computer to play 40gb games (good GPU, CPU, MB etc.), listen to FLAC quality music (good enough speakers/headphones to hear the difference) and take gazillion megapixels pics (good cameras ain't cheap), you probably can afford to have SSD+HDD. :P

As for the HDD+SSD or just HDD, there is a third option - just SSD. That is what I'm using. For storage, I have external HDD jacked to my router, so that all of the music/video goodies can be used by everyone on LAN. Pretty handy. :=)

"

_Tiem wrote:

You know this just dawned on me. You have a $1k video card, a $500 processor but you don't have an SSD? :0 :0 :0

Will. Never. Understand. People.

I second this.

Building/upgrading your computer, is all about eliminating the "bottleneck". HDD's have been the bottlenecks of computers for several years. Why someone would invest a lot of money in GPU's, CPU's and RAM - without touching the HDD, is beyond me.

It's like buying a 60 inch UHD TV to watch your VHS movies on.

"

Kavlor wrote:

"

DDusk wrote:

Since the new load times have been introduced I have a terrible time playing for the first 5-8 min of the game. Even died to stuttering.

I got a gtx 980ti with a previous gen i7 and 16gb ram...

What should i do?

It's a QoL that is all so no not mandatory.Having said that lowend SSDs big enough to put POE on are pretty cheap now,cheaper than some games.

If you count supporterpacks as price of this game, it's definately the most expensive!

Oh and get a M.2 SSD (yep they look like ram sticks) and some asus gamer mainboard!

since i got my new ssd the game runs 100% smoother

everything is just a lot faster and better

I would never go back

"

Perq wrote:

If you have good enough computer to play 40gb games (good GPU, CPU, MB etc.), listen to FLAC quality music (good enough speakers/headphones to hear the difference) and take gazillion megapixels pics (good cameras ain't cheap), you probably can afford to have SSD+HDD. :P

As for the HDD+SSD or just HDD, there is a third option - just SSD. That is what I'm using. For storage, I have external HDD jacked to my router, so that all of the music/video goodies can be used by everyone on LAN. Pretty handy. :=)

Well, if you're a casual you can play well enough even today on a secondhand 50$ card like 6850 and an old i3 processor and Witcher 3 will still take a big chunk off your HDD. As for the audiophile, just try explaining to him he should spend on a computer as much as he does on his doodads, or a photographer, or an avid fisherman. Anyway, stuff piles up fast these days, that's what anyone can tell you and you're confirming yourself, you still got a hard drive hooked in there somewhere even in that 'just SSD' scenario.

Eeenyway, I know it's a bit of an alien concept if you're living a comfortable life in an orderly country, but when people have trouble making ends meet they cut corners, on everything they can. Whatever you get, you get a minimum that can barely do the job and you get nothing you don't really-really need. I've seen that a lot, it's a way of thinking and it gets under your skin so you go by it even if you don't strictly need to. It's different than honest poverty, you hover at the edge of it for decades in constant fear of slipping over, pray that you never get to understand it.

What were we talking about, ah, right, SSD. Get one right now if you can afford it, totally worth the extra price tag but do it without spouting crap like 'lol no SSD in 2016'.

I have had a shit HDD (5400 rpm, lol) all the time and it served me well. Once I upgraded to an SSD however, I can not imagine going back to an HDD. I still have one as my secondary drive but apart from some music titles or older games that don't get any benefits from an SSD, it is nearly empty.

My rig is fairly old though (i5-2500k, R9 270x, p8p67rev3.1) but I can imagine the boost is significant even on newer hardware.

As for the so called discussion; Mandatory? No. Huge quality of life improvement? Yes. If you are at it and blow a fortune on the rest of your hardware, investing another 60 to 100 bucks for an SSD is very worth it.

"

Crimnór wrote:

I have had a shit HDD (5400 rpm, lol) all the time and it served me well. Once I upgraded to an SSD however, I can not imagine going back to an HDD. I still have one as my secondary drive but apart from some music titles or older games that don't get any benefits from an SSD, it is nearly empty.

My rig is fairly old though (i5-2500k, R9 270x, p8p67rev3.1) but I can imagine the boost is significant even on newer hardware.

As for the so called discussion; Mandatory? No. Huge quality of life improvement? Yes. If you are at it and blow a fortune on the rest of your hardware, investing another 60 to 100 bucks for an SSD is very worth it.

I would also say it isn't mandatory. I have installed PoE twice (via Steam, and via the normal Client). The Steamversion is on the SSD (it has to be, because it lacks the tools of the normal client), but sometimes my cousin wants to play in my library so I switch to the client and given I have a fast and small HDD (1TB, 7200rpm) it loads relatively quickly too.

People often forget that HDDs usually get a lot slower the bigger they are. So if you have a 3+TB HDD, exspecially with just 5400rpm... get an SSD.