The fastest SSD for gaming, and one big problem..

[Emily Young]

Intel Optane promises theoretical latencies up to 1,000x lower than NAND. Could it possibly live up to such a lofty claim?

 

 

Buy an Optane 900p on Amazon: http://geni.us/ee1y (280GB) http://geni.us/S2Tl (480GB)
Buy an Optane 900p on Newegg: http://geni.us/h16eUSs (280GB) http://geni.us/4hXMAQ3 (480GB)

[Thermosman]

Doesnt really matter when its 3x the price per GB of nvme

[Oshino Shinobu]

The marketing on these SSDs and NVMe SSDs in general is atrocious. They're slapping the "gaming" marketing on them, despite gaming being one of the main areas that it barely makes a difference. 

 

Why can't they just market them for what they are, excellent work/scratch drives, not "gaming" drives.

 

EDIT: It's worse than the normal "gamer" marketing, which is normally just RGB lights and a flashy design, but this is what I'd consider close to false advertising. It's marketed as making a huge difference for gaming, but it barely makes any difference.

 

It basically just preys on your average consumer that doesn't know how data is read and stored or things like random read/write and sequential read/write. 

[awesomescape]

anyone else interested in the key of the star citizen promo? id love to have that

[queuewho]

What is the bandwidth limit of the PCIE slot, and is it close to it?

[BluJay614]

13 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

The marketing on these SSDs and NVMe SSDs in general is atrocious. They're slapping the "gaming" marketing on them, despite gaming being one of the main areas that it barely makes a difference. 

 

Why can't they just market them for what they are, excellent work/scratch drives, not "gaming" drives.

 

EDIT: It's worse than the normal "gamer" marketing, which is normally just RGB lights and a flashy design, but this is what I'd consider close to false advertising. It's marketed as making a huge difference for gaming, but it barely makes any difference.

 

It basically just preys on your average consumer that doesn't know how data is read and stored or things like random read/write and sequential read/write. 

Personally, the main reason I'd use an NVMe SSD is if I'm going to be recording while playing a game, if not live streaming at the same time at a higher resolution. Otherwise..... it's bragging rights along with shits and giggles.

[Oshino Shinobu]

3 minutes ago, queuewho said:

What is the bandwidth limit of the PCIE slot, and is it close to it?

It's PCIe 3.0 x4, so the bandwidth is 4GB/s.

 

The drive maxes out at 2.5GB/s according to the specs, so not really close. 

[Egg-Roll]

Linus is like the Marketing team at Intel team...

"Our Optaine killed it in just under 29 minutes"

*See's chart stating 29:17*

17 seconds might not seem like much, but they only did 8 seconds of footage It can add up fast.

 

How did this get past post? My guess had to of been done either last day of work before christmas or on new years day.

 

 

I'd like to point out Linus can make mistakes but Post should catch them... Esp in performance.

[ProtectOS]

Can you achieve the same performance increase with a "normal" optane drive, if you configure it as an overflow drive for RAM? That might be interesting because price per Gigabyte of a "normal" optane drive is way better than the ppG of RAM.

[unijab]

Looking forward to optane dimms... and the higher capacity SSDs

[Mira Yurizaki]

I think it needs to be drilled into people's heads that application "loading" is not just transferring data from storage to RAM. It's processing the data and initializing the application. Then maybe people start to see why loading times plateau after a certain point.

 

17 minutes ago, BluJay614 said:

Personally, the main reason I'd use an NVMe SSD is if I'm going to be recording while playing a game, if not live streaming at the same time at a higher resolution. Otherwise..... it's bragging rights along with shits and giggles.

Unless your bitrate is at least 4,400 Mbps, NVMe isn't going to make a difference.

[BluJay614]

3 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I think it needs to be drilled into people's heads that application "loading" is not just transferring data from storage to RAM. It's processing the data and initializing the application. Then maybe people start to see why loading times plateau after a certain point.

 

Unless your bitrate is at least 4,400 Mbps, NVMe isn't going to make a difference.

Again, shits and giggles. Either way, it's one of those "nice to have"s, and definitely NOT a "need"

[Bobis32]

one thing i feel they forgot to test was framerate averages as frame drops and studders are often caused by the latency of pulling memory off of you storage disk which would theoretically increase the framerate of the 1% drops

[MichaelRK66]

Hello everyone. I would like to know if anyone can tell me how to get that whirlpool demo. I have Houdini Apprentice and want to experiment with it on my machine.

[Method]

Star citizen on the box and you guys didn't even test star citizen??

 

The game recommends an ssd, thats pretty much the first time a game has ever recommended a certain kind of drive over just storage. I hope at least its an upcoming video or something.

 

I had Star Citizen on my raid0 hard drive array, and FPS was abysmal. probably 5 FPS and extremely stuttery. Put it on my 840 pro ssd raid0 array, thing flys. Id be super curious about a full video about this, but at least a mention or a quick check as part of this video would've made sense, huge oversight.

[Princess Luna]

A PCI-e SSD for gaming is so pointless it isn't even funny.

[System Error Message]

why not a ram disk? Now we can have huge capacities of ram.

[porina]

 

900p 280GB connected to CPU PCIe lanes on my 6700k (stock) system. Just a recent single run, so there will be some variation and I didn't attempt to maximise it. The selling point is not in the sequential speed, as a 960 Pro would beat it. Look at the 4k Q1 results. Nothing flash performs like it, and you'd have to run a ramdisk to get similar.

 

Note I used CPU connected PCIe lanes in an attempt to improve latency compared to using chipset lanes. It is detectable in benchmarks. In earlier testing on another system, I also found overclocking the CPU also impacts the benchmark results, with a nice lift to random speeds by taking a 8350k from stock 4.0 GHz to OC 5.0 GHz. I'm thinking I really need a CPU upgrade to get the most from this.

 

Did it help my game load times? I couldn't feel it compared to the SATA SSD used before. That's not to say it can't be measured, but it isn't something I can feel. This is not the use case it is looking for.

 

2 hours ago, System Error Message said:

why not a ram disk? Now we can have huge capacities of ram.

Ram is even more expensive per capacity.

[AshleyAshes]

I'm probably one of the few people on this forum who have encountered a practical scenario that would benifit from this.  I can't say what movie, but it was a VFX sequence, the script had about 100 read nodes (As in, the script had to read from 100 different image sequences that made up different layers and elements) and some of the read nodes, a single frame in that node would be 150MB.  So to view the bottom of that script, NukeX would have to read different parts of any of 100 different files ranging from 10-150MB each, apply transformations and effects and such.  In total the shot hat about 4TB of assets though, so you'd need a LOT of these drives.

But yeah, even on four 1TB EVO 850's in RAID0 on an enterprise controller, it was brutal.

[System Error Message]

56 minutes ago, porina said:

 

900p 280GB connected to CPU PCIe lanes on my 6700k (stock) system. Just a recent single run, so there will be some variation and I didn't attempt to maximise it. The selling point is not in the sequential speed, as a 960 Pro would beat it. Look at the 4k Q1 results. Nothing flash performs like it, and you'd have to run a ramdisk to get similar.

 

Note I used CPU connected PCIe lanes in an attempt to improve latency compared to using chipset lanes. It is detectable in benchmarks. In earlier testing on another system, I also found overclocking the CPU also impacts the benchmark results, with a nice lift to random speeds by taking a 8350k from stock 4.0 GHz to OC 5.0 GHz. I'm thinking I really need a CPU upgrade to get the most from this.

 

Did it help my game load times? I couldn't feel it compared to the SATA SSD used before. That's not to say it can't be measured, but it isn't something I can feel. This is not the use case it is looking for.

 

Ram is even more expensive per capacity.

true, prices have been through the roof for ram.

[Unhelpful]

1 minute ago, AshleyAshes said:

I can't say what movie

Thor?

[AshleyAshes]

1 hour ago, VegetableStu said:

is it layered like those VFX reels that the studio releases after a while away from movie releases? O_O

First; All VFX is layered.  That's how VFX is done.

But it was something a hell of a lot worse.  Many of the layers were 'Deeps', which is a form of volumetric compositing.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_image_compositing

[GilmourD]

This brings up a good question...

If I'm not editing video and the audio I do edit processes super quick on my current Samsung 950 Evo...

Is there even an advantage for me to upgrade to NVMe? I mean, sure, I like to be cutting edge, but my wallet has been telling me to eff-off lately. LOL

[iskander87]

19 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

First; All VFX is layered.  That's how VFX is done.

But it was something a hell of a lot worse.  Many of the layers were 'Deeps', which is a form of volumetric compositing.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_image_compositing

I had never heard about this before, at least not by this name "deep image compositing" looking at the wiki page... isn't it just compositing with z-deeps maps or am I missing something??

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, iskander87 said:

I had never heard about this before, at least not by this name "deep image compositing" looking at the wiki page... isn't it just compositing with z-deeps maps or am I missing something??

It's more than simply having a DEPTH map.  Each pixel can basically exist in volumetric space.  In contrast, a depth map is a 2D image that is used to derive how far back any pixel in a 2D grid could be.  Deep compositing will allow pixels to be BEHIND other pixels.  This means there's a crazy amount of data.  Some assets were literally like 100-150mb pef FRAME.

 

Here's an example of a deep image converted to a 3D point cloud, showing the kinds of data held within the image: