Side by Side video of photo scenery texture loading using HDD Vs SSD

[dtmicro 1]

I understand, but I haven't watched your video in several days so was not thinking about how you pieced it together.
 

The simple truth is that the loading of the tile we see is the CPU decompressing it, not the hard drive reading the data which happens in a fragment of the amount of time that it takes for the CPU to decompress it.

 

As the song goes, nothing else matters.

[dtmicro 1]

The issue is you are re-hashing an argument that was settled by numerous tests by FSX developers in 2009-2013 in many threads in many forums. This isn't the first discussion on SSD load times in FSX for photo-real tiles. It was concluded by several seasoned FSX developers that the load times were not improved significantly for PR with SSD for the same very reasons I just posted here. I cannot post the threads here for obvious reasons from them being in other forums, but a little google work and you can see all the tests people already ran.

 

As far as I can recall from logging disk reads last year, FSX reads the first 4k of every active scenery bgl shortly after initial startup or when you load your first flight if you have disablepreload=1 in the cfg. That's why the initial load time takes forever if you have a lot of active scenery and also the reason the SSD is so much faster compared to HDD when it comes to that. SSDs are great at short 'random' reads.

 

It is basically just checking the drive for the existence of the file and comparing it to the index it created. FSX creates an index of all the files that are loaded from the Scenery.CFG file and a temporary scenery cache, you can go look at these and actually see what it is planning to load in the scenery files and temp scenery files.

 

SSD is faster at loading the scenery from the start of the game, yes we can agree on this. SSD is possibly faster when slewing too fast and taxing the indexing too much, maybe, I would have to test, but I have done several tests that have not shown any noticeable improvement. I can agree that when flying high even at a relatively slow speed, an SSD drive does cut off a tiny bit of time (but it's almost unnoticeable and sometimes immeasurable).