Stuttering gaming on SSD then Ram Drive

[GabrielKnight]

Has anyone else here forgot to use the ram drive software they got with their motherboard? I was playing Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag on a 512 gigabyte SSD and I thought the whole time it was stuttering it was my CPU or GPU even when I toned down the graphics settings, I have to say out loud - DONT FORGET THERE IS A RAM DRIVE OPTION.... using a ram drive fixed my stuttering problem and AC4 is a beautiful game world but im sorry to say AC4 game files are about 26 gigabytes so im lucky to have bought my new pc with the maxed out ram for my motherboard of 64 gigabytes, now why does an SSD have stutter problems I thought they were very good? Or is this true only if you have them in a raid of some sort?

My Rig:

Asus Rampage 4 Black edition motherboard
GTX Titan 6 GB
64 GB Ram 1866
i7 4930K 6 cores 12 threads
Win 7

[Korth]

Not all SSDs are created equal. At the lowest end they're merely comparable to highest-end mechanical HDDs. And hybrid SSHDs have a mix of the best and the worst of both worlds.

RAID striping across multiple drives does dramatically increase performance, it's awesome, but it doesn't magically resolve bandwidth bottlenecks.

26GB is a lot of data. I'm guessing that your game uses a huge number of tiny files, the sort of small (<4K) data transfers which limit performance on even the best SSDs - raw IOPS throughput is never as spectacular as (advertised) Sequential R/W performance. I'm guessing, too, that your particular SSD might be using a SandForce controller, optimized for impressive compressible data throughput but with a tradeoff of weak performance on incompressible data, and this would work poorly if your particular game happens to be designed around incompressible (pre-compressed) data elements.

An SSD upgrade - say two 256GB Samsung 850PRO SSDs in RAID0 - would've likely addressed stuttering for much lower cost than that extra 32GB block of physical RAM. Samsung's RAPID Magician software can also dedicate a (1GB-4GB) chunk of RAM towards SSD pre-cache, providing real performance effectively indistinguishable from a pure RAMDisk solution.

[GabrielKnight]

Thank you Korth for the SSD information, when I bought and researched for my SSD I made sure it didn't have a cache like the Samsung 840 Pro 1TB as I thought it would burn out the drive quicker, I am using a Samsung 840 Evo 500GB is this SSD good or should I buy a better SSD, I will look up the 850 Pro but for now I have spent all I can on my new rig so I will have some time to wait before I get another SSD.

[Korth]

The 840 SSDs were Samsung's best drives last year. Not quite as good as the new 850 SSD models, of course, but also nothing to dismiss - they're still top-tier performers - but being #2 means that the 840 is significantly less expensive, so striping two or more into a performance RAID is more practical.
This page summarizes Samsung SSDs well enough, and (about halfway down) it provides a handy spec chart to compare 840-vs-850 and EVO-vs-PRO combinations.

The Magician software can allocate RAM as a Read and/or Write cache. This basically achieves near-RAMDisk performance on all SSD tasks, although a RAMDisk is still faster for a single game/app - if you have enough RAM. Enabling the Write cache actually extends the longevity of the drive because it needs to commit fewer Writes of large (filled) data blocks instead of more Writes of small (partial) data blocks - the tradeoff is the risk of (unwritten) data loss during sudden power failure/interruption events. And even this risk is minimized when a laptop battery or backup power supply is involved.

Magician does a lot for people with normal RAM capacities installed. It can be combined with RAMDisk, but provides little or no performance gain (they both eat RAM and overlap in how they work), and using both requires large (expensive) RAM capacities. Magician won't be any faster than a 26GB RAMDisk, lol, I'd say there's no real need to upgrade your 840EVO - the SSD hardware is already superior, the software won't do much (if anything) for your game, and you've already invested $$$ in a successful performance solution. I think if you really insist on spending money to upgrade your gaming performance, you'd do a lot better spending it on a second Titan than faster memory/storage access.