Within the laptop world, it takes totally different quantities of time to learn information from a selected supply. Sure information sources are a lot quicker to learn than others. Right here is the overall hierarchy for studying occasions:
- Cache hit (1-20 nanoseconds)
- Not cached, learn from reminiscence (15-20 nanoseconds)
- Not in reminiscence, learn from SSD (25-100 microseconds, i.e. 25,000-100,000 nanoseconds)
- Not in reminiscence, learn from laborious drive (5-10 milliseconds, i.e. 5,000,000-10,000,000 nanoseconds)
- Not in reminiscence, learn from Blu-ray disc (greater than 100 milliseconds, i.e. >100,000,000 nanoseconds)
As you’ll be able to see, cache and reminiscence reads are actually quick, however studying from SSD or HDD may be very quick. extraordinarily gradual compared. HDD reads are orders of magnitude slower than SSD reads, that are additionally orders of magnitude slower than reminiscence reads. Studying from bodily media like a Blu-ray disc is even slower than that. This time value happens when the sport must learn information that’s not in reminiscence, for instance when loading a brand new space, new enemy, new character, impact, and so on. from the disk.
One of many methods to optimizing load occasions is to attenuate the quantity of “search time” required by slower units, resembling laborious drives and Blu-ray discs, by having redundant copies of the identical information on the drive. That is like having a number of kitchens arrange across the workplace as a substitute of simply within the kitchen: employees do not should stroll as far to get a snack. It does not matter if the workplace is small, however having a single kitchen when your workplace homes a thousand folks on ten flooring means a fairly large bottleneck at supper time. A number of redundant kitchens will pace issues up as a result of employees solely want to kitchen and can typically desire the closest one obtainable. A number of items of redundant information will pace up search occasions as a result of they’re all the identical and the reader does not should go as far to get what they’re on the lookout for.
Having redundant choices comes at a price of disk area. Having a number of beverage stations or kitchens means the area cannot be used for a lounge, gaming stations, storage, extra places of work, or the rest. Not all video games do that as a result of they do not at all times have that possibility: if the sport options numerous tremendous excessive decision textures and top quality audio, these assets will eat a ton of disk area on their very own, even with out mirroring for entry pace. It is a selection the Helldivers improvement staff made to assist pace up entry time on decrease spec machines. It appears they determined the pace financial savings weren’t well worth the disk area.
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