SSD & TG3

[ejgodwin]

Has anyone had any experience about whether an SSD drive improves TG3's performance, either with the UI or with rendering? I'm just wondering if I should keep all my Terragen resources on the current SATA drive (installation, heightfields, objects, etc), as SSDs degrade over time the more use they get.

Thanks!

[PabloMack]

I think the way most people use SSDs to speed up execution is to put mostlly read-only files on them such as the executables and their associated data files.  Programs load a lot faster but the SSDs don't get worn out very fast because these files are read-only. But for long renders, animation software only has to load once so this type of drive wouldn't seem to improve performance very much. I would guess that most everything needed for a long render would be held in RAM during the whole process so the only issue would be page faulting. But if you have as much RAM as you are using virtual memory then it wouldn't matter much what your "backing store" was.

I think gamers use SSDs a lot because a lot of geometry and textures have to be frequently loaded as the player's perspective reveals new geography during game play. Pauses during loads for these real-time uses are not considered to be tolerable. I have no idea how much of this type of thing might go on during a render caused by a moving camera during an animation sequence. If you add these pauses up, though, they probably don't account for much during an off-line use such as a long render.

[ejgodwin]

Yes, one of the recommendations of installing an OS on an SSD is to have enough Ram to avoid page faulting, or else move the page file to a secondary drive. I'm not doing animations, so that variable is removed from the equation. Thanks!

[jaf]

Sure an SSD would help fetching the various TG resources and loading the application itself, but as pointed out above, I don't think it would be worth the chance of impacting the life of the SSD.  I put my OS one one for quick booting, but move almost anything I can to a hard drive, including program files, indexing and page files.  I don't believe the actual render times, including preparation of populations would be improved at all, or very, very little.

[Oshyan]

It would not notably improve render times, but would improve scene and general resource load times.

- Oshyan