On this planet of computer systems, it takes various quantities of time to learn information from a selected supply. Sure information sources are a lot quicker to learn from than others. Right here’s the overall hierarchy for learn instances:
- Cache hit (1-20 nanoseconds)
- Not in cache, 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 onerous disk (5-10 milliseconds, i.e. 5,000,000-10,000,000 nanoseconds)
- Not in reminiscence, learn from blu-ray disc (100+ milliseconds, i.e. >100,000,000 nanoseconds)
As you may see, cache and reminiscence reads are actually quick however studying from both SSD or HDD are extraordinarily gradual as compared. HDD reads are orders of magnitude slower than studying from SSDs, that are additionally orders of magnitude slower than studying from reminiscence. Studying from bodily media like a blu-ray disc is even slower than that. This time price is incurred every time the sport must learn information that isn’t in reminiscence, e.g. when loading a brand new space, a brand new enemy, a brand new character, impact, and so on. from the disk.
One of many methods for optimizing load instances is to reduce the quantity of “search time” it takes for the slower gadgets like HDDs and blu-ray discs by having redundant copies of the identical information on the disk. That is like having a number of kitchens arrange across the workplace as an alternative of simply within the kitchen – staff don’t should stroll as far to get a snack. It isn’t necessary if the workplace is small, however having just one kitchen when your workplace homes a thousand individuals throughout ten flooring means a fairly huge bottleneck at mealtimes. A number of redundant kitchens will velocity issues up as a result of staff simply want a kitchen and they’re going to usually want the closest obtainable one. A number of redundant chunks of knowledge will make search instances quicker as a result of they’re all the identical and the reader doesn’t should go as far to get what it’s in search of.
Having redundant choices comes at the price of disk house. Having a number of drink stations or kitchens signifies that house can’t be used for a lounge or sport stations or storage or extra workplaces or anything. Not each sport does this as a result of they don’t all the time have that choice – if the sport options a whole lot of tremendous excessive res textures and top quality audio, these property will eat up a ton of disk house on their very own even with out duplication for entry velocity. This can be a alternative the Helldivers dev group made to assist velocity up entry time in decrease spec machines. It looks as if they determined that the velocity financial savings wasn’t well worth the disk house tradeoff as an alternative.
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