Real World Tests - Game Level Load Times

We have changed our Game Level Loading Time test to include two of the latest games, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Because of their high resolution textures and the large levels, the loading time for the levels of each game are long enough to help show a difference between each drive.

We have also included an older strategy game Command & Conquer: Generals because of its longer level load times. Though the game is a couple years old it still proves to be a good measure of performance data loading performance.

Though 30.767 seconds may not seem like much of a performance boost from Seagate's Barracudas' ~32sec chart toppers, Western Digital's WD1600JS came in at first which is a huge improvement over its 10,000RPM Raptor cousin. And even with NCQ enabled, the HD160JJ and T7K250 were not able to keep up quite as well with 33-36sec loading times

The Barracudas still hang on to first place spots when loading Half-Life 2's d1_canals_01 map. Our SATA300 drives barely broke the 20sec mark.

Real World Tests - Application Load Times Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004
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  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    And I need to learn to refresh.
  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    ---quote---
    Our first benchmark shows Western Digital's WD1600JS coming in at second best in pure hard disk performance at 719 IO operations per second while the 74GB 15000RPM Raptor still tops the charts.
    ---quote---

    Um... did I miss something? Aren't Raptors 10k in RPMs?
  • mechBgon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Typo on page 3 referring to a 15000rpm Ratpro. They wish :D

    ...errr, 10th post!
  • cryptonomicon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    eh, a few minutes ago, the review showed up but when i clicky, it goes to search review panel.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    No graphs on some pages still.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Haha!
  • PuravSanghani - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    When our publisher is away, with HTML we get to play!

    Sorry about that guys...everything should be good now. Do let us know if you see anything odd though.

    Thanks for stopping by!

    Purav
  • pastorjay - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    If I remember right, Wes said that their HTML coder was gone and they were doing all their own coding.
  • Krk3561 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    graphs wont work for me either
  • ChiefNutz - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Never mind.

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