Games that 'hitch' the most based on your experience

[lyndonguitar]

I just ordered two Samsung SSDs online to arrive by tuesday, one for my desktop and one for my laptop. I've been using a small one for my OS for years and it's really awesome. however I haven't used it that much in games outside my most played games which is CSGO, Dota 2, and PUBG. anyway I got curious as I wanted to install more of my games into the new SSDs and take advantage of it so I googled some stuff.

I've read that aside from reducing loading times, SSDs can in fact improve the overall performance in many games(especially open-world games). particularly helping reduce or eliminate 'hitching' where the game will stutter due to the HDD unable to load the needed files by the game on time. therefore reducing the sudden slowdowns, and resulting to a better average FPS. based on your experience, what games did you guys find that hitch the most on normal HDDs?? mine being Arma 3 and The Sims 3.

 

[EntropyZ]

ArmA III and most definitely modded Elder Scrolls and Fallout games with extended landscape, object and character view distances with high-resolution textures. Wolfenstein: New Order might have issues with high-resolution texture streaming at times I think. These are at the top of my head right now.

I got a 1TB Seagate Barracuda which does tremendously well for a HDD, it's good for most other games. I haven't really looked into what heavily fragmented HDD does for when the game engine requests larger chunks of data while in-game.

 

[Solaris17]

modded Elder Scrolls and Fallout games

Pretty much if you want to saturate I/O just tell an elder scrolls game to load more cells.

 

[EntropyZ]

Pretty much if you want to saturate I/O just tell an elder scrolls game to load more cells.

While that is true, it also brings instability, that's why mods exist. BGS didn't bother scaling cells properly, it breaks certain triggers and quests. A testament how good it is for having lots of small data constantly changing, but the engine is just crapping out, anytime it's forced to run out of it's boundaries. Those boundaries can be pushed but only so much.

SSD's are really a godsend, most people I think take them for granted nowadays. But hard drives over the past 5 years have gotten pretty decent too, especially Seagates. In the old days I never met a person who would recommend anything else than a WD drive.

 

[Solaris17]

While that is true, it also brings instability, that's why mods exist. BGS didn't bother scaling cells properly, it breaks certain triggers and quests. A testament how good it is for having lots of small data constantly changing, but the engine is just crapping out, anytime it's forced to run out of it's boundaries. Those boundaries can be pushed but only so much.

SSD's are really a godsend, most people I think take them for granted nowadays. But hard drives over the past 5 years have gotten pretty decent too, especially Seagates. In the old days I never met a person who would recommend anything else than a WD drive.

That wasnt contested, was just trying to agree. Just trying to stick to the thread topic. The stability of said games or engines doesnt concern me.

 

[silentbogo]

One of the worst ones was Batman: Arkham Knight (last year, at least).
Even TES IV can't compete with that lag and distorted textures when playing off HDD.

 

[DRDNA]

While that is true, it also brings instability, that's why mods exist. BGS didn't bother scaling cells properly, it breaks certain triggers and quests. A testament how good it is for having lots of small data constantly changing, but the engine is just crapping out, anytime it's forced to run out of it's boundaries. Those boundaries can be pushed but only so much.

SSD's are really a godsend, most people I think take them for granted nowadays. But hard drives over the past 5 years have gotten pretty decent too, especially Seagates. In the old days I never met a person who would recommend anything else than a WD drive.

I still have me a mini pile of raptor drives....things were the shit in the day.

 

[Nuckles56]

The worst one I found was Subnautica, every time you enter a new biome you will have a 2-3 second frame drop on a HDD and 1 second or so on a SSD

 

[phanbuey]

ive found that most of the games that hitch are really badly optimized, and that the hitching is much more obvious on higher end systems...

 

[therealmeep]

Try either a heavy modded minecraft, Rust, or BeamNG, all of them hitch pretty bad on my machine even on my 960 Evo..

 

[phanbuey]

witcher 3 does it if you have bad background process configuration, but i have not found that 960 evo stops hitching...

 

[jboydgolfer]

i have a VERY large amount of play time in Arma 2 , which if your unfamiliar has a TON of HDD calling during gameplay (& one of ... if not THE worst optimized game engines to Ever grace a game) and i used to run 30+ mods at any given time (so much so that i NEEDED to use a game launcher i.e PW6 since it was just too much start-up parameter BS otherwise) and for about 1000 hours i played on a HDD PC,which as you can imagine was glitchy and awkward. a couple years ago i moved to SSD (good ones too , & for the Entire PC, aka, not a single platter in this machine) and i have noticed huge decreases in load times, but as far as stuttering, or whatever you want to call it, the difference is minimal, if existent at all. There are some changes, but I think that would only be where the game would actually Stop in a freeze for a split second when loading a texture etc from the Mod files, or game files on the HDD. all in all id say from my experience , the changes were great , but certainly not what i would call "night and day", more like terrible to Awful. a lot of that experience is not the SSD's though, and to be blamed on the game as i mentioned earlier. since no matter how fancy the bag you put $hit in, its still a bag of $hit

 

[Sempron Guy]

Far Cry 3

 

[phanbuey]

Far Cry 3

get process lasso, set it to real time priority, 4 threads on the first ccx only and it will run like a dream... just super poorly optimized.

Far Cry 4 is the same way... but if you do that you will add 10 FPS to your mins easily.

 

[Sempron Guy]

how do you get it to run with 4 threads on first ccx? disable it manually? Even if my card is just fairly decent I never had any problem with low minimums. I've been getting around 60-70fps average with minimums never going below my monitors freesync range which is 45 but the stutter is just unbearable it takes out the experience.

 

[phanbuey]

how do you get it to run with 4 threads on first ccx? disable it manually? Even if my card is just fairly decent I never had any problem with low minimums. I've been getting around 60-70fps average with minimums never going below my monitors freesync range which is 45 but the stutter is just unbearable it takes out the experience.

https://bitsum.com/

you can try it free see if it does the trick... you can set default priority and then affinity. I only really use it for older games. Basically you can turn the ryzen into a 2600/2500k by tweaking affinities for those programs which is plenty for the older set of games to run smooth.

It's also not shareware - it's the full version nagware.

 

[RenatoJBail]

Its Late 2018 and I am FINALLY getting an SSD. couldt take playing on my 1tb Toshiba anymore, it sucks. Fortnite for example requires a lot of your HDD, which just couldnt to the job. Hitches and delays are very commom. Cant wait to get rid of it as a main storage device

 

[StrayKAT]

ArmA III and most definitely modded Elder Scrolls and Fallout games with extended landscape, object and character view distances with high-resolution textures. Wolfenstein: New Order might have issues with high-resolution texture streaming at times I think. These are at the top of my head right now.

I got a 1TB Seagate Barracuda which does tremendously well for a HDD, it's good for most other games. I haven't really looked into what heavily fragmented HDD does for when the game engine requests larger chunks of data while in-game.

I'll second this.. although I'd just say most open world games in general (but modding TES moreso). MMOs probably count too, but I don't play them.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I covered the issue a bit in the review a few months back. There were a couple solutions offered, which helped a bit, but I strongly suspect it is an HDD loading issue.

 

[Vayra86]

Hitching is first and foremost a CPU / RAM issue and not storage. Things don't go straight from storage on to your screen. A well coded engine/game makes absolutely sure that the bottleneck is not on storage - its the slowest part of any system. You'd much rather load the right assets well on time.

That is also why an SSD doesn't usually fix it and why it pops up in high end systems more often. The CPU can't keep up or there is a load spike on it. Its an illusion you can completely avoid this too, and its even more of an illusion to think faster storage will fix it altogether. It may help (given a fast enough CPU) but it is the last thing I'd look at.

Its easy to test this, too. Apply the same use cases to NVME / PCI SSDs and to SATA ones...

 

[Gorstak]

The only game I ever noticed a hiccup in, was dirt 3, when that car is loading prior to race...never really understood why that happens, but I assumed cpu spike...saw it on much stronger cpus then my pentium too. I guess some unoptimized chunk of data got sent from ram to cpu. But the game itself was as smooth as an elven a*se....

 

[John Naylor]

We have been using a combination of SSD and SSHDs in each box for about 8 years. We all played Batmans, Witcher 3, Far Cry, etc .... My oldest son uses my box to play Arma while Im sleeping. Neither of us have experienced anything like you have described on either the SSDs or SSHDs

 

[FordGT90Concept]

The Sims 3, all expansions loaded, Isle Paradiso map. Every morning at 4 am (I think it was), the game clock pauses as the game processes the NPCs.

 

[Vario]

TES Fallout 4 seems to get slammed in the downtown area, around the Goodneighbor town.

 

[Athlonite]

Any TES game (including SSE) with a lot of mods or carrying a shit ton of crap around same for FO4 I've never really had a problem with the Far Cry series though