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Graphs showing Hard disk speed influence on Unreal Gameplay
Last Updated: 11/02/98 11 AM EST)

 

These latest benchmarks , for real "Speed Freaks", show what kind of benefit you will see when installing and running Unreal on a Wide Ultra SCSI drive as oppose to a regular Ultra - narrow drive. For the tests, Unreal was installed on two different drives, the narrow IBM DHFS 4SX (AV drive) and on the Ultra SCSI Wide Barracuda 9.1 GB (ST 34173W). This later one was hooked to a Jackhammer SE Ultra Wide SCSI PCI card [Special $139 sale on these at www.macsales.com], while the IBM drive was hooked to the internal SCSI bus. The test were performed under MacOS 8.5with Connectix Speeddoubler 8.1.1 . Both drives had the standard Apple drivers installed. The Mac was a 7600 upgraded with a G3 Powerforce 220/110, 512k cache overclocked to 330/132, with 224 MB RAM.

For the tests, the time taken to load Unreal or the Terraniux level was measured. Terraniux was chosen for the test since it is the largest level in Unreal. The timer used for the benchmark was my old Swiss watch water resistant 100 m, all stainless steel bought on special a couple of years ago in downtown Tokyo.

The ATTO benchmarks for these drives were (without using the System cache) :

 Drive type

 sustained 128k read

sustained 512k read

sustained 2 MB read
 IBM DHFS 4SX- Ultra Narrow 4.5 GB

 5.2

 6.6

 7.1
 Seagate Barracuda Ultra -WIDE ST34173W 9GB

 7.29

 11.27

 12.87

Hard disk speed effect comparison on Unreal Gameplay

As expected, installing Unreal on your fastest drive will reduce the time taken by Unreal to start or load the levels. This issue is surely not as important as having a G3 card or a fast 3D accelerator card but it could be relevant in the case you were running Unreal with Virtual memory turned on .-Frank

 

Other Site Unreal Info:

 

If you have other Unreal Tips or Comments, please contact us-Frank

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