How to improve your DDO play experience by a lot.

[Matuse]

Move all files-
D:/Games/DDO (spinning disc drive)
to
C:/Games/DDO (SSD)

You won't believe the difference it makes. Night and day. You're welcome.

[Ultinoob]

I remember one of my friends a long time ago bought 4 fast hdd and raided them and put windows operating system on them while the data was on another hdd.

This was back in the 90ths before ssd and M.2.

If you wanna overkill it you could in theory make a raid of a number of M.2 and put everything on that. Or even better buy enough ram and have the whole OS and DDO loaded into them on boot.

Well just crazy ideas.

But yeah transferring to SSD would make a big difference. You should also have your OS on a ssd.

[Ode1st]

My issue with how DDO runs is the constant flickering textures. Did a lot of googling and still can't fix it.

[Matuse]

But yeah transferring to SSD would make a big difference. You should also have your OS on a ssd.

Yeah, my C: drive has basically just been the OS/boot disc for speed, cause it's several years old and not very large. But I decided to move DDO over to it and see how much of an improvement there would be and now I kick myself for not doing it a long time ago.

[Saekee]

hey can you translate this for the tech ignorant? I have my shortcut pointing too: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Turbine\Dungeons & Dragons Online"

is that what you mean?

[Cordovan]

The main point of the OP is that having your DDO installation on a Solid State Drive vs. the older mechanical drives makes a night and day difference in your ability to quickly load into the game and pass between loading screens. Sure does!

[Natashaelle]

The main point of the OP is that having your DDO installation on a Solid State Drive vs. the older mechanical drives makes a night and day difference in your ability to quickly load into the game and pass between loading screens. Sure does!

Don't have one, but the type of SSD you slot directly into your motherboard will be fastest of all.

[M.ham]

The main point of the OP is that having your DDO installation on a Solid State Drive vs. the older mechanical drives makes a night and day difference in your ability to quickly load into the game and pass between loading screens. Sure does!

You missed mentioning that it also helps when you have to restart the client due to the game freezing while displaying a loading screen...

Cheers,
M.

[Ultinoob]

hey can you translate this for the tech ignorant? I have my shortcut pointing too: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Turbine\Dungeons & Dragons Online"

is that what you mean?

Let me try to elaborate.

When you buy a computer look at whether the harddisk is a ssd or hdd.

A harddisk drive (HDD) is like a cd or old time record. Where inside the disk drive a disk is spinning and a reader or "pick up" is reading from it. The data is then stored as magnetic zeros and ones on the drive. This means the head has to move to where the data is stored when it wants to read it. These drives are slow compared to ssd. The benefits of a harddisk drive is the data is more secure in terms of wear and tear and usually can store data longer. The read and write speeds meaning how fast the computer can load a program are typically in the range of 6 Giga bit per second. These drives are usually also bigger in terms of the data they can store and cheaper. When i as a kid had a comodore 64 it used tapes. I think this technology is about the same age as using tapes so i would guess the early 80's.

SSD stands for solid state drive and the technology is probably from the 2000 where it first appeared as memory cards for your camera. These disks are more expensive but transfer data at about 20 Giga bit per second so about 3 times as fast. The data is stored in a totally different way and i am not sure how, but i know that the "reading head" has access to all data at once so no moving parts. Pure electronics, no mechanics. The drawback of these drives is that they can only read and write a specified number of times to each block. So they have a limited lifespand. Data recovery from one of these drives is also harder if it has been damaged.

Generally speaking - especially before multicore cpus - you had the cpu which had a very limited memory called the cache but it was the fastest memory there was. Then there is the random access memory (RAM) which is fast but volitile so it can only hold data while given power. This is slower than the cache. Then there is the harddisk which is the slowest but the cheapest. At each of these steps the price and the speed goes down while the total capacity (how much data it can hold) goes up.


As a rule of thumb for myself i keep all the data that is not crucial for saving and that i need to access fast on a ssd. Namely the operating system (In my case Linux but could be windows or mac) and games and other stuff. If i am doing video editing i put it temporarely on the ssd whie i edit it. Things i like to save such as work or pictures or other data i like to keep i take a backup on a hdd.

Hope this was helpfull and if you ever need help with buying a new computer id be glad to help.

EDIT: I am no expert but hope this helps.

[janave]

Don't have one, but the type of SSD you slot directly into your motherboard will be fastest of all.

On a low estimate HDD to SSD will be about 300% faster, SSD SATA 3 to M.2 about 20-25% depending on the actual drive and other system parts. It is worth investing into a cheaper SSD to cut down loading times if someone is using a HDD. Probably should be added as the Recommended System Specs in 2021. With a strong SSD drive, CPU and RAM 350%+ should be possible.

YouTube has some decent comparisons in modern games, but the % diff will be relatable to most games with some margins:

[Cetus]

The main point of the OP is that having your DDO installation on a Solid State Drive vs. the older mechanical drives makes a night and day difference in your ability to quickly load into the game and pass between loading screens. Sure does!

I'm playing this game on a Samsung 980 pro.

Load screens are still garbage. See my twitch stream from yesterday for more information. Toward the end we ran a Baba and we literally broke the instance - kept getting ported outside after we try to cross a particular line with stuck loading screens.

Figure out your product please. This is on par with the lag of the marketplace attack by the devils eons ago.

[LrdSlvrhnd]

The main point of the OP is that having your DDO installation on a Solid State Drive vs. the older mechanical drives makes a night and day difference in your ability to quickly load into the game and pass between loading screens. Sure does!

Worth pointing out that this can include a flashdrive as well; I installed DDO on one years ago because I was using multiple computers (meant I only had to update once, screenshots weren't scattered in multiple spots, etc.) and immediately noticed a huge difference.

[Glorious]

The main point of the OP is that having your DDO installation on a Solid State Drive vs. the older mechanical drives makes a night and day difference in your ability to quickly load into the game and pass between loading screens. Sure does!

What is the size of the SSD that would be recommended to have all of DDO installed into.... I smell a computer upgrade opportunity...

[Ultinoob]

What is the size of the SSD that would be recommended to have all of DDO installed into.... I smell a computer upgrade opportunity...

Well DDO takes up 15.4 GB on the harddisk. If you are buying a new computer make sure you have enough space for you OS (Windows) all you games and then multiply that with atleast 2.

SSD usually range from around 500 GB to 2 TB. On my computer where i dont have much else than DDO and the os i use less than 150 GB. So i think 500 GB will do if you dont have a lot of pictures and videos or anything else that takes up a lot of space.

If you can then get a computer with M.2 NVMe SSD as they are usually faster and check the read write speed of it. Samsung 970 EVO is a really good one and worth the extra money i think.

[Eantarus]

If you don't have an M.2 drive you can buy a fast USB 3.0 drive, I've been running the game like that for years and is much better than spinning disk.

The real question here should be: why does a game from 2006 require an SSD to be playable?

[Amundir]

It should be noted that a decent strategy for machine storage now days is to have a minimum of two drives; one SSD and one HDD. The operating system and your active programs should live on your SSD. Your static files such as images, documents, videos, should go on your HDD. If you find yourself playing a variety of different games as time goes on, the ones you stop playing from long periods of time can be removed, or relocated to the HDD from the SSD.

Not only does this allow you to prioritize what programs need the speed, but it can allow you to budget costs by not requiring you to have to buy as big of an SSD to hold -everything-, and its also just good practice in the event that your OS drive decides to brick.

Edit:
Also sorta related to that, but kinda not. Having the secondary drive is also useful as it can encourage you to not throw everything in your home directory. If you find yourself on a machine that used to boot quickly, but over time you have noticed it taking longer, take a moment to consider how much memory your home directory is using. Windows on login of a user performs operations against your home directory that directly increase the amount of time it takes for Windows to load up. So it is to your benefit to keep that folder as small as possible to keep boot times quick. This is one of the reasons I hate programs that don't offer an option to install else where and just by default install into your home directory (I'm looking at you Slack and Discord).

[Milcom]

Move all files-
D:/Games/DDO (spinning disc drive)
to
C:/Games/DDO (SSD)

You won't believe the difference it makes. Night and day. You're welcome.

Sounds like a solid suggestion. I was having some frozen instances. Thank you

[KoobTheProud]

The gaming laptop wars are really hot right now.

Easy to find a quality gaming laptop with a 500GB or Terabyte SSD for under $1500 US.

[Memnir]

Sadly computer upgrades are on our list of Pandemic Casualties, at the moment. When finances get better, I'd love to nab a SSD. Till then (pats PC tower) Ol' Betsy here is just gonna have to keep plodding along as best she can.

[TekkenDevil]

Ask me how I know OP didn't build his PC himself.