Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World

Game Loading Performance

One test that everyone wants to see when it comes to hard disk reviews is something game-related. For the most part, gamers agree that your hard drive isn't limiting performance while you're actually playing a game. After all, if you are swapping to disk a lot, then your gaming experience is going to be pretty poor, regardless of how fast your disk is. But what is important and very noticeable when it comes to disk performance in games are loading times.

Today's games have arguably some of the worst loading times ever, thanks to extremely large artwork, levels and other game data that must be loaded before game play can begin. Games also provide a very tangible and perceivable platform for hard disk performance comparison; while even Winstone scores may be difficult to relate to, everyone knows what waiting longer feels like.

For our game loading tests, we used two games: Far Cry and Unreal Tournament 2004. Both games were installed, in full, to the hard drive. We then used no-CD patches to prevent any accessing of the CD/DVD drive to skew the loading process. Both games were installed to a clean drive without anything else present on the drive (the OS is located on a separate drive).

Our Far Cry test consists of starting a campaign with the default difficulty level, hitting escape to skip the introductory movie and beginning the stop watch timer at first sight of the loading screen. The stop watch timer is stopped as soon as the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds, lower scores obviously being better.

The benefits of a 10,000RPM spindle speed are not much when just looking at the first generation Raptor, but the new Raptor manages to offer a 6% performance advantage even over the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives.

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds, lower scores obviously being better.

The UT test shows similar standings (although there is a bit of swapping amongst the 7200RPM 8MB cache contenders), but the 2nd generation Raptor extends its lead over its predecessor significantly. The first generation Raptor is even slightly outpaced by Seagate's 7200.7 series.