I would appreciate the opinions of you seasoned FS2020 performance measurers  as to whether or not SSD RAPID mode increases FS2020 performance in either FPS or smoothness.

Background:

My FS2020 is installed on a Samsung SSD that supports RAPID mode (read acceleration through intelligent caching of hot data) which, when enabled, provided me with a measurable FPS increase.   I would appreciate having an experienced person test RAPID mode and report their results for other forum dwellers to see.

Thanks, RobertR

Hello Robert.  I would have thought this would only reduce loading times. 
I cannot see a reason why it would increase FPS, which is mainly a factor of CPU, GPU, and RAM performance.

Can you tell us what your measurable increase was?

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by bobcat999

Any measurable performance gain would be interesting, but disk caching can really hurt the lifespan of an SSD. That's why I stopped using the rolling cache in msfs.

1 hour ago, cianpars said:

Any measurable performance gain would be interesting, but disk caching can really hurt the lifespan of an SSD. That's why I stopped using the rolling cache in msfs.

Is this still an issue with state of the art SSDs?  As far as I know, the Windows Swapfile is more or less continually written to, even if you deactivate it (which usually isn't suggested). My C drive is a M.2 SSD and still reported as "good" by Samsung Magician after 5 years of daily heavy use.

I have the rolling cache off, too, as I have a good/unlimited Internet connection, but I never thought rolling cache would hurt the SSD in a measurable manner.

Kind regards, Michael

I would expect the rolling cache to help SSD lifespan as I assume that even when you're streaming data it's still being written to disk somewhere temporarily before being processed into something the sim can display?

On 10/19/2021 at 12:33 AM, bobcat999 said:

I cannot see a reason why it would increase FPS,

I can't help you there because I am unfamiliar with the inner workings of FS2020.  

Take this with a huge amount of skepticism but my in-pattern FPS (as measured by Dev Mode) increased from 30ish to 40ish which both amazed and puzzled me, and prompted my query for verification. 

On 10/19/2021 at 5:38 AM, cianpars said:

Any measurable performance gain would be interesting, but disk caching can really hurt the lifespan of an SSD. 

Agree, but whether or not that degradation is significant is unknown to me.  I will say that Samsung cautions that enabling Full Performance Mode can cause high temperature and data loss due to long-term use. And, again, to what degree is unknown.

I may conduct a few more RAPID experiments then turn it OFF.

I've never understood why SSD drives apparently degrade as data is re written but RAM does not?

3 hours ago, jarmstro said:

I've never understood why SSD drives apparently degrade as data is re written but RAM does not?

RAM and SSD memory are 2 different animals  SSDs use a special type of memory circuitry called non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) to store data, so everything stays in place even when the computer is turned off.SSDs use a special type of memory circuitry called non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) to store data, so everything stays in place even when the computer is turned off.

Edited October 21, 20214 yr by cianpars