West to South Bree Gate

Here I a took a ride fromon SSD and HDD to check if there is any difference in stuttering between two drives.As you can see the difference is very significant. On HDD there are over 3 times more major stutters than on SSD. This is a huge difference.Unfortunately I don't have anything faster than typical SSD to test it further, but the results are rather surprising. SSDs are know to lessen the stuttering a bit compared to HDD, but the difference is never that significant. This means that the game utilizes the storage more than any other, and this is where you can get the most significant improvement to your performance in LOTRO.Explaining why is that is going to be a lot of speculation, since I am not an expert and I am judging and measuring things as an experienced gaming enthusiast from user standpoint (which is arguably far more useful for the end user than all the excuses developers and experts would give instead). Since the amount of memory the game can use is limited by it's 32-bit architecture, the game has to use your storage to compensate. This is not as uncommon, in Windows there is actually a special feature for that called Page File, which is using your storage as a video or system memory when you run out of RAM or VRAM (at a huge decrease of speed and latency of course). LOTRO however doesn't report any Page File usage, so maybe it is inherently using a lot of storage. And since SSD is drastically faster than HDD in both speed and latency, there is much less stuttering happening.Framerate is of course limited by a single CPU core power like I've already shown, but stuttering doesn't get any smaller with faster CPU. Low framerate is caused by the singlethreaded characteristics of the game's engine, like with many other games, but these many other games don't stutter nearly as much and don't show such a huge difference between SSD and HDD. This points to memory issues, and the game relying on the storage far too much, probably due to the limitations of the amount of system memory (RAM) it can use due to 32-bit architecture. There is a 64-bit client coming out and I will test it extensively as soon as it gets out in Beta.In summary, I don't think that framerate is every going to be increased, since there is only so much a single CPU core can do, and this is not uncommon for games overall. The crazy amount of stuttering however is uncommon and specific to LOTRO, and should be fixed because it makes the game unplayable. 64-bit client is certainly a good step in this direction, and like the first real attempt to improve performance since I started to play this game, but how it is going to turn out is unknown.