does faster ssd speeds affect online gaming, other than load times?
Posted by Accomplished_Cry8120@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 14 comments
the question is in the title. i know that SSDs help for faster load times and writing to the drive itself, but when it comes to online gaming, does it have any affect on latency of loading in things, like enemies or the latency between what you see, what is going on and what you do in the game? could a lower speed SSD/write speed affect a competitive online shooter where every millisecond counts? could it cause any sort of latency problems if your drive is close to full and the write speeds are lower?
AtlQuon@reddit
Pretty much no, because download/upload speeds are lower than read/write speeds of SSDs. It may help installing them, but there is little effect between drives as gaming itself never saturates the write buffers.
Accomplished_Cry8120@reddit (OP)
so lets say my drive is 80% full, and my write speeds are down to 180-350MB/s rather than the normal 2000MB/s, this would affect online gaming experience and maybe introduce latency in a competitive environment?
AtlQuon@reddit
If it is 80% full and not running full speed, the SSD is probably end of life, as I have had a couple that were even fuller than that and still able to run full speed. I have seen them really slam down in speed only when just a few GB were still available or when the system starts demanding too much from it. But no, even 180 is still more than enough as most games read slower than that, write even slower. I would be more worried about the root cause of abysmal performance that causes it to run that slow, that sounds like a system problem.
Plenty-Industries@reddit
No. Because games are usually loaded into RAM anyway.
You can basically disconnect a drive as you're playing a game, and as long as no other assets need to be loaded - you can keep playing the game even if the drive its installed on was disconnected.
apoetofnowords@reddit
Not exactly true. A long as you stay in one place, the game will run. But if you move to a different location, the game will load that location from ssd. Idk how much of the "map" is stored in ram for different games
Plenty-Industries@reddit
Pumciusz@reddit
From games where you wait for the slowest person and anecdotal vaguely remembered experience, usually just having AN SSD is a big diffrence, having an NVME rather than SATA is maybe like a second or two max, further speed bumps don't seem to do much.
Accomplished_Cry8120@reddit (OP)
so with your experience, if my nvme ssd is supposed to run at write speed of 1200MB/s, but instead is running at 190-350MB/s because its almost full, this wont cause any problems in a competitive environment?
apoetofnowords@reddit
Read about the difference between sequential and random reads and writes. If ssd is designed to run at 1200 does not mean it will be able to reach that speed in certain tasks, like gaming
Pumciusz@reddit
I keep my drives happy so I don't have that experience. But probably. Maybe in bigger games like Warzone, but in arena shooters like CS you shouldn't load that much stuff anyway.
GonstroCZ@reddit
Now compare the load times, there will be like 1s difference between sata ssd (500ms/s)and pcie 5.0 ssd (14000mb/s) :p
FilthyCasual04@reddit
In most singleplayer games nvme vs Sata it’s definitely noticeable. But I honestly haven’t noticed a difference over gen3.
GonstroCZ@reddit
I have some games on sata, some on gen3, dont feel any difference really, Samsung 870 and samsung 970evo
FilthyCasual04@reddit
As someone who’s owned ssds ranging from 400mbs to my current 13000mbs boot drive. No not really. Anything over gen3 you don’t notice. Get what’s affordable and 3500+ mbs and your good.