When will SSD speed start making a difference in gaming?
Posted by Progenitor3@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 138 comments
When pcie gen 4 SSDs came out, people said it won't matter for gaming compared gen 3 SSDs or SATA.
Now that gen 5 SSDs are here people say it won't matter in gaming compared to gen 4.
So my question is, are those people actually right? And if so, when will SSD speed actually start to matter?
Bobert25467@reddit
In most games there isn't a big difference between a SATA SSD and a NVME SSD. It's mainly loading times but the difference is minuscule. PS5 is where the SSD makes the biggest difference since it has some parts designed to not fully bottleneck the SSD but developers haven't really taken advantage of it in a way that gamers would really notice. Part of the reason I believe is most of the big companies have become mediocre and don't want to update their game engines to take advantage of new tech. Some of them are even abandoning their engines for Unreal Engine 5 because they don't want to waste money and time on a new engine. So to answer your question I would say when developers get around to making more next gen engines then we should see a difference.
slimricc@reddit
Everyone wants to make their version of fortnite or candycrush, no one is about the art anymore. Gaming is fucked sadly
murgador@reddit
AAA games by and large havent been about the art for at least 15 fucking years.
Just take a look at the gameplay, about 90% of it is basically fucking identical to the depth we have today.
slimricc@reddit
Sony had some bangers, fromsoft is goated, rdr2 and cyberpunk are masterpieces. Bethesda is a good metaphor for the state of gaming in general tbh
murgador@reddit
Cyberpunk tried to be different and is okay at best. Mostly shines for story, gameplay is okay. Once you literally do the encounters in the game it's just...sadly empty.
I haven't played any sony games.
Fromsoftware is so fucking overrated. They stopped being innovative once they got onto the Dark Souls cash cow. I will die on the hill Dark Souls 1 is better than Elden Ring since Elden Ring is literally DS1 controls/mechanics except the enemies get all the cool upgraded action game movesets but us the player are still playing in 2008 with demon souls ass mechanics with jank weightless movement and slow movesets functionally identical to DS1, and an even worse poise mechanic.
Even Armored Core 6 was, at its core (no pun intended), the principles of Elden Ring's gameplay design for the worse - gone is the mech variety and instead it's a lot of pigeonholing for encounters but also with poor build variety. I say this as someone who wanted to like Elden Ring and Armored Core 6. AC6 also has that relatively 'weightlessness' that DS-Elden Ring has.
That being said - still better games than most western AAAs, but they still fall under a similar fallacy convergently. Instead of redesigning their games to be the same thing because they spend all their time developing on a new engine for graphics, they just copy and paste the game mechanics for the player while upgrading their burgeoning engine to support a now 4x exhausted encounter design, and because they can't be bothered to make new fucking mechanics that violates their Dark Souls success formula - Bloodborne and Sekiro notwithstanding.
RooTxVisualz@reddit
Take my up vote for spitting facts and supporting those facts.
slimricc@reddit
I don’t think so lol there are so many different weapons and play styles in elden ring, it’s very clearly not the same combat as ds1 dude. and cyberpunk is an excellent game. You’re just trippin
winterkoalefant@reddit
Fortnite artwork has been really good recently. Gameplay too. If that’s the standard games are aiming for, it’s a good thing.
slimricc@reddit
Hey i love fortnite, i hate everyone else trying to make a game that makes money like fortnite does. They have a lot of bad practices. $30 for a skin is egregious
ravenousglory@reddit
CDPR for example, they literally abandoned their engine for UE5. Such a shame
Jaives@reddit
the difference is big enough for me. from a 20-30 second load time to 5-8 seconds. rarely get a game that loads more than 10 seconds now.
of course in the HDD days, load time was counted in minutes at times, hence the need for load screens with tips/backstory/game lore.
Luckyirishdevil@reddit
I miss the lore and back story load screens
Jaives@reddit
I actually played an old fantasy rpg during the lockdown and i remember a 3 paragraph loading screen just blipping for 3 seconds. Load screens are a thing of the past now.
Hijakkr@reddit
There are some games that don't work on SATA SSDs. Back when Forza Horizon 5 first came out, the game was unplayable on my system until I upgraded from a SATA SSD to an NVMe SSD, at which point it was smooth as butter.
MoonHash@reddit
A lot of the ps exclusives take advantage of it well. Ratchet and Clank is a good example with the constant portals with no loading
macgirthy@reddit
I wish there was a study on this because i put an ssd in my xb1x and had two of them, both with a 2tb ssd. I sold one to fund a series X and was disappointed in only a slight speed upgrade. It really only felt a little bit faster. The new tech in the series X like resume is faster sure! But the ssd in the xb1x was just a tiny bit slower not 2x/3x faster that i thought the series x would be. Maybe its the case now tho.
Anyways, I only have nvme pcie gen iv speeds on my systems. 3950x rig with a 4tb sn850x OS drive and a handheld GPD Win4 7840u with a 4tb 990 pro. Waiting for nvme vi speeds to be a thing.
vswey@reddit
It's not a huge difference in-game even tho there are people saying that between different SSDs but obviously the startup time is very different
viverun@reddit
It will make a difference when the bottlenecks are due to load times, games load within seconds.
eyes-are-fading-blue@reddit
Matter in what sense? Loading times? It matters already. FPS? extremely unlikely because you don’t do IO in a game outside of loading screens/first couple of seconds of a session.
IanMo55@reddit
If/when Direct Storage becomes a thing.
-UserRemoved-@reddit
It technically is a thing that is available in a decent amount of games now, there just isn't much to talk about in terms of noticeable improvements.
https://steamdb.info/tech/SDK/DirectStorage/
Vashelot@reddit
Holy shit it was fast on like T700 on one test. Like the loading itself felt like a 1 second framedrop instead of a loading.
vapeducator@reddit
The T705 on a PCIe 5 M.2 is smokin' fast. It's many times faster read performance than the Samsung EVO Pro that I was using previously. Everything feels so much faster. I also got 64GB of DDR5-6400 reduce memory paging by keeping more in main memory as cache.
Itphings_Monk@reddit
Sorry what is t700 and t705? I'm tempted to get 64 gb instead of 32 gb of memory when I get the new ryzan 3dx cpu. All I need is rtx5000 to come out.
Ouaouaron@reddit
The Crucial T700/T705 high-performance SSD. It's much faster than more typical SSDs in certain ways that generally don't affect gaming. Maybe it will matter some day, but right now I wouldn't spend money on it (not to mention that it means you have to consider SSD thermals).
64GB is also probably overkill for memory, but it's much more likely to be relevant to gaming (especially with certain games).
Itphings_Monk@reddit
Would 4 16gb be to much worse then 2 32gb? i know in the past it was more unstable or something.
Ouaouaron@reddit
4x16 has a good chance of being worse than 2x32, yes.
That might become less of an issue if CUDIMMs are compatible with 9800x3d, but those are rather expensive and we have to wait for people to try it to figure out if it's worth it.
Vashelot@reddit
I think that is only really tech for intel at this point.
My X870 tomahawk can run the CUDIMMs but only in a bypass mode so they only really run like a regular memory.
Barefoot_Mtn_Boy@reddit
4 ×16gb is good on the old DDR-4, but not on JEDEC-5 (what we call DDR-5) because it's a totally different animal. Why do they still put 4 slots on a DDR-5 motherboard? I don't know, but only the main channel works. Also, you still have use of the XMP/EXPO overclocks just using the main channel. Now, along with the new 15th generation CPU's Intel has introduced a new type of DDR-5, the CUDIMM, which tests are showing vast improvements over regular DDR-5! The bottom line is do not try 4 sticks of RAM on a DDR-5 system. Buy a matched pair of the gb's you want. Most gamers are good with 32gb while 64gb works best on productivity software.
arahman81@reddit
And by the time it matters, it will be around the same price as PCIE3/4 SSDs.
vapeducator@reddit
https://www.crucial.com/ssd/t705/ct2000t705ssd5a
aldothetroll@reddit
Placebo effect. Those numbers they advertise are seq performance numbers which gaming and general computing don't rely on, at all. In rand performance which actually matters for gaming and general computing most SSDs aren't too far apart in performance where it'll be noticeable.
vapeducator@reddit
I'm not going based on advertisements. I own the T705 with a motherboard that supports PCIe 5.0 M.2. Do you own them? Then maybe stick to what you actually know based on experience than your own frivolous and unhelpful conjecture.
aldothetroll@reddit
If you're telling people to stick to what they know then why are you using a word like conjecture when you don't even know what it means? Everything I've stated is backed by fact with evidence thanks to tech reviewers which is the complete opposite of what conjecture means.
Then you tell me to use anecdotal evidence(like you're doing) instead of objective evidence? Kind of disappointing for someone with "educator" in their user.
Then you talk about a "samsung evo pro" which doesn't exist. It's either a evo or a pro and yet you're here saying talk about what you know when you know nothing LOL.
It doesn't matter but since you care so much I have an Asus Prime X670E-Pro which surprise surprise has Gen5 PCIE with a Samsung 980 PRO because Gen5 SSDs weren't even out yet when I got my current PC
HeavyDT@reddit
Yeah storage speeds have increased so quickly over the last few years that that data speed has outpaced game engines capability to use it. There reaches a point where loading data is no longer the bottleneck. There's other processing (like shader compilation) that needs to happen in order to get that end result on the screen that's the new bottleneck now which is why you don't see a huge difference between SSD's. The data's there and ready but the rest of the computer still has to do stuff with that data.
I think part of it is that many games engines need a whole new design paradigm that is built around the speed of SSD's and that just takes time. Games engines take many years of iteration to integrate new technologies successfully. Part of it is just the other computer components need to get faster to catch up with how fast SSD's have gotten.
DigitalDecades@reddit
Exactly, loading a game involves a lot more than simply copying data from disk to RAM.
You can clearly see this if you open Task Manager while loading a game. Transfer rate mostly goes from a few MB/s up to maybe a few hundred MB/s for short bursts. It's also often very serial in nature, you you only see usage on one or a few cores.
Synaps4@reddit
The other part is that you would be leaving a ton of older machines behind if you did that, so your game wouldnt sell.
So this wont happen until it becomes not just available tech, but very common tech.
As long as it's not standard in consoles devs will have to avoid it like the plague as well because it would block an entire market from your game.
Skrattinn@reddit
SSDs are already standard in the consoles and have been so since 2020. PS5 even has a fairly quick one for its time at 5.5GB/s.
It's just hasn't mattered nearly as much as people thought it would. The quicker load times are great but data streaming rates are rarely more than 200-300MB/s.
Synaps4@reddit
We're talking about gen5 ssds
Z_relish42@reddit
Xbox series X already does this by forcing you to install newer "series x enhanced" games on your ssd or it won't let you play them.
PotusThePlant@reddit
I wouldn't call about 20 a "decent" amount of games.
-UserRemoved-@reddit
Would you not?
I mean, it's wasn't much more than a year ago that the first game to use DS was released (Forspoken), I feel like 20 games since then is a "decent" amount.
PotusThePlant@reddit
Over 300 games have been released this year and not even 10% of them have DirectStorage. Let alone, take actual advantage of it. So no, I wouldn't.
-UserRemoved-@reddit
Why is it even necessary in those 90% of games? Are load times a universal issue I wasn't aware of?
I mean, end of the day it's all relative. You might not think that's a lot, but I think it's decent given it's pretty niche technology anyways.
PotusThePlant@reddit
Theoretically, DirectStorage removes some cpu overhead so it would lead to improved performance in any game that uses it properly. I think that's a pretty compelling reason to use it.
Your moving the goalpost though. I never specifically said that. My comment was about 20 games bein just a handful instead of a "decent" number.
It's not niche. Any gpu with Directx 12 compatibility can use it. It's not something for very specific scenarios or types of games.
Antheoss@reddit
Which is a useless comment since there's no objective measure of "decent number" or "handful", especially when where talking about video games.
-UserRemoved-@reddit
I stand behind my statement on this one. I don't care about bringing DS to easy to run or competitive games. If it doesn't make a noticeable difference, I don't really care. CPU overhead is great, but if you aren't having issues with frame drops or 1% lows then who cares.
I honestly assumed it was about more than my use of "decent number" since that's relative to my opinion and perspective anyways. Without moving the goal posts, I think a better comparison for both of us is if we compared implementation of other technologies in new games, like how many games were released with SLI, RT, or DLSS support in their first year of use.
I again disagree, it think it's use would be most worthwhile for developers and consumers if it was implemented in situations where it can make a noticeable difference, such as games with longs load times, eliminating transition scenes and area loading, as well as create overhead in CPU heavy AAA games.
PotusThePlant@reddit
Why tho? It seems that you're speaking from a very privileged place where you can afford a decent PC. More optimization is always more better if more people can enjoy your games even on their potato pcs.
SLI is dead, RT is dumb due to the performance penalty and DLSS will (or at least should) die because it's proprietary. FSR and XeSS are better options simply because anyone can use them.
Neither you nor I know how difficult this is to implement. If it's as simple as flipping a toggle or requires minimal effort then I think every game should have it. If it's a more involved process then yeah, it might not make sense to spend time on that instead of polishing the game itself ir resources are limited.
Same here. That's doesn't mean that I don't notice when a game runs poorly. Not really sure how that's related to what we were discussing though.
Justifiers@reddit
Zero of which are games that you'd notice it in
Bf2042, cod, pubg, Minecraft; fast paced exploration open world or massive map world games need it
SoggyBagelBite@reddit
I do not believe that list to be accurate.
Neither of the Truck Sim games actually use or require DirectStorage. They have a DX12 beta branch that technically has DirectStorage enabled but it makes no difference to either game.
Balfus@reddit
Are you just here to argue with yourself?
SoggyBagelBite@reddit
No, the DX12 beta branch has it enabled but the game makes no actual use of it, so that list is kind of pointless and inaccurate. Some of the games on that list may have the flag enabled in the Steam database saying they have DirectStorage when they don't actually utilize it at all.
Just looking at some of the titles on that list, I don't even have to search to know they don't actually use DirectStorage simply because of the nature of the game.
Trick2056@reddit
what about directstorage for all of those back drop environment that are just low poly repeating texture and props /s
smackythefrog@reddit
Am I understanding correctly that that's a list of games that support DS?
FF16, Ratchet and Clank, Diablo 4, etc.?
I thought it was like a dozen games just one year ago.
I have Ghost of Tsushima and didn't know it supported DS. It does load fast, though, but I wasn't paying attention as it didn't feel too different from other games I play, like Dota or COD.
Tobleto_Danillio@reddit
36 games. Mostly truck simulators
IanMo55@reddit
Thanks for that.
Kiriima@reddit
It is a thing in Sony open world games. Every loading screen in Horizon and Ghost of Tsushima is under 3sec, no loading screen if you fast travel close enough.
Sarculus@reddit
Also very noticeable in Ratchet and Clank when travelling between worlds through the portals.
Zarniwoop99@reddit
LOL I wish it was like that on Sony's own console. You know, the PS5.
Percy1803@reddit
It literally is no?
huffalump1@reddit
It was also something they hyped when revealing the PS5, with the Matrix and Spider-Man demos of flying through the city at ultra speed while it loads from the fast SSD.
What games have issues with load times?
arahman81@reddit
The PS5 also has a dedicated decompression chip. On BC games that go through CPU decompression, the XBox gets shorter loads.
Ouaouaron@reddit
Aren't Ghost of Tsushima loading times famous for being less than a second on both the PS4 and PS5? Was there some sort of remaster for PS5 that messed that up?
Due_Shelter_5033@reddit
I'm completely fine with it as it is. I just use 1 proper NVME SSD for windows, apps and most played games and then some simple cheap SATA SSDs for all other games since it does not make any difference in terms of loading times.
jamvanderloeff@reddit
Nowadays SATA SSDs aren't even cheaper unless you're looking for huge ones.
Due_Shelter_5033@reddit
They are, although not by much. But another issue is motherboards are often limited to 2 M.2 slots while you'll have a shitload of SATA ports.
jamvanderloeff@reddit
Not cheaper for anything half-decent I should say. Absolute cheapest DRAMless SATA drives are much more painful to use than absolute cheapest NVMe things since those can steal system RAM instead.
Having SATA ports is changing, current gen standard has dropped from 6 as normal on a mid range board down to 4 or even two, three or more M2s is getting fairly common, and adding M.2s in a PCIe adapter card is often an option.
rabbitsrcruel@reddit
Should be helping with loading shaders, loading screen
shellbert_eggman@reddit
It's not about improving the gaming experience, it's about how quickly you can reboot from a modern AAA game's hourly BSOD
WiatrowskiBe@reddit
It will start making a difference when games will start requiring and relying on it - meaning not anytime soon because putting a "PCIE4 SSD" in minimum requirements for a game would cause people to flip and game sales to tank.
Games can do some amazing things reducing RAM/VRAM usage by dynamically loading assets during gameplay (could literally unload stuff behind camera and load it as soon as camera starts rotating), but for that to even consider at all a fast SSD is mandatory.
Tof12345@reddit
I think you'll be limited by your internet and actual CPU power than any SSD speed increases.
BaconFinder@reddit
When "I think I'll buy a game" becomes "I thought about buying a game and AI bought it for me".
Skrattinn@reddit
There are two main types of 'loading' involved in games:
1) Burst loading i.e. the initial bootup and level loading. As of 2024, this almost never exceeds more than a few gigabytes at a time so the difference between 4GB/s and 8GB/s is fairly trivial. This won't likely matter much until datasets grow at least 4x larger with a corresponding increase in memory capacities.
2) Streaming data during play. This was the main promise of the then-new consoles back in 2020 when the 5.5GB/s SSD in PS5 was heavily promoted. Four years later, the absolute highest streaming rates only top out at ~500MB/s and usually much less than that.
tl;dr: Don't hold your breath.
EirHc@reddit
People who say it don't matter are full of shit. And this stupid sub will downvote comments like mine, so good luck reading any sanity.
Like if the difference in your load times is going from 6 seconds to 3 seconds, then it changes from a minor inconvenience to an even less minor inconvenience. But it will factor into load times, the differences are measurable.
SSDs have generally made load times pretty short. And typically load times between scenes are almost non-existent, or very very short because of SSDs. Where you usually get the longest load times is booting up the game for the first time, particularly with lots of mods. Faster SSDs make it quicker and quicker. I have modded up games that still take upwards of 30 seconds to load on a Samsung 990 Pro. If I had a lowend PCIe3 SSD it's probably 90 seconds. If I had a lower end PCIe4 SSD, the difference will at most be 10-15 seconds (probably less), but still, there's a difference. And when I'm on my downtime at home, I consider that time more valuable than anything else, so I don't wanna wait 90 seconds for a game to load up. If I can get 40 seconds down to 30 seconds, I'll pay a little extra for it. Maybe not worth it to everyone, and that's totally cool, but there is a difference.
Autobahn97@reddit
10 years ago mostly - moving from spinning disk was night and day. I don't think we will see much more improvements, not like back then.
RisingDeadMan0@reddit
there was a good step up from my xbox One X with an internal SSD to the Series S/X though, it might have just been down to games being developed for an SSD rather then just being brute forced.
jamvanderloeff@reddit
Much faster CPU's going to be making a big difference there too
Hijakkr@reddit
There is another step up happening with games designed from the ground up to run on the PS5 and XSX. Forza Horizon 5 is the one that made me upgrade from a SATA SSD to an NVMe SSD, since it literally could not load textures as fast as I was driving. I spent a sizeable chunk of my first 30 minutes or so with that game driving past bushes and road signs with that pink and black "no texture" pattern and driving on air because the ground texture just didn't exist. I tried a number of things to get it to work until I saw a conversation saying that my SSD probably wasn't fast enough, at which point I put it down until I upgraded.
AsianEiji@reddit
at this point (ie after the SATA to SSD speed increase) MB/CPU Cache needs to be like 5x more than what it is now before SSD speeds matter.
Pretty much the baseline cache needs to be the AMD #800x3d range for SSD speeds to matter at this point (that and SSD cache also needs to increase)
svenge@reddit
As things stand, any halfway decent Gen3 model (i.e. rated at 2500 MB/s or better) is still more than "good enough" for strictly gaming purposes. Of course Gen4 models' pricing has dropped to near parity with their predecessors, so there's little reason to buy a Gen3 model today.
In any case, Gen5 models are going to be overkill for the foreseeable future.
RisingDeadMan0@reddit
Did Linus do a blind test and people couldnt tell whatever SSD it was
winterkoalefant@reddit
yes but it was far from scientific; I wouldn’t take it to mean much
Luckyirishdevil@reddit
He did. I think 1 guy could actually call it correctly
RisingDeadMan0@reddit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA 10:20 if its this one, then no-one could tell, but the video is 4 years old
huffalump1@reddit
It's likely that most SSDs are "fast enough" - especially modern NVME drives.
I definitely feel the speed difference from older SATA drives, but it seems like any NVME M2 drive from a reputable brand is "good enough".
No-Actuator-6245@reddit
To be fair, any half decent SATA drive is good enough for gaming.
lumlum56@reddit
Yeah I have an 870 EVO drive and it still works great, loading times are only really 3-4 seconds in bigger games
thenord321@reddit
SSDs HAVE made a huge difference in gaming, as in, it already happened vs HDDs. Now that read speeds are so high, and most big games can cache into our large 16Gb+ of RAM, we don't need much more.
I remember changing to NVMEs from older HDD and SSDs that my load times for large multiplayer FPS like Battlefield went from minutes to seconds caching the large maps.
rocketchatb@reddit
FFXVI supports GPU based Directstorage and it loads into levels from the start menu in less than 1 second if you have a fast NVME.
Hrmerder@reddit
Yes basically if you have green 3 you’re good. People can’t even tell the difference between gen 4 and sata. That initial hard bottleneck of spin hdds are done and there isn’t much of anything that requires more than gen 3 today
Imgema@reddit
Regular SATA SSDs make a big difference VS HDDS. Even slow SSDs.
Anything faster than that has diminishing returns.
Savacore@reddit
With the current trajectory of hardware development and game design? Never. Games are simply not designed in a way that makes them bottleneck around disk speed.
A game where it matters could exist, but doesn't right now. You need to go back to SATA drives before there's really a measurable impact.
murgador@reddit
When publishers push graphics marketing to the point it requires it to just run a fucking game.
Enough_Standard921@reddit
Storage is just in a good place right now. It lagged everything else for years when spinning magnetic drives were the bottleneck- the move from IDE to SATA didn’t really do much because the bottleneck wasn’t at the interface, it was getting the data off the disk itself. There was a huge jump in usable performance when we went from HDD to SSD and the SATA interface became the bottleneck, then smaller jump when NVME drives removed the bottleneck entirely. At the moment storage just isn’t a bottleneck at all in most applications and CPUs/GPUs/RAM need to catch up.
Liesthroughisteeth@reddit
The only difference will be in load times.
Errettfitchett03@reddit
It's not that there are no improvements in gaming. It's just the type of improvements people don't care about. There are no gains in frame rates, but instead in background loading tasks that developers keep out of sight, loading times, and texture loading. Between 3.0 4.0 and 5.0, there are improvements in those areas, but that's not something people care about or want to spend extra cash on improving unless you are building a luxury system.
ManderlyPies@reddit
I guess you never played Tarkov.
aptom203@reddit
M.2 is noticeably better than SATA, but it's not as big a jump as from HDD to SSD.
Gen 4 is not noticeably better than Gen 3 for gaming, but it has benefits for heavy duty video editing and other read/write bound tasks.
gunsnammo37@reddit
M.2 is a socket type. I think you mean Nvme is better than sata. You can have an M.2 drive that is sata.
NFSokol@reddit
Small correction, NVMe is noticeably better than SATA.
M.2 is just a form factor, both NVMe and SATA SSDs can be M.2
skyfishgoo@reddit
most gaming doesn't access the disk except for when it starts up... and what little access it does need for loading the next bit of content is trivial compared to loading the game into memory.
now if you have very little ram and you are constantly swapping to disk then speed could matter but getting more ram is the solution, not getting a faster disk.
CamGoldenGun@reddit
what do you mean when? SATA3 SSD's immediately improved gaming load times over HDD. nvme m.2 improved that more but you won't see much difference between pcie 4 and 5 nvme drives when it comes to gaming.
Belzher@reddit
What do you mean, I bought a new nvme m.2 and the difference is clear comparing to a Sata3 in games I play with a lot of loadings
PotentialAstronaut39@reddit
Already did for more than a decade...
Just try playing games on a HDD, you better be patient.
azrael4h@reddit
Bah. Go play games using a 1541 drive on a C64. Then tell me about patience.
I kept a book on hand to read while loading games back in the day.
PotentialAstronaut39@reddit
Agreed, also I was on a 56K modem until the mid 2010s, I know patience. xD
azrael4h@reddit
LOL AOL was known as AOHell for a reason. I gave up at one point and used a "free" ad supported dial up instead, because AOL was so slow and unreliable.
As soon as I could get able I jumped on it. Comcast sucks and should be treated as a terrorist organization, but it's better than AOL. Fewer CDs too.
SwordsAndElectrons@reddit
When drive speed becomes the bottleneck, which won't happen until it gets fast enough not to be a serious bottleneck.
Confused?
Say the game needs to load 1GB of data from the SSD. A good gen 3 SSD might accomplish that in 300 milliseconds. A gen 5 can do it in less than 100 milliseconds. Are you really going to notice the difference of 200 ms to load that data? Probably not, especially if the loading was already being done dynamically or in the background behind an animation.
And that's what drive speed affects. Loading. Games load the data they need into RAM, and only touch the drive again to load different data, create save files, or other things or that nature. Once the data they need is in memory, the drive speed has no further influence.
So when will that change? Dual channel DDR5 bandwidth is >100GB/s and latency is measured in nanoseconds. The best SSDs are orders of magnitude worse. Game performance will not be dependent on SSD speeds until they become so fast that using RAM isn't necessary anymore. I'm not saying that'll ever happen, but I am saying the speed of the SSD won't make a general performance difference (as in higher average FPS) until games are actually using data directly from the SSD. Right now, that's just where it lives until it gets moved somewhere faster.
DirectStorage may someday impact the story of what kind of drive is "fast enough" at some point, but even then it won't make a difference as long as it's fast enough to keep up with the rate at which the game is loading data.
lollipop_anus@reddit
Biggest impact SSDs have for gaming is with loading times and advertised SSD speeds do not equal real world performance. Sequential read/write speeds are only important for transferring files around which isnt important for most users. The important metric is the random read speeds which are more impacted by DRAM vs DRAM-less SSD rather than the PCIE version. They are both so fast now that you cant notice a difference unless you are sitting with a stopwatch on loading screens to count milliseconds.
slimricc@reddit
How much faster can you get when it takes 1-4 seconds to load? The only changes we can expect are on the game design side and now that consoles have ssds we should see the improvements, we don’t bc every studio just wants to make the next cash generator like fortnite. Spiderman2 has taken advantage of ssds but that’s like it?
leandroc76@reddit
PCIe Gen 5 has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 32 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) per lane or about 64 GB/s over a x16 lane PCIe slot. Most Intel core and AMD Ryzen CPU's address 20-24 PCIe lanes. SSD's typically take up 4 lanes. Hitting the 64GB/s bandwidth is nearly impossible with 128b/130b encoding scheme which has been used since PCie 3.0. That's mainly the unspoken reason people are saying it doesn't matter. In gaming it's true, for large data movement like video editing or data farms it definitely does.
KlausKoe@reddit
Also depends on the game. E.g. I know in Diablo 3 you run from one map to the other. Some abilities are up only for a certain time. Clock ticks also during loading so faster loading will be better as you can suer your abilities longer.
-UserRemoved-@reddit
Well, we know the increase in bandwidth benefits sequential speeds and throughput, so we know which workloads typically benefit from these specs.
Since sequential speeds deal with single files that are stored as continuous blocks of data, I'm not sure what reasoning you have to believe more speed is going to be benefit gaming, since games are developed as single files.
Perhaps when game files increase to the point that sequential speeds make a significant difference, then we may see more benefit.
Halbzu@reddit
That being said, some games are optimized into a few big files which are benefiting from high sequential load speeds. But then they need to be unpacked and that doesn't happen fast enough to justify high end ssds.
ProfaneExodus69@reddit
It makes a difference.
If your RAM is not enough, it will reduce the duration of loading assets. But before considering getting an SSD to reduce that during gameplay, maybe you should consider investing in RAM instead to avoid that in the first place... You may see an improvement in loading times, but does it take matter if you see the loading screen 5 seconds less if you have to pay that much more?
Pretty much no game loads resources exactly when they're needed, and if it's the case, that's just poor optimization and it will still be poor even with an SSD.
There are some niche games that have poor optimization and will require a lot of trips to the storage regardless, but other than that, you're never running games from the storage... You load them in the RAM to play... Otherwise you'd play at single digit frames per second.
BeastMsterThing2022@reddit
Already does. Games from the last 5 years are nigh unplayable on a 7200RPM
BluDYT@reddit
It depends on the game but typically it doesn't really matter. Can't notice a real difference between anything from my Samsung Evo sata SSD or my gen4 or gen 5 drives.
A lot of multiplayer games make you wait for the slowest player anyways as well.
actionjmanx@reddit
As soon as console manufacturers decide it should matter.
Routine-Lawfulness24@reddit
Incremental upgrades.
h2vhacker@reddit
You know what's much faster than a hard drive or solid state drive. RAM.
Pesebrero@reddit
Not anytime soon. Not at least until NVME drives become universal enough. If games start to require a minimum SSD speed, many players would be excluded. Lack of speed certifications would also make it very confusing.
jrduffman@reddit
The way I always looked at it is the PS5 has a good direct storage system and from what I've seen games like Spiderman 2 load up faster on a PS5 than even the most beast of a gaming PC and the SSD in the PS5 is only what 5,500MBs? I don't think my PC needs anything faster than that for gaming. Gen 5 drives at 12,000MBs still can't load Spiderman 2 any faster right?
Lt_Muffintoes@reddit
What improvement do you expect?
If the load times are already down from 1 minute to 5 seconds, what difference does reaching 2 seconds make?
Only thing which springs to mind is massive open areas, but I think that would be a function of RAM and VRAM, not storage.
Quarrels@reddit
Most of the reason for this is that programs run in memory, not on the storage. So no matter how fast your storage is, its never going to faster than RAM and the only time the computer is accessing your storage is when it is retrieving files to put into RAM. So, load times at launch and maybe between large environments can get faster, but they are already so fast that even a pretty significant improvement doesn't feel that way.
Copernican@reddit
For multiplayer games, does it make a difference if you need to wait for the slowest potato to load in before the game starts?
TripKnot@reddit
Sequential speeds don't matter. 4k read or 4k mixed speeds are a better indicator of real world application performance. This is where the true improvement of SSD's was seen.
We went from HDD's with 0.5-1.5 MB/s 4K speeds to the first SSD's in the 20-25 MB/s range. That was 10-20x faster and we could feel it immediately. Sequential speeds only increased 3-4x with that change from 100 to 300 mb/s.
Today we see NVME drives with 10-20x sequential speed increases over SATA SSD's, upto 7000 mb/s, but only a 2-3x improvement in 4k speeds, with most <90 mb/s, and we can barely tell the difference in everyday usage.
420KillaNA@reddit
doesn't make a damn lick of difference between SSD and NVMe - "you only need SSD for 'some' games" and NVMe - not even close yet while it does ramp up to 10x the speed of SSD "at times" but not averagely and SSD is just as fast as nothing takes full advantage of the technology just yet - if software isn't demanding or pushing over 550-600mb/sec of SSD - aint no way it's pulling fucking 6000-7000mb/sec off Samsung 980/990 Pro NVMe 4.0 - and certainly not gen 5 @ 14,500mb/sec transfer speed top end... thus why people are still buying brick SSDs that connect over slower 6gb SATA III - because nothing is going to reach NVMe speeds within 5 to 10 years, guaranteed - only took 30+ years of HDDs to be replaced by SSD as the new norm
dnl647@reddit
I mean it’s already made a huge difference. Loading times are abysmal these days in comparison to what we used to deal with. Fallout 3 on Xbox 360 entering a building took at least a minute to 2. Now it’s almost seamless.
Biggest difference I’ve noticed with 5th gen is writing speed for downloads mixed with good fiber and cat 6 means things download almost instantaneously.
DigitalJedi850@reddit
It makes a difference, but at the moment it’s marginal. In gaming, most of the reading or writing is done in a big batch; for instance when you first start the game and it has to load in. This is where you will see the most impact. Once you’re in game, the hard drive’s work is mostly done.
Unless for some bizarre reason that changes, hard drives will never have a significant impact on your performance once everything is loaded. If you want to load between levels faster, or start up the game faster, then you might see a difference, but I have a fairly high degree of confidence that hard drive performance will never affect things like frame rate.
Sluipslaper@reddit
It already does, its not only fps that matters for gaming, what about install time for games ? Or save time, when a game stutters for a few seconds. Or loading time ... into a save, into the game, loading rendering items. Its literally one less bottleneck, Still , gen 5 is overkill
needle1@reddit
As long as developers still have to make stuff run decently on a Steam Deck (which may run games off of a fricking SD card) I doubt it’ll be anytime soon.
starocean2@reddit
Everything gets loaded into ram ahead of time so there would have to be a condition where the data is so large that it cant fit into ram and has to be directly accessed from the ssd. Which isnt very likely seeing that even 64gb of ram is a common thing now.
ArchusKanzaki@reddit
Nowadays, running games out of HDD is actual liability on the PC-side, just like how it shows when Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart was out for PC.
The main difference is now on SATA vs NVME. Running it off NVME is noticeable compared to SATA, but not much different yet between PCie generations. It might change though if texture files become larger and larger to the point developers prefer to store it on the SSD instead of loading it to the GPU VRAM.
JustThatOtherDude@reddit
I grew up with HDD.... 5 seconds to load a new zone in veilguard and cyberpunk 2077 seems "made a difference to me" 🤔
daeganreddit_@reddit
raid zero makes a couple gen 4 nvme feel like gen 5. and most motherboards support raid. it is noticeable and your machine will load inti game scenes faster than anyone else, if the game is simply waiting on assets from storage.
AtlQuon@reddit
I see no difference between SATA SSD speed and gen 3, let alone gen 4 or 5. If it is noticeable, it is a matter of a fraction of a second. Most games are not made to read and write full speed during gameplay and you can check the speeds when monitoring. Verifying game files does go full speed, but how often do you need to do that?
Patatostrike@reddit
It probably won't for a very long time, some games need direct storage so other than those select few, the difference between sata and pcie is negligible(in the 100s of milliseconds range)
9okm@reddit
My crystal ball guess? At least 5 years.