Has anyone owning an SSD ever seen a benefit in gaming?

[BoozeHobo]

I noticed an immediate benefit when I went to an SSD playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas, though each was with nearly a hundred mods.

I noticed absolutely ZERO difference in those games whether it was with or without mods. In fact the open world stutter of Fallout 3 was the sole reason I bought the SSD. I loved that game to hell but I became extremely frustrated with the open world stutter, so I dished out the money for a 256 GB SSD. And to my disappointment there was absolutely Zero difference between it and my 7200 rpm hard drive. I actually measured the frametimes at every point where the stutters occurred, and they were exactly the same. If it was 50 ms on the HDD, it was 50 ms on the SSD. I checked with others on forums, and it was always the same: people who didn't own an SSD claimed "It will make the game butter smooth cause game streams assets" etc, while the people with an actual SSD posted their experience that it provided zero improvement for the stutters.
The only explanation I have for you noticing an improvement was that you were using a very old 5400 rpm hard drive, maybe in IDE mode, or maybe it was faulty, or fragmented, or maybe you installed it on a drive on the outer track of the disk.

 

[bystander36]

I noticed absolutely ZERO difference in those games whether it was with or without mods. In fact the open world stutter of Fallout 3 was the sole reason I bought the SSD. I loved that game to hell but I became extremely frustrated with the open world stutter, so I dished out the money for a 256 GB SSD. And to my disappointment there was absolutely Zero difference between it and my 7200 rpm hard drive. I actually measured the frametimes at every point where the stutters occurred, and they were exactly the same. If it was 50 ms on the HDD, it was 50 ms on the SSD. I checked with others on forums, and it was always the same: people who didn't own an SSD claimed "It will make the game butter smooth cause game streams assets" etc, while the people with an actual SSD posted their experience that it provided zero improvement for the stutters.
The only explanation I have for you noticing an improvement was that you were using a very old 5400 rpm hard drive, maybe in IDE mode, or maybe it was faulty, or fragmented, or maybe you installed it on a drive on the outer track of the disk.

I don't play those 2 games, so I can't say what I've experienced, but just to make sure, you did reinstall Windows on the SSD and the game too before making a judgement, right?

 

[JTsyo]

There's a con to SSDs too. I can't read the tips on the loading screen on some games.

 

[Captain Picard]

7 years ago, I got my first SSD to hold my windows install. 2 years ago, I ditched HDDs completely, and have been running RAID 0 Crucial BX100's ever since. Apart from cost, does anyone have a reason to pick HDDs over SSDs these days?

 

[JujuFish]

7 years ago, I got my first SSD to hold my windows install. 2 years ago, I ditched HDDs completely, and have been running RAID 0 Crucial BX100's ever since. Apart from cost, does anyone have a reason to pick HDDs over SSDs these days?

Storage density is the other big reason for HDDs. I suppose technically SSDs have that conquered as well, but I'm not sure many consumers are going to spend $10k for a 15TB SSD.

 

[Malogeek]

My desktop has a 256Gb NVMe and a 512Gb SSD for applications and gaming. My NAS has 16Tb of HDD capacity. It's about what your requirements are and what type of data you need/want to store.

I think some of the issue with subjective experience on gaming from SSDs is the disparity of hardware and testing environment. Are the stutters/hitching from data streaming, lack of VRAM and pulling from system memory, or some other factor like the game engine itself?

I honestly don't think it could be said that SSD doesn't improve a gaming experience. Improve raw fps? Not in most cases, no. The only time it would improve overall fps is streaming and ensuring less/no impact on dips in fps during your gaming session. Of course the initial game loading and level loading is a nice plus.

I'm just glad that in today's age of digital distribution and high speed internet, I don't have to care about deleting a game and coming back to it later. I keep maybe 5 max games installed at a time and the time it takes to download and install GTAV over a 230Mbit connection is irrelevant to me. Thus requiring large capacity drives for my gaming desktop is no longer a factor and I don't have to spend huge $$$.

 

[DaveSimmons]

There's a con to SSDs too. I can't read the tips on the loading screen on some games.

I was going to post that

That happens to me in many games. Those are all cases where with a 20th century platter drive I'd be waiting at least a second or three longer for that load screen to clear.

Mr. Hobo, like everyone else I disagree with your alternative facts. But perhaps you're the only sane person here and we're all crazy.

 

[Ichinisan]

Haven't read the thread, but even the title is confusing. Games load from storage drive. If storage drive is SSD, games load faster.

It really is that simple.

 

[mikeymikec]

When playing StarCraft 2 multiplayer, I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason why maps sometimes take freaking ages to load is because one of the players is loading from a HDD. On other occasions it's about 45 seconds quicker. If I'm correct, SSDs do funny things to expectations, because that ~45 second extra delay is often enough to make me think "has something gone wrong?", especially as the progress bar just sits at the same spot the whole time.

There's a con to SSDs too. I can't read the tips on the loading screen on some games.

Argh, Dragon Age: Inquisition was really irritating on this point! Although frankly I don't recall any particularly interesting text in this game, yet there was an awful lot of it.

 

[bystander36]

Argh, Dragon Age: Inquisition was really irritating on this point! Although frankly I don't recall any particularly interesting text in this game, yet there was an awful lot of it.

All the text it shows was in your journal and help menu, so you didn't miss anything not available to you to look up. Whenever I saw something that looked like I might need to know, I could always go back and look it up. But yeah, the SSD sure made those screens go by fast.

 

[Ranulf]

What games have "constantly loading levels"?

Damn near anything that is open world. MMOs especially. You will see a difference, namely in less stutters and hitches in gameplay.

 

[BoozeHobo]

I don't play those 2 games, so I can't say what I've experienced, but just to make sure, you did reinstall Windows on the SSD and the game too before making a judgement, right?

I also secure erased it before installing windows just to make sure I didn't install windows on a non-trimmed SSD.

 

[WhiteNoise]

I feel that SSDs do make a difference. I enjoy much faster load times for sure. With gaming that is all I really want. I still use HDDs for storage but even my Velociraptor outperforms all of my standard HDD's. I do have a number of games installed on that drive (Velociraptor) and though its faster than a standard HDD those same games still load faster on one of my SSDs for sure. I'd say it improves loading times by a lot. Not a bit.

 

[zinfamous]

You mean texture mods? Don't use them.

You don't use texture mods, or maybe other mods in a Bethesda game?

Are you supposed to be posting in the console forum, or...?

 

[Crono]

The OP's title and posts in this thread elucidate his point. He isn't seeing any performance benefit to an SSD for gaming when that was his expectation. Which has nothing to do with whether "anyone" is seeing a benefit overall, because clearly those of us who do still play games with loading screens (DOOM comes to mind) do for at least that reason.

Hard drives also don't wear well over time, so just from a reliability and performance standpoint outside of games it makes sense to have the boot/OS drive be an SSD even if you use a high capacity hard drive for game storage. I don't know how much a mechanical drive impacts frame time versus an SSD, but it's kind of a moot point (practically speaking, but I'm sure it's academically interesting) as hard drives are starting to be less and less compelling as SSD capacities rise and prices continue to fall.

 

[local]

When I built this rig almost two years ago I installed my first SSDs. One for 256GB windows and another 256GB for large demanding games. I also carried over a 1TB HDD that was my gaming drive. I will never go back to using just HDDs. Unfortunately though that 1TB drive started dying last week and I was disappointed to find that SSD prices are still pretty much the same as they were two years ago. So I bought a 2TB HDD for my data drive and I hope that it will be the last one I ever need.

With steam it is simple to store games you are not currently using just copy the game you want to play to the SSD then "reinstall" it in steam. It will check your files and link to the new location without redownloading. When done either uninstall it or just copy it back to the HDD so it will stay updated. That way I can keep a few dozen games installed and just switch the ones I am currently using to the SSD.

 

[JujuFish]

I was disappointed to find that SSD prices are still pretty much the same as they were two years ago.

I suspect that is due in part to the NAND flash shortage going on.

 

[CZroe]

...

Hard drives also don't wear well over time, so just from a reliability and performance standpoint outside of games it makes sense to have the boot/OS drive be an SSD even if you use a high capacity hard drive for game storage. I don't know how much a mechanical drive impacts frame time versus an SSD, but it's kind of a moot point (practically speaking, but I'm sure it's academically interesting) as hard drives are starting to be less and less compelling as SSD capacities rise and prices continue to fall.

Ever hear of MTBF? Also, back in the '90s Scott Mueler's Upgrading and Repairing PCs told me that the magnetic field of the Earth would weaken certain tracking and alignment parts of the platter that could not be renewed such that drives would generally begin to fail after five years. Not sure if today's drives are similar, but it's not like we're closer to real LLF today.

 

[KMFJD]

would it be worth it to put two ssd's in a raid? read that it really doesn't help

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

would it be worth it to put two ssd's in a raid? read that it really doesn't help

Don't bother, any performance increase would be negligible over a single one, and you'd be gaining all the wonderful potential problems of raid0 (I'm assuming you meant raid0). Just stick with a single, or multiple singles if you need more space.

 

[Rubycon]

There's lots at play here.
With high end graphics cards, dips in frame rates are likely due to your CPU not being able to keep your GPU busy.
This could explain why Ryzen users say gameplay is smoother despite overall framerate being lower than Kaby Lake 4C8T processors.
8C16T users would already be aware of this even if they didn't know.

And since using SSDs in my own system since early 2009, I could not imagine a primary computing system without its OS running on one.

 

[HitAnyKey]

Any game that uses swap or pagefile (due to memory), constantly writes to logs or has that internet check thing turned on will benefit from an SSD.
I am too cheap to put all my games on SSD but I think if your are a serious gamer I think for certain games it could help. At the very least put your OS on it so when Windows crashes or requires a reboot it is pretty painless.

 

[Malogeek]

Having Windows load in like 3 seconds is nice

 

[BoozeHobo]

Ryzen users say gameplay is smoother despite overall framerate being lower than Kaby Lake 4C8T processors.

What, seriously? Is that true? Does AMD Ryzen exhibit less frametime spikes than Intel?

 

[Malogeek]

What, seriously? Is that true? Does AMD Ryzen exhibit less frametime spikes than Intel?

Depends on the game. The poster child is BF1 which exhibits ultra smooth frame times on BF1. Discussed and argued extensively in the Ryzen threads.