Why are NVME no faster than SATA in games?

[The Sauce]

Was recently reading an article reviewing load times between conventional HDDs, SATA and NVME SSDs. In their testing the NVMEs were even a smidge slower on load times in games than the SATA drives. Does anyone have any explanation for this? Seems counterintuitive if read speeds are overall 6-8 times faster.

 

[leexgx]

Once you have a sata ssd or higher your cpu limited when loading the game data (the game data files are big and reads are typically sequential)

All that nvme will get you is 2-4x faster Install times (nvme benefits more the os or productivity applicationsdue to likely higher random access)

 

[piasabird]

I wonder if using an NVME PCI Express drive is slower when using a PCIE X16 video card? I know heat can affect it.

 

[leexgx]

I wonder if using an NVME PCI Express drive is slower when using a PCIE X16 video card? I know heat can affect it.

Lanes are typically dedicated (on ryzen it is, Intel seems its typically ran off the chipset)

 

[IntelUser2000]

Does anyone have any explanation for this? Seems counterintuitive if read speeds are overall 6-8 times faster.

There is no simple answer to this. It's dependent on a lot of factors.

Any time you see a single metric(like read speed) affecting performance immensely, it just means the particular code is not optimized very well.

Think of cars. 2x powerful engine does not net you 2x the speed. If it was, its because the whole thing is unbalanced in the first place by putting a real crappy engine. A faster car needs better engines, corresponding improvement in the drivetrain, improved aerodynamics. They all come into play.

 

[nosirrahx]

Look at the gap in speed at the 4KQ1T1 between top SATA SSDs and top NVMe SSDs, this is part of the equation. These numbers are not even remotely close to 6 to 8 times faster. 2 times faster is about all you get at this metric.

Another part is the processing required in setting a game up, this is not affected by storage speed.

All in all you need to understand that peak sequential transfer speed while real is also something that almost never happens. Games are composed of a huge number of files many of them quite small so sequential really does not apply.

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compa...2-1TB-vs-Samsung-860-Evo-1TB/m494791vsm423831

Look at one metric in particular here, 4K read. Notice that the gap is only 50% to 60% higher while the sequential read speed is more than 350% higher for the 970.

 

[kschendel]

In addition to what nosirrahx said, transfer speed isn't the long pole in the tent like it was with hard drives running at 40 MB/s effective speed. Make something that's only maybe 1/3 of the total time (if that) go twice as fast, and you've only sped the process up by 15% in round numbers.

 

[The Sauce]

Ah I see. I was under the assumption that game load times were really mostly reading textures into memory and such. Obviously I'm not a high level techie.

 

[TheELF]

Was recently reading an article reviewing load times between conventional HDDs, SATA and NVME SSDs.

Could you post that please?

In addition to all that was already said,all games are made for consoles so the amount of data that get's read into the game is balanced for very slow I/O and a slow CPU,you got to really try very hard to achieve a bottleneck on a PC with those games.