We examined the influence of SSD pace on gaming efficiency in 11 titles — we analyzed from SATA to PCIe 5.0 to see whether or not upgrading to a sooner NVMe SSD would have an effect

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We examined gaming efficiency with each NVMe and SATA SSDs throughout 11 video games to find out if upgrading to a sooner drive is value it. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been a staple of PC gaming for years, however their significance grew considerably with the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2020. Both consoles characteristic high-speed NVMe SSDs and storage architectures designed to totally leverage their capabilities, enabling sooner asset streaming and lowering conventional storage bottlenecks.

As a end result, sport builders have more and more developed their titles for SSDs, with many trendy video games now itemizing them at least system requirement. But how precisely do video games use SSDs throughout gameplay, and does upgrading to a sooner SSD really enhance gaming efficiency? In this text, we’ll look at SSD exercise in trendy video games and decide whether or not increased storage speeds translate into a greater gaming expertise. Given the surge in SSD costs, will a slower drive ship comparable gaming efficiency to high-end options?

Load Times

While this text focuses totally on SSD exercise and efficiency throughout gameplay, loading instances stay some of the vital benefits of solid-state storage. It’s well-known that video games can take a number of minutes to load from an HDD, whereas trendy SSDs usually cut back load instances to only a few seconds.

The hole between SSDs is far smaller. In some titles, PCIe NVMe drives can load video games a number of instances sooner than SATA SSDs, however in lots of circumstances, the distinction is comparatively small. Naturally, totally different generations of PCIe SSDs have even smaller variations, with flagship drives usually delivering solely marginal enhancements to loading instances regardless of their considerably increased sequential throughput.

Disk I/O Operations in Games

Before inspecting the efficiency outcomes, it is necessary to grasp the sorts of disk I/O operations that video games usually generate. Two key metrics are block measurement and queue depth. The block measurement of an I/O operation defines the dimensions of the chunk of information a sport will learn at one time, whereas queue depth is the variety of pending I/O requests {that a} storage gadget has queued at anybody time.

During gameplay, the overwhelming majority of storage exercise consists of random learn operations as sport property are streamed from storage into reminiscence. Sequential reads are much less frequent, and write exercise is mostly minimal.

Microsoft provides several storage optimization recommendations for developers in its DirectStorage documentation. Although these guidelines are intended for DirectStorage-enabled titles, many of the underlying principles apply to games in general, even if they do not use DirectStorage. Among Microsoft’s recommendations are the use of block sizes of at least 32k and sufficiently high queue depths to maximize storage throughput.

Modern games typically employ 32k or 64k random I/O requests. However, despite Microsoft’s recommendations, most games continue to operate at relatively low queue depths.

Performance Comparison

Now we will examine SSD activity and compare performance across different SSD generations. The games included in our testing were selected because they either exhibited higher storage bandwidth than usual, had greater peak or average SSD utilization, had support for DirectStorage, or because they are popular titles that many gamers would be interested in seeing analyzed from a storage-performance perspective.

To place as much stress as possible on each SSD, all testing was conducted with 16GB of system memory. Using a smaller memory capacity reduces the amount of game data that can be held in RAM, forcing games to rely more heavily on the SSD than they would in a 64GB configuration. It also better reflects the configurations found in many mainstream gaming PCs. That said, we observed little difference in SSD activity when comparing 16GB and 64GB memory configurations.

When interpreting the SSD activity data below, it is important to understand that 100% utilization does not necessarily mean an SSD is reaching its maximum rated bandwidth. For example, a PCIe 4.0 SSD reporting 100% utilization is unlikely to be delivering its full 7.5 GB/s of sequential read throughput. In gaming workloads, SSDs can become fully utilized while transferring data at significantly lower bandwidths.

This is because the speeds advertised by SSD manufacturers are based on sequential read performance, whereas games primarily rely on random reads. While random-read throughput can approach sequential-read speeds under certain conditions, doing so requires sufficiently large block sizes and high queue depths. Although modern games often use relatively large block sizes, they typically do not use the high queue depths needed to fully saturate an SSD’s theoretical bandwidth.

We have also chosen not to test any traditional hard drive disks. There are many documented examples of modern games performing poorly, taking an unbearably long time to load, or having visual issues when installing the game on an HDD. There are some games where this may not be an issue, but we still do not recommend playing modern games on an HDD.

The testing was conducted in gameplay. No built-in benchmarks were used. We found that SSD activity increases with higher settings, so that is where we focused our testing. We set each game to its absolute maximum settings.

We used HWiNFO to measure SSD activity and set it to the lowest polling rate possible to capture activity accurately without incurring overhead.

Test system

Forspoken

Forspoken was the first game to support DirectStorage on PC. DirectStorage is a feature that aims to allow games to make full use of high-speed storage devices while reducing the CPU overhead associated with making reads from disk.

Looking at the table below, you can see that it does exhibit a fairly high peak and average bandwidth. In fact, it’s the highest average bandwidth we have seen in any game we have tested. Average utilization is also quite high, and the game hits 100% SSD utilization frequently.

SSD Activity at 1080p
	Peak Bandwidth	Average Bandwidth	Peak Utilization	Average Utilization
SATA SSD	485 MB/s	240 MB/s	100%	52%
PCIe 3.0	1324 MB/s	301 MB/s	100%	50%
PCIe 4.0	2956 MB/s	374 MB/s	100%	30%
PCIe 5.0	2761 MB/s	307 MB/s	100%	19%

SSD Activity at 1440p
	Peak Bandwidth	Average Bandwidth	Peak Utilization	Average Utilization
SATA SSD	486 MB/s	271 MB/s	100%	59%
PCIe 3.0	1645 MB/s	318 MB/s	100%	56%
PCIe 4.0	2931 MB/s	382 MB/s	100%	28%
PCIe 5.0	2890 MB/s	352 MB/s	100%	17%

SSD Activity at 2160p
	Peak Bandwidth	Average Bandwidth	Peak Utilization	Average Utilization
SATA SSD	565 MB/s	264 MB/s	100%	56%
PCIe 3.0	1656 MB/s	317 MB/s	100%	54%
PCIe 4.0	2886 MB/s	379 MB/s	100%	26%
PCIe 5.0	2901 MB/s	366 MB/s	100%	19%

SSD Activity at 1080p
	Peak Bandwidth	Average Bandwidth	Peak Utilization	Average Utilization
SATA SSD	562 MB/s	80 MB/s	100%	63%
PCIe 3.0	582 MB/s	83 MB/s	100%	62%
PCIe 4.0	572 MB/s	82 MB/s	91%	14%
PCIe 5.0	1047 MB/s	83 MB/s	100%	13%

Load Times

Load Times

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