Gaming Load Times Question.

[Redrooster]

What determines your load time in a game, the read or the write?

 

I have been gaming on a 500gb HDD for 5 years and my partner gifted me a 2tb micro USB 3.0 hard drive for games. Now it says it's only for Xbox games but I got it to work for my pc (Up until 2019 my primary gaming device was ps4 and xbone, that all changed when I got my rtx 2060)

 

The old HDD that I used for 5 years has a sequential Read/Write speed of 89MB/s and 78MB/s respectively

 

That 2tb micro USB 3.0 hard drive has a sequential Read/Write speed of 117MB/s and 115MB/s respectively

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, Redrooster said:

What determines your load time in a game, the read or the write?

Primarily read speeds, with a little more weight on the 4K random performance or IOPS (more or less same metric) depending on the game.

 

Secondarily CPU performance. As crazy as it sounds, an app isn't ready to run once it's in memory. The app has to initialize, which takes CPU power. I've seen a fast CPU with an HDD match the loading time of a slower CPU with an SSD.

 

[Redrooster]

1 minute ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Primarily read speeds, with a little more weight on the 4K random performance or IOPS (more or less same metric) depending on the game.

 

Secondarily CPU performance. As crazy as it sounds, an app isn't ready to run once it's in memory. The app has to initialize, which takes CPU power. I've seen a fast CPU with an HDD match the loading time of a slower CPU with an SSD.

 

If you are talking about the "4KiB" speeds, my 2tb game drive doubles my HDD.

 

Additionally, I didn't even think about the CPU. Does the single core performance dictate the load times, or is it the number of cores and threads?

[Mira Yurizaki]

4 minutes ago, Redrooster said:

Additionally, I didn't even think about the CPU. Does the single core performance dictate the load times, or is it the number of cores and threads?

That's up in the air, depending on what the game is doing while it's loading.