Game delays only on SSD

[PotatoBrandon]

I normally install all of my games on hdd and everything is fine for the past couple years. Today, I decided to install a new game, which is pretty light weight one, on it and the delay happened. Whenever I get a game or going to pre-game to pick characters, I always be the last to get in. I installed it back to my hdd and everything seems fine again, no delay or anything. I checked temp and it was normal (47 C). I still have a lot of free space for it. I also installed the driver, still didn't work. I'm completely lost at this point, please help! Any advice is appreciated!

My specs:

AMD Ryzen 7 1700X

Geforce GTX 1080ti ftw3

ASUS Prime X370-Pro

G.Skill F4-3200C16-8GTZR DDR4 x2 (16G)

TOSHIBA HDWD 120

NVMe Samsung SSD 960 EVO

 

Here is a video to show what I'm taking about:

 

[Daharen]

While I can't give you a straight answer and probably no one can, it's almost certainly software side. The only way to know for sure would be to test another computer with a different SSD, and all other variables removed. 

That said, particularly with online titles in the early days of SSDs some developers realized it was possible to abuse the loading speeds to get unfair advantage over other players with your SSD, and they forced artificial load times, IE timers, instead of loading at the maximum possible speed. This would be done purely via identifying the type of hard drive, and so wouldn't effect HDD's which if this is the case, and the timers were set extremely aggressively, might result in the SSDs loading 'slower.'

If you suspect this is the case, simply check the usage on the SSD during the load screens. Set the polling to maximum, and record the data so you can go back over it in detail. You should see your SSD barely being used at all if it's just a timer artificially limiting your loading, if it's actually some sort of hardware based problem then you will see the SSD maxing out during these periods. In the latter case you're dealing with very poor programming and optimization, so still software, but of a less intentional and malicious sort, and a more incompetent and negligent sort. 

Unfortunately if I'm right there's not much you can do about it. I suppose you could run HDD's in a very big RAID 0 array to get close to SSD speeds, and still end up having the hardware register it as a HDD, but that's assuming the developers weren't clever enough to do something to check for RAID usage. No matter what if they are trying to limit your ability to load too quickly, odds are they will succeed and you'll get worse load times ironically the faster your drive (Or at least artificially set and determined load times that 'could' be worse). 

No real way for me to verify. You could write the developers and ask though, they will usually concede these sorts of things 'vaguely' so long as you don't ask for details. 

[Daharen]

As a side note, when it comes to loading games, often times you deal with issues where the problem is more complicated than people realize. IOPS is not as intuitive as people think. I think most benchmarks use 8kb files as the IOP measurement, but it matters because latency becomes the bottleneck with more variable read and write data. If you talk to a programmer who actually has to deal with loadtime optimizations they can go on for hours about the headaches this causes, and it is in fact the reason you see SSDs that are literally in some cases 100x faster than HDDs from years ago, but the load times are maybe improved 20-30%, which is definitely not even close to proper scaling. 

Most people think IOPS is what determines this, and while they're right (Sequential only matters for large organized unprocessed data), IOPS vary based on the data size, and at really small data packet sizes you begin to become more effected by latency of the Hard Drive than by the actual throughput it can handle in general, and more importantly at REALLY low depths, talking the movement of data sections in the bits or bytes rather than Kb or KB, the IOP numbers listed in marketing materials become meaningless, your processor and memory become the keys, and in fact, you benefit more from REALLY tight memory timings than REALLY high memory speeds, and you need a processor with an outstanding IPC and extremely high single thread frequency, and even then you'll still never be able to even know if the SSD is being utilized properly or not, as it's seldom even possible to eliminate all the bottlenecks to measure the performance capacity when requests are that small, and latency is the primary factor and not throughput itself. 

This relates, because if you check you'll see HDDs have a tendency to offload 'slightly' more data to RAM than SSDs. In ALMOST all cases this has practically zero effect, and the difference is nearly completely negligible, we're talking never more than a few extra hundred megabytes of RAM usage... But a couple hundred megabytes of RAM usage when ALL of that data is nothing but small requests, can make a big difference, because the HDD isn't having to call that data at all, and now what you're really doing is comparing the speed of a partial RAM drive (Inadvertently) to a SSD. The RAM drive will always win in this battle.

It's possible but very very unlikely this is what is happening. Again this would be poor programming if that was the case. Programmers should always push all data subject to frequent small requests onto RAM, that's what it's for, but when a program is poorly optimized that doesn't happen, and programs can discriminate based on the type of hard drive because in general it can be more efficient not to hog up RAM when you can quickly pull the data off of a faster SSD, but only so long as the data being pulled is in larger request sizes that don't force the RAM and CPU overhead to increase. 

[PotatoBrandon]

Thank you so much for the advice. I can't really test my computer with another ssd since I don't have an extra one and most of my friends don't use M.2. And if your prediction is correct, then there is nothing that I can do to fix this. I just have to stick with my hdd for now.