Why an NVME M.2 SSD is consistently only 1 second faster in loading a game than a SATA3 SSD?

[Sargon]

For some kind of a reason, NVME M.2. SSDs consisently load a game only 1 second faster than an SSD which is bound to the 550MBps of SATA3?

Why is that?

Where is the real bottleneck that renders NVME M.2 SSD ineffective in game loadings?

 

Of course copying files, NVME M.2 SSD will perform much better. But in game loading, this doesn't happen.

[RejZoR]

Because games are for the most part still coded for PC's with HDD's. Yeah, those spining dinosaurs. Sequential reads are not that important as are random reads. And there seems to be a point where neither matters anymore. NVMe drives have lower latencies, less overhead and higher bandwidth all around and it means little because the needs of games don't really exceed what SATA SSD's can already supply.

 

DirectStorage is suppose to change that where games will start pushing demands for lower latencies, less overhead, higher bandwidth, more IOPS. It's only then that we'll see things start changing. But it seems to be far away still. I'd be amazed if we even see a single PC game using DirectStorage. And more amazed if we get wide adoption in 5 years across all games.

[porina]

Games are not optimised for fast loading off SSD. They might even still be optimised for hard disk, where disk is slow. So they use a compute expensive compression method as the HD is limiting. This switches over to CPU limiting when the storage is fast.

[Doobeedoo]

Hopefully DirectStorage takes off asap though. Come on MS and game devs.