Claims that SSD is “vastly better” for gaming? Since when?

[Montyjnc]

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/starfield-system-requirements-doing-pc-a-favor/?amp

 

Of course file transfers/boot times etc are much better on an SSD, but since when did a HDD significantly impact IN GAME performance? This article claims it causes frame drops and such? Did I miss some enormous change? My steam hdd works great…

[seanondemand]

Depends on the game. Newer games are streaming in big assets all the time from storage, and HDDs can cause issues with that. Cyberpunk has an HDD mode for this reason.

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

2 minutes ago, Montyjnc said:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/starfield-system-requirements-doing-pc-a-favor/?amp

 

Of course file transfers/boot times etc are much better on an SSD, but since when did a HDD significantly impact IN GAME performance? This article claims it causes frame drops and such? Did I miss some enormous change? My steam hdd works great…

It does. Loading times, frame drops, etc. Especially with direct storage coming out, why in the HECK would you use an HDD for games in 2023? HDD is for long term file storage only

[porina]

Older or more basic games that preload data might not be impacted outside of loading times, but dynamic content loading is more modern titles is going to to suffer. I'd even go a step further, and would like to see latest games even depreciate SATA SSDs. Optimisations to make games usable on slower drives usually mean it can't get benefit from faster ones. I feel this is one of the easier areas to improve PC gaming experience.

[Budget DIY]

7 minutes ago, Montyjnc said:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/starfield-system-requirements-doing-pc-a-favor/?amp

 

Of course file transfers/boot times etc are much better on an SSD, but since when did a HDD significantly impact IN GAME performance? This article claims it causes frame drops and such? Did I miss some enormous change? My steam hdd works great…

Some creative games, especially open world, can create massive savegame files. And I just HATE to wait for a save to complete. Didn't do benchmarking, but I feel like an SSD is an improvement here too.

[Agall]

10 minutes ago, Montyjnc said:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/starfield-system-requirements-doing-pc-a-favor/?amp

 

Of course file transfers/boot times etc are much better on an SSD, but since when did a HDD significantly impact IN GAME performance? This article claims it causes frame drops and such? Did I miss some enormous change? My steam hdd works great…

Even having an HDD plugged into a gaming PC can result in noticeable input latency since the drive is still negotiating with the CPU with interrupt signals/requests.

 

I've seen a couple scenarios where a secondary HDD is the singular source of input latency in someone's gaming PC, but those were likely failing drives taking the CPU hostage. 

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

3 minutes ago, Agall said:

Even having an HDD plugged into a gaming PC can result in noticeable input latency since the drive is still negotiating with the CPU with interrupt signals/requests.

Yeah I avoid having and HDD all together. I have two 1tb Firecuda 530s with virtually endless durability ratings. If I need more storage I'll just get a NAS

[TeraSeraph]

3 hours ago, Montyjnc said:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/starfield-system-requirements-doing-pc-a-favor/?amp

 

Of course file transfers/boot times etc are much better on an SSD, but since when did a HDD significantly impact IN GAME performance? This article claims it causes frame drops and such? Did I miss some enormous change? My steam hdd works great…

SSDs drastically reduce stuttering due to loading new areas and assets in games which could be considered to be frame drops as the GPU and CPU have nothing to render for a brief moment. The difference is night and day. I have all my games on a 2TB M.2 PCIE 4.0 x 4 drive. 

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

12 minutes ago, micha_vulpes said:

As other people said, for some titles that can load all assets to ram and Vram ahead of time its not going to really make much of a difference in game.

Games that constantly cull the render AND purge assets from memory when its culled will then need to hit the drive again to reload the asset when you get your cone of vision close to it again. The best example I can actually think of this is Skyrim On PS3 ( and PC to a later extent) Because its draw cells are so limited (iirc is 5 or 7 cells) you get massive frame drops in some locations, especially if you are moving diagonally relative to the draw cells and have to load multiple cells of assets at once. That took a game that ran at 30fps and cratered it to 15-20 when it was reading from disk. Replacing the system drive with an SSD greatly improved the performance ( though it was still hampered by the sata bus in the ps3)

Open world games are usually more afflicted with this sort of asset management than more linear "level" based titles.
 

I just don't get why anyone would have an HDD drive for games with how dirt cheap SSD's have become. There was a "refurb" (Probably brand new actually just returned) 2tb Samsung 980 pro for like $99 or something the other day on sale... There is literally zero reason to use an HDD anymore besides long term storage for important digital files or for like a NAS.

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

1 minute ago, TeraSeraph said:

I have all my games on a 2TB M.2 PCIE 4.0 x 4 drive. 

"This is the way".

 

I have two 1tb Firecuda 530s. I am going to add a 2tb SSD to round out my storage to 4gb proabbaly around Black Friday if they keep plummeting in price.

[GuiltySpark_]

57 minutes ago, Montyjnc said:

Did I miss some enormous change? My steam hdd works great…

Yes you did and I'm sure it doesn't work as well as you think it does compared to modern options.

[tkitch]

since several years ago.  Sorry you missed the bus.

 

For anything other than bulk storage, SSDs are absolutely the way to go today and have been for a while.  (Such as my PC with 6TB of SSDs.)

[Lurking]

In 2023, are we still discussing benefits of SSD for drives that get used often? Or did we accidentally open a thread that started in 2016?

 

Not talking about those 12TB long term storage drives where HDD still may make sense. But for anything 4TB or smaller, this shouldn't even be discussed anymore. Like no one discusses the use of fax devices anymore.

 

Especially since this is about gaming rigs with expensive hardware, saving on an SSD seems most silly. Especially since many good 2TB m.2 cost not more than equal sized HDD. 

[lewdicrous]

How’s the weather under the rock? /s

 

If you care about speed, even a little bit, then SSDs are the way to go, as everyone else has mentioned.

1 hour ago, Montyjnc said:

My steam hdd works great…

You’re used to HDD performance. You’ll feel the difference once you move to an SSD. 
You can also watch comparison videos on YouTube if you want to see just how storage impacts in-game performance. 

[Xiee]

1 hour ago, Deadpool2onBlu-Ray said:

It does. Loading times, frame drops, etc. Especially with direct storage coming out, why in the HECK would you use an HDD for games in 2023? HDD is for long term file storage only

I still use an HDD for a lot of my games. I don't play many AAA titles anyway, so most of the games I play don't really need a super-fast SSD for loading times.

[Agall]

1 hour ago, micha_vulpes said:

I still have games on platters, but I am not really a heavy gamer or they are so old and the asset sizes so small it makes no real difference. Cost per GB I'm pretty sure you still get a lot more storage per dollar once you move away from the 1tb drives. +A  lot of people keep bringing their old drives forward so they may as well utilize the space if they have it and the limitations dont bother them
 

Only viable reason in 2023 to have any data on an HDD is for ease of data recovery while having better failure indications (in my opinion). HDDs generally have a slower death than SSDs, so detecting failure is generally easier. Anything after that should be on tapes and anything before that on SSDs though.

 

Cost/GB on SSDs is so low in 2023 that its really no longer a justification. There's also arguments for power draw and size+weight constraints with HDDs compared to SATA or NVMe M.2 SSDs when we're talking <10TB of total capacity. Past that, there's an argument for HDDs to get proper RAID5/6 redundancy while having >10TB.

 

I still buy HDDs in 2023 but its for servers/NAS/backups, but those are also done on tapes. Anything else mass storage, its just better to run SSDs, whether SATA 2.5" or M.2.

[wasab]

Since the time I no longer need to stare more than a second on loading screen 

[ApolloX75]

I don't even use HDDs with Windows XP anymore.

[atxcyclist]

2 hours ago, lewdicrous said:

How’s the weather under the rock? /s

 

If you care about speed, even a little bit, then SSDs are the way to go, as everyone else has mentioned.

You’re used to HDD performance. You’ll feel the difference once you move to an SSD. 
You can also watch comparison videos on YouTube if you want to see just how storage impacts in-game performance. 

I was mostly ambivalent on getting an SSD because of the price per GB, but back in 2014 I had a hard drive fail and decided to take the plunge. I’ve never looked back, because the performance difference is so massive.

 

i couldn’t imagine running a newer open-world game like Cyberpunk off a spinning hard drive, it would be horrific.

[emothxughts]

Don't wanna wait a few minutes to load into my game, I'd much rather have it load under a minute. Simple as.

[Doobeedoo]

Yes new games taking advantage of faster storage as baseline. Just need it to be standard for DirectStorage too in time.

[NobleGamer]

On 6/22/2023 at 9:56 AM, Deadpool2onBlu-Ray said:

It does. Loading times, frame drops, etc. Especially with direct storage coming out, why in the HECK would you use an HDD for games in 2023? HDD is for long term file storage only

Because...

• I relocated from a fiber backed ISP to DSL at 7mbps and 5G mobile home internet both with data caps
• I already loaded up 2TB worth of SSDs with mostly games I might want to play
• A spare HDD is all I have left, and I can move stuff to SSDs as I play then uninstall the games on SSDs
• Some games can be played off HDD if they're small enough (<few gigs)
• Any extra money I could spend on an SSD needs to be spent on fixing up my home
• Some cheap SSDs have crap sustained read/write speeds that fall into HDD levels of performance. See: PCPP SSD benchmarks

Just some personal perspective.

 

Yes, otherwise it is correct that HDD can affect in-game performance depending on whether the game consistently read/writes to storage. The last & most egregious use of this I had with an HDD + game before I went full SSD was Subnautica. It could have also been the dumpsterfire implementation pushing Unity too far, but the point is the game tracked every single object in game and saving could be done anytime anywhere, hence constant drive / random usage.