Gen 3 NVMe OS & Gen 4 gaming bottleneck question.

[JuicyMullet]

Hey everyone,

 

I just ordered two WD SN850x ssds and had a question about a bottleneck to my older gen 3 ssds.

 

Is there any potential downside to placing my OS on my older Gen 3 drives and then placing all my games/mods on the newer Gen 4 ones? I actually do currently store my Steam/Epic/GoG download files on my gaming SSD, but now that I'm going to more than double my speed I didn't want to have any sort of a bottleneck between my gaming drives and my OS drive for the latest games coming out.

 

So OS on Gen 3 and Games on Gen 4 no problem? Or potential problem for speed?

 

-Don't know if it matters, but I'm going to be placing all 4 drives on the MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk Motherboard.

 

Thanks. 

[Shimejii]

There is pretty much 0 benefit at this point in time getting a Gen 4 drive for gaming still on PC. Still absolutely 0 benefit. Direct storage still a few years away from getting a lot more games adopting its use, and even then i dont expect it to make performance go up a lot. 

 

Even a SATA SSD will be more then fast enough for most games so.

[tkitch]

the word "Bottleneck" needs to die in a fire.  It's useless.

 

In 99% of configurations today there are no "bottlenecks" anywhere.  There's just hardware limits, based on what you've bought.

 

Gen 3 and 4 are so bloody fast that outside of synthetic benchmarks, you'll never know there's a difference.  Ever.

[dogwitch]

the only time a bottle neck happens.

is when mobo not telling you its bifurcation the pci lanes.

[kokosnh]

He is asking, if placing an OS GEN 4 SSD like SN850X in the gen 3 M.2 slot, will bottleneck the performance.
the answer is no, it will not affect the performance.  The gen 3 M.2 slot only influence the sequential write and read, and the OS is not doing any of that ( and even if, the GEN 3 speeds are adequate ).
the benefits for getting top of the line GEN 4 SSD will still be visible in gen 3 M.2 slot, as the latency, and 4K random operation, are not affected ( and that is what is most important for fast OS SSD ).

[Dukesilver27-]

2 hours ago, tkitch said:

In 99% of configurations today there are no "bottlenecks" anywhere.  There's just hardware limits, based on what you've bought.

You're literally describing the cause of a bottleneck. As someone who studied Industrial Engineering, your comment sparked a rage in me.

Hardware capability/capacity is a big factor in bottlenecks in everything, not just computers.

2 hours ago, JuicyMullet said:

So OS on Gen 3 and Games on Gen 4 no problem? Or potential problem for speed?

Simple answer, no, because it doesn't have any connection.

You don't seem to understand how files are accessed, each process could access different assets located in different places at the same time.

Game texture streaming or fetching assets is entirely independent from the OS asset fetching, so even if you have your OS on an HDD, it won't affect your games. Now, alt tabbing is different, because it involves the OS, if your OS is on an HDD, it might be laggy.

[JuicyMullet]

58 minutes ago, tkitch said:

the word "Bottleneck" needs to die in a fire.  It's useless.

 

In 99% of configurations today there are no "bottlenecks" anywhere.  There's just hardware limits, based on what you've bought.

 

Gen 3 and 4 are so bloody fast that outside of synthetic benchmarks, you'll never know there's a difference.  Ever.

Thanks!

[Supersonicwolfe]

1 hour ago, JuicyMullet said:

Hey everyone,

 

I just ordered two WD SN850x ssds and had a question about a bottleneck to my older gen 3 ssds.

 

Is there any potential downside to placing my OS on my older Gen 3 drives and then placing all my games/mods on the newer Gen 4 ones? I actually do currently store my Steam/Epic/GoG download files on my gaming SSD, but now that I'm going to more than double my speed I didn't want to have any sort of a bottleneck between my gaming drives and my OS drive for the latest games coming out.

 

So OS on Gen 3 and Games on Gen 4 no problem? Or potential problem for speed?

 

-Don't know if it matters, but I'm going to be placing all 4 drives on the MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk Motherboard.

 

Thanks. 

Storge would be your least thing to worry about, given direct storge is still a very new thing. 

 

Games such as Cyberpunk2077 got such bad rep mostly because a lot of people still tried to play the game on HDDs... Hence they introduced a "Hard-drive mode"...

 

A good Gen 3 and Gen 4 drives only have a meaningful different in benchmarks. However beware Dram-less drives, they are not good at random i/o and may take up your system ram.

 

You probably want your OS on the SSD connected directly to CPU (usually only one m.2 is directly to CPU, while all others have to go through the chipset.)

[JuicyMullet]

11 minutes ago, Dukesilver27- said:

You're literally describing the cause of a bottleneck. As someone who studied Industrial Engineering, your comment sparked a rage in me.

Hardware capability/capacity is a big factor in bottlenecks in everything, not just computers.

Simple answer, no, because it doesn't have any connection.

You don't seem to understand how files are accessed, each process could access different assets located in different places at the same time.

Game texture streaming or fetching assets is entirely independent from the OS, so even if you have your OS on an HDD, it won't affect your games. Now, alt tabbing is different, because it involves the OS, if your OS is on an HDD, it might be laggy.

This is exactly what I was after. Thank you so much. 

 

And you're right, I deal with a very few select security programs for my company, and I wasn't sure if games were dependant on the OS for any of their procedures. 

[NobleGamer]

52 minutes ago, tkitch said:

the word "Bottleneck" needs to die in a fire.  It's useless.

 

In 99% of configurations today there are no "bottlenecks" anywhere.  There's just hardware limits, based on what you've bought.

 

Gen 3 and 4 are so bloody fast that outside of synthetic benchmarks, you'll never know there's a difference.  Ever.

People use "bottleneck" to mean one or more combined hardware limits causing some performance difference, whether measurable or not. If people want to use one word instead of several in that context, I don't have a problem with that.

 

I otherwise agree that people shouldn't fret about certain "bottlenecks" that have practically no perceivable difference, including pcie 3 vs 4 nvme SSDs.

 

The only possible exception MIGHT be if there's a very specific productivity use like code compiling or video editing, but that's a very big if. I have yet to hear about a modern game that reads/writes small or random files during gameplay so much that it leans on an SSD's random IOPS and there being a perceivable difference between pcie 3 and 4 - That would be the super long shot or dare I say strawman worst case scenario.

[JuicyMullet]

4 minutes ago, Supersonicwolfe said:

Storge would be your least thing to worry about, given direct storge is still a very new thing. 

 

Games such as Cyberpunk2077 got such bad rep mostly because a lot of people still tried to play the game on HDDs... Hence they introduced a "Hard-drive mode"...

 

A good Gen 3 and Gen 4 drives only have a meaningful different in benchmarks. However beware Dram-less drives, they are not good at random i/o and may take up your system ram.

 

You probably want your OS on the SSD connected directly to CPU (usually only one m.2 is directly to CPU, while all others have to go through the chipset.)

Thank you.

 

Does having it tied directly to the CPU affect load times or performance?

[Supersonicwolfe]

8 minutes ago, JuicyMullet said:

Thank you.

 

Does having it tied directly to the CPU affect load times or performance?

For Cyberpunk2077? Yeah that was the reason the dev said cause texture/animation breaking. But I played the game on an old Samsung 850EVO SATA SSD just fine.

 

I do know DRAM-less SSD that may store the cache in RAM, so it will take up RAM space and CPU time (tiny amount). This attributes to the poor I/O performance, some are as slow as HDDs. But on the other hand, some drives like Crucial P3 works fine as an entry level SSD.

 

Connect SSD directly to CPU basically give you a tiny amount responsiveness, physically less copper trace data have to go through, and you don't have to worry about the chipset. In my opinion making sure the OS is responsive is higher priority than game load time.

Besides, you can just install games on the OS drive too.

 

For games there are 3 tiers of storage and they often being access in this order

VRAM -> RAM -> SSD

Games mostly have problem if data didn't get into VRAM fast enough. This is causing 4060TI 8GB can't run games or can't load texture properly. Doesn't matter how fast the SSD is as long as it's not so slow like a HDD.