33% more FPS in BF1 on SSD vs HDD!?

[Sebastian]

Hey everyone,

 

This article recently popped up on my facebook feed:

 

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7911/upgrade-test-gtx-760-vs-1060-ssd-hdd-system/index.html

 

In it, the author benchmarks a few games using either a GTX 760 or 1060 combines with either an HDD or an SSD (i.e., 4 combinations in total). According to his results at 1080p, 3 out of 4 games (Desus Ex: Mankind Divided, Overwatch, and BF1) all had 20-30% framerate increases ONLY by switching from an HDD to an SSD. I have to say that this was pretty unexpected for me, since I assumed that, at least for online shooters like Overwatch and BF1, everything would be loaded into system memory and VRAM at the start of the match, thus making your type of storage irrelevant (except when it comes to loading times). 

 

I also feel the need to point out that they claim to be using an i5 760 (LGA 1156) on an H97 (LGA 1150) motherboard, and it's also not the first time I've seen some unusual things on Tweaktown. That being said, if moving some games from an HDD to an SSD can really improve performance so dramatically, I figured people here might want to know about it. 

 

I guess the only way to know for sure would be to test it myself, so that's probably what I'll do. Out of the four games tested in the article, I only have Overwatch and BF1, so I suppose I'll go test those out, then come back and post here again later, assuming anyone is interested.

[Fattedd]

This seems highly unlikely. I once tested this with CS:GO and saw no improvements at all, except for loading times of course. 

 

I'm interested in your results if you plan to test it.

[Aytex]

The i5 is really impacting performance, I get ~90+ on bf1 with AA on 

 

I don't think its worth the hassle though, interesting article either way  

 

[SCHISCHKA]

 i dont believe they did not notice difference in GTA 5 between the two drives, especially since they used WD blue drive. maybe they just had a really crappy SSD or they are completely full of it and just made shit up

 

now that i think about it. all of the games should show no change like GTA 5 did, because the stutter you get from loading maps won't reduce the average FPS as much as 33%. Maybe they recorded 0FPS during the loading screen and included this in their average?

 

Anthony Garreffa your experiment is highly questionable.

[Enderman]

If his CPU is that old then the HDD he was using must have had horrible speeds and been a bottleneck.

[Mira Yurizaki]

I'm going to test this out real quick on my HDD for DX:MD at least (but Steam needs to verify my backup for some dumb reason so this'll be a while)

[ARikozuM]

They need to retest everything.

 

#1: i5-760 on LGA1150, no.

#2: He doesn't mention how many passes he uses for each bench.

[Sebastian]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

They need to retest everything.

 

#1: i5-760 on LGA1150, no.

#2: He doesn't mention how many passes he uses for each bench.

That's my initial reaction as well. Which is why I want to test it for myself, just in case I can get a bunch of free FPS :P.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Sebastian said:

That's my initial reaction as well. Which is why I want to test it for myself, just in case I can get a bunch of free FPS :P.

You would if you only have 3GB of VRAM. The drive has to purge and send data to the GPU. Seeing that BF1 only uses 3.6GB of VRAM though, I doubt anyone with more would get that much out of it.

[Sebastian]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

You would if you only have 3GB of VRAM. The drive has to purge and send data to the GPU. Seeing that BF1 only uses 3.6GB of VRAM though, I doubt anyone with more would get that much out of it.

If the graphics card doesn't have enough VRAM, wouldn't the system memory come next (before system storage)? This is why it seems so bizarre to me that storage should have any impact on FPS whatsoever. At any rate, I currently have BF1 on an HDD, so if nothing else comes out of this testing, at least I'll definitely have faster loading times!

[Mira Yurizaki]

My results came back: 33 Min, 45 Avg, 55 Max on DX:MD 1440p on ultra quality with a GTX 1080. I did fire up Performance Monitor to see how the drive was being used and there was almost zero activity on it.

 

So I'm going to declare the article bunk.

[ARikozuM]

24 minutes ago, Sebastian said:

If the graphics card doesn't have enough VRAM, wouldn't the system memory come next (before system storage)? This is why it seems so bizarre to me that storage should have any impact on FPS whatsoever. At any rate, I currently have BF1 on an HDD, so if nothing else comes out of this testing, at least I'll definitely have faster loading times!

It would but your VRAM is dynamic and will change unused data for needed data as it goes along. I would normally think that performance may increase by 5fps and no more.

[ARikozuM]

4 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

My results came back: 33 Min, 45 Avg, 55 Max on DX:MD 1440p on ultra quality with a GTX 1080. I did fire up Performance Monitor to see how the drive was being used and there was almost zero activity on it.

 

So I'm going to declare the article bunk.

I think they used 3GB cards to force the cycling of data. You and I would gain very little and would lose a lot for having to waste space on an SSD for crap.

[matrix07012]

I noticed that moving Just Cause 3 and GTA V to my SSD removed micro stutter, but it didn't increase FPS.

[Mira Yurizaki]

38 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I think they used 3GB cards to force the cycling of data. You and I would gain very little and would lose a lot for having to waste space on an SSD for crap.

Well that is a fair point.

 

On one hand it drives a point home: you can increase your FPS if your setup isn't up to snuff. I found an article that showed if you have a fast enough CPU with an HDD, it can match a lower end CPU with an SSD on loading times.

 

On the other: why the hell are you driving ultra quality settings on a lower-end card? Really people, stop doing that. Do you put an aftermarket twin turbo on your Nissan Versa and expect good things to happen?

[ARikozuM]

3 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

On the other: why the hell are you driving ultra quality settings on a lower-end card? Really people, stop doing that. Do you put an aftermarket twin turbo on your Nissan Versa and expect good things to happen?

You mean the HEMI in my Aveo doesn't do anything?

 

I honestly think the article is full of junk data. I'll test out my 750 Ti if I can remember to do so.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

I honestly think the article is full of junk data. I'll test out my 750 Ti if I can remember to do so.

It has some good points, but it also has some really bad ones too.

[ARikozuM]

1 hour ago, M.Yurizaki said:

It has some good points, but it also has some really bad ones too.

Mind if I ask what the good points are?

[Mira Yurizaki]

11 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Mind if I ask what the good points are?

That an SSD can help with graphics performance if you have a crappy CPU and not enough VRAM.

[Sebastian]

Well now I've finally had the time to do a bit of testing, and I can say that I saw a negligible difference in framerates for both Overwatch and Battlefield 1. I'm using a core i5 4670K @ 4.2 GHz (sad, I know haha), and a GTX 1080 Founder's Edition, with 8 GB of RAM. I tested both games at max settings at 1440p.

 

Luckily, however, there WERE two good things to come out of this. First of all, since I tested the games on HDD first, and SSD second, both games are now gonna stay on the SSD, since I DID obviously notice a big improvement in loading times. Second, during my testing I noticed that ticking the "epic" preset in Overwatch caused the game to automatically set my resolution scale to 122%, which corresponds to around 42% more pixels. When I manually changed this to 100%, my average fps went from the 90-100 fps range up to the 135-145 fps range. Hooray!

 

I recommend for all you Overwatch players out there that you take a quick look in your graphical settings to see if the game automatically applied a >100% resolution scale.