Hard Drive Bottlenecks

[Orange The Hacker]

I have a pretty simple question:

 

When Linus is bench marking a CPU, or graphics card in a game, is it possible that the drive that the games are held in can provide a performance bottleneck? Would a slower drive that cannot read or write as fast make the game drop fps?

[Princess Luna]

5 minutes ago, Orange The Hacker said:

?

Don't worry about it, Linus uses high end SSDs to avoid it.

 

Also the drive will not affect the game's fps because all is loaded on the memory and such already, it only makes loading times either faster or slower while throwing the game's data on the memory.

 

The only case of fps drop would happen if it is a several bottleneck like playing off a USB 2.0 pen drive.

[Orange The Hacker]

I assumed so. I was just curious if it actually would make a difference if he didn't. Thanks anyway.

[SkilledRebuilds]

7 minutes ago, Orange The Hacker said:

I assumed so. I was just curious if it actually would make a difference if he didn't. Thanks anyway.

There can be SMALL cases found for a slow/defective HDD (with for example 30-60Mb/s Read&Write) that could potentially cause stuttering due to not being able to load big game assets 'on the fly' fast enough.

 

Super-Rare, likely unseen by the average user, mostly back in the day when Disk Defrags were happening in the background on peoples 'Gaming' drives.

 

But not impossible to create that scenario or have it happen on non-SSD machines with slower than average mechanical drives.

[Mira Yurizaki]

30 minutes ago, Orange The Hacker said:

I have a pretty simple question:

 

When Linus is bench marking a CPU, or graphics card in a game, is it possible that the drive that the games are held in can provide a performance bottleneck? Would a slower drive that cannot read or write as fast make the game drop fps?

Under ideal  most conditions, storage has almost no impact on performance. As some measure of evidence to this: http://www.pcgamer.com/game-performance-using-different-storage-media/

 

The reason is once the game is loaded, everything it needs lives in RAM. And if the game needs to stream data in, it's packed in a way to be as efficiently picked up by spinning media as possible and not ask for too much too often.

Edited August 1, 2017 by M.Yurizaki
Ideal is a strong word