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We tested the impact of SSD speed on gaming performance in 11 titles & we analyzed from SATA to PCIe 5.0 to see whether upgrading to a faster NVMe SSD would have an impact (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 39 points 3 months ago (5 children)

They only tested frame rates. There was no real difference between PCIe versions and most games ran nearly as well from SATA SSDs.

It would have been nice if they tested load times.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I imagine this would show up as texture pop in as often they will load the lower resolution textures first while the higher resolution ones load in, which wouldn’t shown up in n average framerate graph. I’d like to see a frametime plot as well as 1% lows don’t really tell enough of the picture for stuftering.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    lmfao what in the hell does the storage medium have to do with frame rate. You can't really start rendering anything until you've loaded the things that should be rendered. And at that point the storage medium should be finished doing its thing.

    If your frame rate depends on your storage medium, I would consider that a bug, lol.

    Some games do streaming on the fly when you enter a new area to avoid loading screens for massive-world games like maybe the new Zelda games and GTA style games. But once the data is loaded, lay off the storage device.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    There are a number of games

    particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm

    that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.

    I'd assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it's got a strategy more sophisticated than just "load resource first time it's requested". But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.

    Bethesda uses the term "cell". I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.

    searches

    It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is "sublevel", for the units loaded.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/

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