NVME (m.2) / RAM Drive / RAID / SATA III SSD Game Load Time Comparisons

Thank you OP. Saved me a ton of money!


Question, is voltage drift for <20nm TLC NAND already addressed with these TLC SSD's?

My information might be outdated. I still opt for the MLC for endurance.
 
Last edited:
enzolt said:
Thank you OP. Saved me a ton of money!


Question, is voltage drift for <20nm TLC NAND already addressed with these TLC SSD's?

My information might be outdated. I still opt for the MLC for endurance.
Click to expand...

Glad you found the info helpful!

Sorry, but I don't have any info about voltage drift.
 
Excellent work. I've built a few high-end systems recently and have felt something was off somewhere. They benchmarked beautifully, but we just weren't feeling that speed in the apps and these flat load times look to be part of that.
 
Zamboni said:
Excellent work. I've built a few high-end systems recently and have felt something was off somewhere. They benchmarked beautifully, but we just weren't feeling that speed in the apps and these flat load times look to be part of that.
Click to expand...

Thank you!

Yes I noticed it as well which is why I did some digging and then wrote this up. It's marketing for the most part, at least until the games (and file system?) can support these rediculously fast drives.

Yet that's the price for being early adopters on the bleeding edge, isn't it?
 
Zamboni said:
Excellent work. I've built a few high-end systems recently and have felt something was off somewhere. They benchmarked beautifully, but we just weren't feeling that speed in the apps and these flat load times look to be part of that.
Click to expand...

Which is why I was never interested in buying NVMe, because current gen SATA SSDs are already fast enough that responsiveness in most apps is limited purely by the UI and the underlying programming. I tested a pure RAMdisk on early 00s era games and that can't even load those instantly or faster than from a standard SSD.
 
Wait, so you didn't even install the games in the different drives you were using? You simply moved stuff along? This makes absolutely 0 sense. None whatsoever if you want to see what is going on.
 
He installed them in the sense that he copied the files to the drive being tested, then he used junction points, so steam (and the game) thought it was still in the original folder.
 
And I also moved steam and Fallout 4 completely and tested, as per my earlier post near the end of page 1.

It made zero difference.

Edit: just for you -

Fallout 4 1080P (no mods) (Steam + FO4 moved)
Used a save game from one hour thirty minutes into the game. (1920X1080 and all game settings manually set to max)
Timer started when press Enter to Confirm (load) was pressed and stopped when the game loaded in.

Tested with steam install + FO4 moved (no other common folder steam games). Verified that other games could not be opened by trying to open one.

Order of testing: NVME, SSD, RAM, RAID. RAM drive only enabled for RAM drive test.

8 Hard Disk RAID 6 Array (WD Black 5TB 128MB Cache 7200RPM drives) (18.1TB of 27.2TB free)
30.25
23.34
21.74

512GB 950 Pro NVME in PCIE 3.0 X4 slot (with passive heatsink) (boot drive, ~135GB free)
7.54
7.26
6.9

512GB 850 Evo (empty except for Steam + FO4)
7.33
6.80
6.95

48GB RAM drive (3200MHz DDR4 16-18-18-32)
7.06
6.76
6.89



Here's my original test for comparison:

Fallout 4 1080P (no mods)
Used a save game from one hour thirty minutes into the game. (1920X1080 and all game settings manually set to max)
Timer started when press Enter to Confirm (load) was pressed and stopped when the game loaded in.

8 Hard Disk RAID 6 Array (WD Black 5TB 128MB Cache 7200RPM drives) (18.1TB of 27.2TB free)
29.11
22.61
22.91

512GB 950 Pro NVME in PCIE 3.0 X4 slot (with passive heatsink) (boot drive, ~75GB free)
7.65
7.01
6.68

512GB 850 Evo (empty except for FO4)
7.49
6.81
6.67

42GB RAM drive (3200MHz DDR4 16-18-18-32)
6.9
6.54
6.63
 
Strange to see DA:I tied HDD and SSD load times. Even if it was raid. When I first played the game loading times was at least 10 times longer from a WD Black series HDD than from a 840EVO.
 
M76 said:
Strange to see DA:I tied HDD and SSD load times. Even if it was raid. When I first played the game loading times was at least 10 times longer from a WD Black series HDD than from a 840EVO.
Click to expand...

Just the save game load time? Because that's what I tested, and never how long the game takes to load from opening the game up to getting in game. Too many arbitrary splash screens, and an increased error in times.
 
arestavo said:
Just the save game load time? Because that's what I tested, and never how long the game takes to load from opening the game up to getting in game. Too many arbitrary splash screens, and an increased error in times.
Click to expand...
Yes the game load time from the main menu. Getting trough the splash screens was not significantly different.
 
M76 said:
Yes the game load time from the main menu. Getting trough the splash screens was not significantly different.
Click to expand...

Well, my RAID 6 is very fast (_some_ throughput tests show that it is faster than my NVME drive) for load times except in Fallout 4 - which is probaby because there are so many files to load and seek times play a significant role.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the report. What is the difference in time when verifying files? such as when you verify the integrity of game cache on steam, verify files on a large torrent, or run sfc /scannow on windows

I had to scan a 360GB torrent before I could upload it, and it took forever to do it with my ssd.
 
xSneak said:
Thanks for the report. What is the difference in time when verifying files? such as when you verify the integrity of game cache on steam, verify files on a large torrent, or run sfc /scannow on windows

I had to scan a 360GB torrent before I could upload it, and it took forever to do it with my ssd.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

I can tell you that scanning a larger (not as bad as 300GB) torrent takes awhile even on my RAID 6. Never had the d/l path on an NVME though.

That might be something that I'll check on later - for now, I'm just going to enjoy actually playing some games :jimlad:

Edit: I did a quick sfc /scannow on my OS drive (the NVME) and it took 5 minutes and 44 seconds. I'm not sure if it scans just the Windows files or the entire drive. 286GB used and 189GB free. Perhaps you can measure your time with your SSD?
 
Last edited:
I think SSDs put a lot of the loading for games bottleneck back on the CPU. I've been told most games load on a single thread.
 
arestavo said:
Thanks!

I can tell you that scanning a larger (not as bad as 300GB) torrent takes awhile even on my RAID 6. Never had the d/l path on an NVME though.

That might be something that I'll check on later - for now, I'm just going to enjoy actually playing some games :jimlad:

Edit: I did a quick sfc /scannow on my OS drive (the NVME) and it took 5 minutes and 44 seconds. I'm not sure if it scans just the Windows files or the entire drive. 286GB used and 189GB free. Perhaps you can measure your time with your SSD?
Click to expand...

With sfc /scannow on a 2TB samsung evo : (Windows 10 Pro x64)
5m 30s
5m 35s

Verify Integrity of Game Cache (Steam)
1m 10s company of heroes 2
1m 25s coh2

1m 3s Dying light (No dlc)
1m 2s Dying light
59s Dying light
 
I'm not much for bumping, but this should be available up top for everyone looking to maximize gaming performance on a buget.
 
What about load times for games with a single 1TB hard drive when compared to a 1 TB Sandisk SSD? Mind you, I am sure it is faster but, by how much?
 
ManofGod said:
What about load times for games with a single 1TB hard drive when compared to a 1 TB Sandisk SSD? Mind you, I am sure it is faster but, by how much?
Click to expand...

Not exactly what you asked for, but it should give you an idea:



Fallout 4 with its plethora of small files shows how much a regular HDD suffers when compared to a SSD. I'd wager that a fairly modded Skyrim also suffers from long load times with a standard HDD as well.
 
Last edited:
arestavo said:
Getting this back to the first couple of pages for a bit longer.
Click to expand...

I have 2 x 1TB SSD's and 2 x 1TB Harddrives. I place all my extra stuff like downloads on one hard drive and lots of my never or rarely played Steam games on my other hard drive. I have Windows Store games, some steam games, all my Origin and Uplay games on both of my SSD's and they make a significant difference in load times. (Two extreme examples is Dragon Age: Inquisition and Batman: Arkham Knight.)
 
I was originally thinking of doing a 1TB Samsung 960 EVO with a 4TB spinner for storage (using steam mover to move current games to the SSD for playing and back to the spinner for storage) but based on this I think maybe instead I'll buy two Crucial MX300 2TB drives and stripe them.

Additional benefit: My current setup is a 512GB 840 Pro and a 4TB spinner running Win 10 with my documents, downloads, pics and music libraries on the spinner and even though they supposedly issued a patch to fix it every 4th boot or so it still has the split drive issue where none of my apps will load for a really long time. With the raid setup I won't have to split my data so it should get rid of this issue permanently.
 
I think as mentioned already, the issue lays with NTFS probably. We need a more efficient file system that takes into account the tech improvements and requirements 25 years later.

I find it infuriating that I have invested in some of the best tech money can buy and push huge chunks of data with stunning speeds yet transferring 10GB of small files can still take forever.

As an aside I moved over to a NVMe drive last week. A PM961. I can't tell the difference over the Sandisk Extreme Pro SATA SSD it replaced.
 
I actually formatted an Intel 730 480GB drive with REFS, NTFS's successor (but not bootable yet), and I didn't see any decrease in load times. This leads me to believe that it isn't necessarily a file system bottleneck - or to put it another way, it isn't the current bottleneck for game load times.
 
arestavo said:
I actually formatted an Intel 730 480GB drive with REFS, NTFS's successor (but not bootable yet), and I didn't see any decrease in load times. This leads me to believe that it isn't necessarily a file system bottleneck - or to put it another way, it isn't the current bottleneck for game load times.
Click to expand...

Yeah I've seen some reports and benchmarks for REFS and in most cases its a bit slower than NTFS but it's doing a different job to NTFS in a way. We need a disk filesystem that can better handle small file transfers as well as the big ones.

I bet 25 years ago they didn't imagine software would be full of thousands of tiny kb files amounting to GB's in volume.
 
Thanks for this post. I hav seen a few vids on the subject but nice seeing exactly the difference. It'll be good evidence for a friend who is still on hdd
 
This shows that games are not bottlenecked by fast storage, i.e. anything above magnetic drive.

I just bought a 960 Pro 512GB but now I am tempted to return it as it is still in the box and get a bigger sata iii drive instead. I just am having a hard time finding out who really benefits from nvme in the consumer sector. I do tons of video encoding etc... but even then I am not sure there is a discernable difference. For a long time I ran an Intel 750 that blew up and I got the RMA back and sold it to a member on the forums since it was a brand new RMA drive. Went back to my Crucial M4 256 for OS and Kingston DataCenter 1 TB ssd for games storage.
 
Man, I got teased.
I was really hoping to see raid sata III SSDs.
Raid 850 evos must be pretty quick too.
Still, Thanks and Nice work.
 
Using a PNY CS2030 NVMe M2 as my main OS/proggies drive and got a pair of WD Red Nas 3TB drives in Raid-0 for my games.Load times on both OS and games show very little difference. Only difference I notice is when BF1/BF4 in Origin is loading it's slow-ass browser. Aside of that I don't see any difference between the two. My platters do me fine in games.

Now if i had the extra disposable income, i would snag up a pair of the largest SSD's I can and raid them for my games.

Thanks arestavo for all your hard work !
 
Looking at prices, it would seem that an Intel 600p 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe would be a good compromise.
M.2 drives are nice because they don't take any space or need any cables.
 
I've been thinking about getting an m.2 nvme drive, but I guess I'll wait since I still have space on my Sata3 SSD.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top