Game Load Times on HDD and SSD

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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Nasty Nathan Kirsch of Legit Reviews fame has put together a good read on real world load times when it comes to games. He takes a look at six SSDs and throws in a 10TB spinning drive for good measure. He covers traditional SATA drives as well as M.2 drives, and throws and Intel Optane PCIe drive into the mix.


Over the years we've tried to include game load times in our storage drive benchmarks, but it is tough. If you are comparing just one HDD to an SSD the benchmarks are easy, but when you are comparing a dozen or more drives to one another it gets tough. It's something that can easily be done to show the differences between technologies or interfaces, but if you look at just SATA III SSDs that are all basically interface limited the drives will all be clustered together in the chart and the performance differences message gets lost.
 
Good article, I'm honestly surprised to see that much of a difference, most things I've read previously showed no real difference on game loading for SSD vs a spinner. Looks like i need to upgrade my game drive at some point :)
 
It is nice to see the data. I appreciate the time and effort to create it.

I just wish that more then 1 game had been tested. The numbers might be unique to how FF14 loads.

Anyone know of a more comprehensive testing?
 
nice to see, difference between ssd to ssd isnt to noticeable for me but my god do I notice the difference in VR on SSD vs HDD. When in VR your basically frozen in the dark when a game first start to load and it makes you super aware of hard drive load times lol
 
rgMekanic said:
Good article, I'm honestly surprised to see that much of a difference, most things I've read previously showed no real difference on game loading for SSD vs a spinner. Looks like i need to upgrade my game drive at some point :)
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?

Even on consoles, I've noticed significant differences between a stock drive and an SSD. Obviously real world is different than synthetic tests, but I haven't heard anyone who thought an SSD wasn't miles better when it came to PC games.
 
Elf_Boy said:
It is nice to see the data. I appreciate the time and effort to create it.

I just wish that more then 1 game had been tested. The numbers might be unique to how FF14 loads.

Anyone know of a more comprehensive testing?
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is why I never read Legit Reviews. These incomplete reviews are a way of life for them.

FUCKING TechSpot is more comprehensive than these lazy asses!
 
Elf_Boy said:
It is nice to see the data. I appreciate the time and effort to create it.

I just wish that more then 1 game had been tested. The numbers might be unique to how FF14 loads.

Anyone know of a more comprehensive testing?
Click to expand...

I've tested this back and forth, some games ain't pushing the disk and is either loading with one core or two 100% and isn't disk limited.
quick rule of thumb seems to be, many files = benefits ssd, large containers doesn't matter much.

on another note.
if you have a 10 year old 1tb drive like I had a samsung 1tb 7200rpm 32mb cache and changed it to a 8tb 256 mb 7200 rpm and I experienced a minimum of 3x performance across all metrics and it helped massively for me.
You may want to invest in your last hdd around this time, they've gotten better too but I hope it's the last time I feel like I need hdd capacity....
 
Elf_Boy said:
It is nice to see the data. I appreciate the time and effort to create it.

I just wish that more then 1 game had been tested. The numbers might be unique to how FF14 loads.

Anyone know of a more comprehensive testing?
Click to expand...
What only a single game tested? Then I'm not even clicking the link it's so worthless.

There are games where the difference is 10 to 1 and then there are games where it's virtually the same.
 
This is a much more thorough review, even though it's just testing the Optane caching.

https://techreport.com/review/31784/intel-32gb-optane-memory-storage-accelerator-reviewed/2

Tests two different games and multiple app load times with 7200rpm hdd vs midrange SATA SSD vs Optane.

And this older tests compares all SSDs against that same hard drive, although on an older game set:

https://techreport.com/review/26701/samsung-850-pro-solid-state-drive-reviewed/6

And here's modern game load times for the 960 Pro, with SATA SSDs as a comparison.

https://techreport.com/review/30813/samsung-960-pro-2tb-ssd-reviewed/5

That's about as thorough a drive comparison I've seen anywhere.
 
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I transitioned to a 1TB SSD (from a 1TB 7200rpm single platter HDD) for my games drive a couple years back, and the difference was highly noticeable.

What surprises me the most about this comparison is that the ridiculously priced NVMe drives don't offer much over the SATA SSD offerings.
 
rgMekanic said:
Good article, I'm honestly surprised to see that much of a difference, most things I've read previously showed no real difference on game loading for SSD vs a spinner. Looks like i need to upgrade my game drive at some point :)
Click to expand...


That hasn't been my experience at all.

I noted a HUGE decrease in load times when SATA SSD's first came around, compared to the hard drives that preceded them.

Like, less than half the time in many cases.

I also noticed less and less of an improvement as newer SSD's have come out, with the shift to PCIe, NVMe and M.2 drives having only marginal impact compared to a decent SATA SSD.

So, I guess I'm surprised the hard drive wasn't much slower than it was, and I'm surprised the PCIe/NVMe/M.2 drives show any real improvement over their SATA SSD cousins.


Maybe it is very title dependent. Also, might depend on caching. If you have a ton of RAM and have loaded the game since the last reboot, there might be some impact of RAM drive caching going on here.
 
I use a mix myself.

I don't have a lot of money to test, however....

On my 2tb barracuda it loaded games fine.

When I added my samsung 840 512 data it decreased load times noticeably.

With the Sammy booting the drive load times seemed faster (no is writes?)

When I switched to my Sam 960 m.2 pro the os speed way noticing faster than the sata ssd. However the m.2 game launches were about the same for me as the sata ssd.

I currently use the hdd for older games. The sata ssd for newer games and a few huge games on the m.2

That, for me, seems to be my best case scenario without spending a lot.

Any thoughts.

I play a lottle everything, assassins, FO4, MoO, WOT, SC, TF2, BF, RL
 
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probably not the same thing, but putting a ssd in my ps4 pro made it super nice for gaming. For any steam machine,etc..I mostly have stuff on ssd's for games that are heavy players now.
 
viper1152012 said:
I use a mix myself.

I don't have a lot of money to test, however....

On my 2tb barracuda it loaded games fine.

When I added my samsung 840 512 data it decreased load times noticing.

With the Sammy booting the drive load times seemed faster (no is writes?)

When I switched to my Sam 969 m.2 pro the os speed way noticing faster than the sata ssd. However the m.2 game launches were about the same for me as the sata ssd.

I currently use the hdd for older games. The sata ssd for newer games and a few huge games on the m.2

That, for me, seems to be my best case scenario without spending a lot.

Any thoughts.

I play a lottle everything, assassins, FO4, MoO, WOT, SC, TF2, BF, RL
Click to expand...


Personally I just don't keep a lot of games installed at a time.

I invest in one small fast SSD, and keep maybe 3 games installed at a time, and when I am done playing them uninstall them.

If I want to play them again, I just install them again.

This way I am not wasting local storage, and can always run the games I am playing off of my fastest drives.

Then again, having gigabit internet helps, but even so I've never understood those who absolutely have to ahve all of their games installed at the same time. Makes no sense to me.

23659342_10105050411546662_9139451912800138535_n.jpg


For a while I was backing up games to my NAS when I uninstalled them, but then I realized there was no sense to it. I could reinstall them off of Steam almost as fast as I could restore the backups off of my NAS, so I stopped wasting my time and space.
 
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In my machine, I have an 850 Evo SSD, and old, unkown, 7200 RPM HDD and finally a crappy Apple 5400 RPM HDD from an old Macbook.

Between the SSD and the 7200 RPM drive I don't notice much of any perceptible difference when playing. I mean the difference is there, but because I'm not doing straight A/B testing back to back and I'm just playing the games then it really is kind of negligible. It's not like I'm noticeably twiddling my thumbs any more for one or the other.

Loading off that 5400 RPM drive however....that takes ages.
 
I have like 28 games installed, saved movies not on my central storage and music.

I can't bring myself to say I am wasting space, due to some of them being massive.
 
I have a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 drive and I am always the first player to load a new map after the map change. So a SSD does make a difference, but only by like 1-3 seconds.
 
[21CW]killerofall said:
I have a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 drive and I am always the first player to load a new map after the map change. So a SSD does make a difference, but only by like 1-3 seconds.
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Funny story.

I've had 64GB of RAM in my desktop since ~2011-2012 (I forget when I installed it)

I had the extra ram because I broke down my old deskotp parts based server, and figured might as well use the ram for SOMETHING. So then I went looking for something to do with it.

I was really into Red Orchestra 2 at the time, but was frustrated, because even with my relatively recent super fast SATA SSD (this was before PCIe/NVMe SSD's) I'd be fighting with other people for the classes I wanted to play in game. It became a mad rush to click on which class you wanted to play that map, before someone else did.

So, I created a RAMDisk. Loaded the entire game into RAM every time the machine booted. I never had any competition ever again. I could always take my sweet time, choose the class I wanted to play and not have to worry about others :p
 
I think its really a shame about the size and pricing of the Optane drives. If you could get the same size at a similar price as a samsung 960 m.2, it might be worth a shot, but hard to justify a the current price premiums and sizes. Maybe the next refresh will be bigger and priced more reasonably.
 
Yeah its nice to run at max speed but with just a SATA SSD my PC is bloody quick.
Intels loss, they could capitalise.
Too expensive to bother with.
 
zerogg said:
I think its really a shame about the size and pricing of the Optane drives. If you could get the same size at a similar price as a samsung 960 m.2, it might be worth a shot, but hard to justify a the current price premiums and sizes. Maybe the next refresh will be bigger and priced more reasonably.
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Nenu said:
Yeah its nice to run at max speed but with just a SATA SSD my PC is bloody quick.
Intels loss, they could capitalise.
Too expensive to bother with.
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Definitely hard to justify- but the main thing accelerated by Optane is OS stuff followed by productivity applications, basically anything that uses a lot of small files. Further, for most people, all of that fits into <100GB easily- so the 280GB Optane SSD is certainly a reasonable product for the desktop.

The bigger issues are that Optane's performance boost is felt, but doesn't make anything actually really faster, and that it doesn't yet come in a full-speed PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 package.

Zarathustra[H] said:
I also noticed less and less of an improvement as newer SSD's have come out, with the shift to PCIe, NVMe and M.2 drives having only marginal impact compared to a decent SATA SSD.

So, I guess I'm surprised the hard drive wasn't much slower than it was, and I'm surprised the PCIe/NVMe/M.2 drives show any real improvement over their SATA SSD cousins.
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Main issue with application loadtimes, including games, is that the game code itself seems to get in the way: regardless of how much CPU, RAM, and drive speed you throw at many games, load times just don't seem to go anywhere. SSDs, basically anything that approaches SATA3 speeds, largely exceed what just about any game can actually use. I can't really say why this is but I will certainly posit that beyond getting load times reasonable for the available hardware, load time optimization is very likely so low on developers' cut lists that it just never gets done.
 
Game load time on my old 7200rpm drive: forever.
Game load time on my SSDs: too slow.
Game load time on my Samsung SSD when it had senility bug: don't ask.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Definitely hard to justify- but the main thing accelerated by Optane is OS stuff followed by productivity applications, basically anything that uses a lot of small files. Further, for most people, all of that fits into <100GB easily- so the 280GB Optane SSD is certainly a reasonable product for the desktop.

The bigger issues are that Optane's performance boost is felt, but doesn't make anything actually really faster, and that it doesn't yet come in a full-speed PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 package.
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I have been reading Brahmzys thread about his Optane 900p experiences and I believe him (even if he is a bit rough with his audience).
Because of that yesterday I decided to get one if the price is reasonable.
It isnt near reasonable.
In 2 years it will be even faster, larger and a much better price.
And there may be decent competition from other SSD mfrs.
I can easily afford to get one but I'm not suffering even slightly, I'm amazed how quick my PC is.
I'm going to wait.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Personally I just don't keep a lot of games installed at a time.

I invest in one small fast SSD, and keep maybe 3 games installed at a time, and when I am done playing them uninstall them.

If I want to play them again, I just install them again.

This way I am not wasting local storage, and can always run the games I am playing off of my fastest drives.

Then again, having gigabit internet helps, but even so I've never understood those who absolutely have to ahve all of their games installed at the same time. Makes no sense to me.

View attachment 65571

For a while I was backing up games to my NAS when I uninstalled them, but then I realized there was no sense to it. I could reinstall them off of Steam almost as fast as I could restore the backups off of my NAS, so I stopped wasting my time and space.
Click to expand...

It is a pain to set up everything every few weeks for some games. A 1TB SSD is just the minimal you need if you play more than 2-3 games and you want your OS installed on it. Stuff that I keep on because I play them frequently or don't want to spend an hours setting them up every few weeks:

DCS World - 94GB <-- Grows every few months
BF4 - 72.5GB
BF1 - 79.5GB
ArmA 3 - 33.9GB <-- Grows every few months
Rising Storm 2 Vietnam - 32GB <-- Will likely grow with future updates

That is 312GB between five games. I typically have a few SP games installed as well as I wait for DLC, want to play them a bit more (to screw around if open world, or replay a few missions if a good game). Or those few games that are too long to finish in one sitting like Fallout or Assassin's Creed Unity, which I came back after a few months to finish off the side quests (there were probably 50-60). And in 2-3 SP games and we're easily at 100-180GB of extra space. That, along with an OS, will easily fill up a 500GB drive.

When I am done with a game for good I uninstall it. Maybe I'll replay it in a few years are reinstall it. I only have three games out of my entire Steam library installed. One is Homeworld 2 Remastered but that runs fine off an HDD so I didn't count it. Honestly though I haven't touched that in well over a year. Exception to the rule I suppose.
 
nvme c for currently played games/os, ssd d,e,f for newer games, hdd g for old games, hdd H for music, etc.

OxMoR96.jpg
 
Honestly I'm surprised current hdd are that competitive, would love to see 1, 2, and 4 TB for a comparison.

But really the metric isn't represented correctly, it's not that the 960 Pro is 31% faster, it's that the 10 TB is 43.9% slower.
 
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for the record, I've seen slight improvements to game load times by installing games on SSD versus HDD, but not enough to write home about.

Most games actually load faster with a faster CPU, as when they say 'loading' what they're really doing is 'compiling'.

full disclosure I run SSDs in RAID, and load times are still annoying.
 
I've been using an ioDrive2 (1.2TB) for games for a long long time.. also at one stage I was creating RAMDrive's (ImDisk Toolkit is free and easy) and copying my steam or Origin folder from the ioDrive2 into RAM with a startup script.

Personally, I found there was very little reward for all the effort and overkill hardware.. Battlefield 3 & 4 would be quicker but then you're in a 'fortnite' situation.., waiting for the rest of the world to connect anyway.. :)
 
Seventyfive said:
At a certain point aren't all these just getting bottle necked by DMI 3.0?
Click to expand...

Nothing at all close to useful is going to be bottle necked by DMI. Fastest drive out there are <= QD4 is the 900P and it sits at roughly 1/2 of DMI max sequential.

To hit DMI limits you need to be copying from a 3+ stripe set on the DMI side to a 3+ stripe set on the CPU side. And at that point, WTF are you wasting your $10k+ with such a bad setup. DMI has more than enough bandwidth for any real world use case that doesn't require either a Xeon or EPYC.
 
DejaWiz said:
I transitioned to a 1TB SSD (from a 1TB 7200rpm single platter HDD) for my games drive a couple years back, and the difference was highly noticeable.

What surprises me the most about this comparison is that the ridiculously priced NVMe drives don't offer much over the SATA SSD offerings.
Click to expand...

NVMe increases theoretical bandwidth limit, it doesn't change low QD random and sequential performance. It like going from 100mb ethernet to 10gbe and thinking you should get a much lower ping.
 
rgMekanic said:
Good article, I'm honestly surprised to see that much of a difference, most things I've read previously showed no real difference on game loading for SSD vs a spinner. Looks like i need to upgrade my game drive at some point :)
Click to expand...

The most drastic differences I've seen are level load heavy games like MEA, KCD, and Witcher 3. As I have a number of similar platters/ssd's he used in testing I can say my experiences are pretty spot on the same. Occasionally when a new game comes out and it feels slow on SSD, I'll drop it on a platter. My first thought is, wow this is like a flashback to the eighties loading on a tape drive. I know thats extreme but I still remember the 45minutes plus to load TelenGard on my Atari.

I'll also say that SSD RAID0 can improve load times, but not necessarily enough to justify the added expense unless someone gets a bunch of small ones cheaper than a single large. I still have 2 m.2 samsung 850's in raid on my MSI GT80 Titan and they load around 20-30% faster than their non-raid desktop counterparts in my other rig.

The only other thing I'd add to this is that the on board I/O chipsets can significantly affect speeds too, not just the obvious cpu/ram/port specs. MARVELL/Intel etc. As I've swapped components from one rig to another over the years I've always been a bit surprised to see some of the differences. Things like going from USB3/SATAIII topping around 45-75MB/s to 120-150MB/s with nothing more than changing motherboards.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Personally I just don't keep a lot of games installed at a time.

I invest in one small fast SSD, and keep maybe 3 games installed at a time, and when I am done playing them uninstall them.

If I want to play them again, I just install them again.

This way I am not wasting local storage, and can always run the games I am playing off of my fastest drives.

Then again, having gigabit internet helps, but even so I've never understood those who absolutely have to ahve all of their games installed at the same time. Makes no sense to me.

View attachment 65571

For a while I was backing up games to my NAS when I uninstalled them, but then I realized there was no sense to it. I could reinstall them off of Steam almost as fast as I could restore the backups off of my NAS, so I stopped wasting my time and space.
Click to expand...

For longer SSD life though it's best to keep a good amount of free space. I too have a gig internet but do like keeping some games around (I have a 1TB SSD just for games) as I tend to bounce back and forth. Also the issue is some games getting insanely big, with several now over 100GB which is a big chunk of space. Personally I found it funny how they compared mechanical drives to SSD, the difference is massive. I didn't see much difference going from SATA3 SSD to PCIe, at least not that noticeable although some games with longer load times like Ass Creed Origins does seem quite a bit faster to load on PCIe than say on my laptop. There are other factors as well though.
 
What is a good high end but but not give up a kidney and a nut expensive m.2 nvme drive?

Maybe I should do some of my own testing.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
So, I created a RAMDisk. Loaded the entire game into RAM every time the machine booted. I never had any competition ever again. I could always take my sweet time, choose the class I wanted to play and not have to worry about others :p
Click to expand...

Or $20 gets you Primocache which made a noticeable difference on my machine overall - even using a Samsung Pro m.2 drive. Being able to dedicate Optane as l2 cache (and avoid Intel's crappy software) is even better.

The nice thing about an intelligent cache - it cache's everything. OS, games, etc. I used to move games between my HD and SSD - now I don't bother. First load of things might be a little slower until cached, but after that things zip along famously. I kind of regret buying as large an SSD as I did now, primocache works that well.
 
zkostik said:
For longer SSD life though it's best to keep a good amount of free space.
Click to expand...

This really isn't the case anymore. It was once true, but modern SSD's are much better than the old ones used to be.

For instance, I have two 512GB SATA Samsung 850 Pro drives mirrored for a TB of cache space on my ZFS NAS storage pool.

They are constantly at about full capacity in order to make the most out of cache performance.

Here is the SMART data from one of them: (they are both about the same)

Code: 
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   094   094   000    Old_age   Always       -       26909
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       73
177 Wear_Leveling_Count     0x0013   083   083   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       985
179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot   0x0013   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total  0x0032   100   100   010    Old_age   Always       -       0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total  0x0032   100   100   010    Old_age   Always       -       0
183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0013   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
187 Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032   074   056   000    Old_age   Always       -       26
195 ECC_Error_Rate          0x001a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
199 CRC_Error_Count         0x003e   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
235 POR_Recovery_Count      0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       52
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       96774426110


The reason keeping the old drives less than full was a good idea was so that wear leveling would work properly, resulting in less write amplification, having to rewrite fewer LBA's

So, this drive has been in my server for 26909 hours (~3.1 years) spending most of that time at or near full capacity.

These have a 512 byte block size, so the LBA's written translate to approximately 45 terabytes written.

According to the wear leveling count of I still have 83% life left in them.

So, in this operation they will be around for 15 more years, or a total of 18 years while being abused in this manner. That is WAY longer than expected when I bought them, meaning that running a drive full really isn't a concern at all these days. At least not if you have a good one, like a Samsung 850 Pro.

OCZ drives on the other hand, I've owned 5 or 6 of them, ran them in much less harsh conditions (mostly idling, between 10 and 50% full, on desktops,laptops and HTPC's) and all of them died before their second birthday...

SSD's have improved. Most of their old school fragility is gone.
 
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