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Advantages using an SSD for games ?

You'll be the first to load the map on mp games. Other then load times there is no advantage to using an ssd for games.
 
Hardly a difference on load times compared to a mechanical HDD. Skyrim was the only game I saw where the SSD helped load save games.

In Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider for example, the SSD did not make a difference in load times from what I could tell.
 
Makes a bit of a difference with MMOs. Try it with an affordable SSD. You will be a believer.
 
dhappy said:
Hardly a difference on load times compared to a mechanical HDD. Skyrim was the only game I saw where the SSD helped load save games.

In Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider for example, the SSD did not make a difference in load times from what I could tell.
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I find if windows is doing anything else on my hdd that bioshock hangs when loading content. Thats about it.
 
I've got an SSD for boot and a spindle for everything else, including Steam games. Comparing my game load times to a friend that has an SSD for boot and a separate SSD for Steam games, his game load times are much faster.
 
Only certain games load faster, some can load almost twice as fast. Some games that load in game like Skyrim, and Witcher 2 will have less hitching and stuttering because of the faster loads. But other than that, it's not really worth it.
 
Mainly MMO's will benefit, but so may other games with large streaming maps. (Skyrim)

Heroes of Newerth shows the match load progress of other players, I am ALWAYS first.
 
SSD is day and night for me in BF3 and PS2. Loading times is way faster and no stuttering in case of texture loading etc.

Recommended day 1 purchase for gaming.

Also if you switch from game to windows apps and back it also helps a lot!
 
Depends on the game really. Many games are limited by non disk stuff like if they do some kind of decode of textures so are more CPU limited. But there are games where it will make a difference, just not every one!
 
(A lot) More ram can help a lot too, especially the second load once win7 caches some of it. But between the RAM and the SSD's I enjoy being the first in just about every game. I beat out my roommate in SC2 loading times, while he has an i5-2500k and the same 512 m4 I have, but only 8gb ram.
 
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MMOs beneift the most. i.e. loading new zones and maps etc....

As far as static games like Bioshock, etc... it will make a difference overall but not as much as one would think.

Where SSD makes the difference isin loading apps and OS's. Also internet browsing is faster because stuff loads from cache faster as well as the browser loads faster.

You will also benefit from SSD in power savings, heat, noise, and longevity over a spinner.
 
wow, i have been wondering this for so long. Thanks for asking..and answering it all
 
I just picked up an 830 128GB for a Steam drive. With all my games, I still just barely top out at 60 GB. I'll probably throw a VST on it too. It's too bad that Samsung had to make the 840's the way that they are.
 
The HDD has always been by far the slowest component on a PC, so game devs usually designed around it so that it wouldn't impact gameplay, choosing to restrict disk activity as much as possible to game startup and level loading times. There have been very few exceptions to that, and the few exceptions showed why it was such a bad idea to rely heavily on the HDD during gameplay. The most infamous examples are most of Bethesda's games, including Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3, which do a lot of texture loading during gameplay; SSDs are quite beneficial to those games.

If you have lots of RAM, as is common these days, you can get the same benefits by loading games onto a RAM disk.
 
I can give you a use case scenario which is from an mmo.

A game like world of warcraft your character will appear in the zone before you may have fully loaded, so quick loading is important. This is true concerning world pvp. You have a higher chance of survival if say you used a portal to enter an area and you need a quick load time so that can fight back against any enemy players on the other side. This have saved me countless times in the past. I am fighting off Horde as my cohorts just stand in place waiting for their client to fully load the new zone and give them control.

A another game that an SSD gave you an advantage was in early version of World of Tanks. Earlier version of the game did not have a round start counter, the round started soon as someone was loaded into the game. This could give you almost 20 seconds of control time before someone with a mechanical drive was loaded.

Is an SSD required? no...are they nice to have? hell yes!
 
Biggest difference I've seen? Oblivion and Skyrim.

The way that game engine (Gembryo) implements resource streaming is fundamentally broken, and tends to cause loading pauses / stuttering. Installing Oblivion and Skyrim to an SSD pretty much kills the stutter (especially when you have mods loaded)
 
Unknown-One said:
Biggest difference I've seen? Oblivion and Skyrim.

The way that game engine (Gembryo) implements resource streaming is fundamentally broken, and tends to cause loading pauses / stuttering. Installing Oblivion and Skyrim to an SSD pretty much kills the stutter (especially when you have mods loaded)
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Oblivion is just horrible. No joke - Skyrim plays smoother than Oblivion on my rig in sig. I installed Oblivion to a hard drive and yeah - I don't know how I did it before.
 
rogerwilco said:
Just curious what advantages there is using an SSD for gaming ? Thoughts?
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Load times will decrease. For most of the games I've played from WoW to MW3 theres a perceivable difference.

I use SSD caching for hard drive with games. I really tell the difference in load times when a games loading from the hard drive vs the SSD.
 
For Skyrim it has been great switching to an SSD. Not absolutely necessary, but really noticeable when riding or running through environments. You virtually never get the normal load stuttering as you do if running it from an HDD. I would recommended it for sure if that kind of stuttering annoys you enough. It's the only game I've ran on both HDD and SSD and I could play this game for a long time before I start into another. But yeah, SSD has been awesome for this game.
 
It's already been said, but I second the remarks about running Skyrim from SSD.
It has been great switching to an SSD. Not absolutely necessary, but really noticeable when riding or running through environments. You virtually never get the normal load stuttering as you do if running it from an HDD. I would recommended it for sure if that kind of stuttering annoys you enough. It's the only game I've ran on both HDD and SSD and I could play this game for a long time before I start into another. No longer having that stuttering and loading keeps you deep into the environment and story of the game, which for me was absolutely worth it.
 
Cantharellus said:
It's already been said, but I second the remarks about running Skyrim from SSD.
It has been great switching to an SSD. Not absolutely necessary, but really noticeable when riding or running through environments. You virtually never get the normal load stuttering as you do if running it from an HDD. I would recommended it for sure if that kind of stuttering annoys you enough. It's the only game I've ran on both HDD and SSD and I could play this game for a long time before I start into another. No longer having that stuttering and loading keeps you deep into the environment and story of the game, which for me was absolutely worth it.
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I wouldn't doubt this one bit. I've never had Skyrim on anything other than an SSD. Oblivion, like I said before, I've had on both SSD and HDD. It really is a night and day difference. Especially because it sat on my 2TB 5900 RPM drive! :eek: Now before anyone chastises me for putting any games on that thing, Far Cry 3 ran just fine on it. In fact, it didn't stutter. Load times were a bit longer, but other than that - there wasn't much of a difference.
 
jbltecnicspro said:
I wouldn't doubt this one bit. I've never had Skyrim on anything other than an SSD. Oblivion, like I said before, I've had on both SSD and HDD. It really is a night and day difference. Especially because it sat on my 2TB 5900 RPM drive! :eek: Now before anyone chastises me for putting any games on that thing, Far Cry 3 ran just fine on it. In fact, it didn't stutter. Load times were a bit longer, but other than that - there wasn't much of a difference.
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There's nothing wrong with 5900RPM hard drives. Heck, my hard drive spins slower than that and i've got a super pc.
 
like others said, you'll load the map faster. then you'll wait the countdown timer more in alot of games like TF2 and BF.
 
I heard anecdotally that SSDs might help raise minimum frame rates in some games, but I am skeptical that it could happen outside of stepping from one zone to another, since you'd think most things would be loaded into RAM already, and the better game engines will preload data in adjacent zones so that you will in theory have a seamless transition from zone to zone.
 
blastingcap said:
I heard anecdotally that SSDs might help raise minimum frame rates in some games, but I am skeptical that it could happen outside of stepping from one zone to another, since you'd think most things would be loaded into RAM already, and the better game engines will preload data in adjacent zones so that you will in theory have a seamless transition from zone to zone.
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Perhaps, but it's probably negligible.
 
blastingcap said:
I heard anecdotally that SSDs might help raise minimum frame rates in some games, but I am skeptical that it could happen outside of stepping from one zone to another, since you'd think most things would be loaded into RAM already, and the better game engines will preload data in adjacent zones so that you will in theory have a seamless transition from zone to zone.
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Possibly by reducting time to load new textures and things like that, but the difference would be pretty small.
 
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