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Comparison of loading times on HDD vs SATA SSD vs PCIE 3.0 NVME in 2020 games

Nyt Ryda

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Thought this was a pretty interesting test done by TestingGames on Youtube.

Definitely seems like everyone should be installing their games on a SATA SSD by now.

Text summary of video below :
HDD was a Western Digital Blue 1Tb 7200rpm SATA 6Gb/s 64Mb cache
SATA SSD was a Samsung 860 Evo 1Tb
NVME was a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1Tb PCIE 3.0

Cyberpunk 2077
HDD - 29.400 seconds
SATA SSD - 9.700 seconds
PCI 3.0 NVME - 8.801 seconds

Assassins Creed Valhalla
HDD - 40.851 seconds
SATA SSD - 12.900 seconds
PCI 3.0 NVME - 11.850 seconds

Horizon Zero Dawn
HDD - 22.500 seconds
SATA SSD - 8.551 seconds
PCI 3.0 NVME - 8.551 seconds

Microsoft Flight Simulator
HDD - 1m15.601
SATA SSD - 34.251 seconds
PCI 3.0 NVME - 30.650 seconds

Watch Dogs Legion
HDD - 48.800 seconds
SATA SSD - 12.650 seconds
PCI 3.0 NVME - 12.050 seconds

 
Yoh. Flight Simulator looks like it will make your storage cry, never mind your CPU and GPU.

Thanks for the interesting post. Now I just need someone to tell me if DirectStorage will be faster on NVMe Gen 4 compared to Gen 3...
 
Yoh. Flight Simulator looks like it will make your storage cry, never mind your CPU and GPU.

Thanks for the interesting post. Now I just need someone to tell me if DirectStorage will be faster on NVMe Gen 4 compared to Gen 3...

The PC space is changing like crazy over the next year or two o_O

- SAM/PCIE Resizeable BAR right now
- DirectStorage/RTX IO in developer preview this year
- 4800MHz DDR5 launched by the end of the year
- PCIE 5.0 with Alder Lake by the end of the year

Exciting times, but games will still be held back while devs push out the last PS4/XB1 games this year and next year.
 
PCIE 5.0 is a flex - what will actually use that speed in gaming?
 
I only moved to NVME (PCIE3) due to form factor (from SATA SSD). Spinners are used for backup / long term storage.
 
Yeah PCIE 4.0 is still not even utilized on the 3090, meaning the 5080/90 and even 6080/90 won't benefit from 5.0.

One of the reasons that I'm super thankful for when it comes to SSD, is my laptop. Remember how a laptop got slower over time? That doesn't happen with an SSD. Carrying around a HDD obviously damaged it over time especially with the occasional fall, but my i7 lappy which is 4 years old still starts up in like 10 seconds max.

It's a NVME though, 7700hq with 8gb ram and a GTX 1050. It's perfect for office work. I'll use it till it dies then I'll just fly in another from Amazon. No ways will I ever do office work on a kak laptop again.
 
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PCIE 5.0 is a flex - what will actually use that speed in gaming?

Well PCIE 4.0 x4 NVMEs have already saturated their bandwidth, hitting 7Gb/s in artificial benchmarks.

I think what would be a better use for PCI 5.0 is to allow more devices to run at higher speeds.

For example, a motherboard with 16 lanes of PCIE 5.0 split over 8 lanes to the first PCIe slot, 4 lanes to the first M.2 slot and 4 lanes to the second M.2 slot means we could have a pair of 15GB/s PCIE 5.0 NVME's running, whilst the PCIE 5.0 capable GPU still has access to 8 lanes of bandwidth that is on par with the 16 lanes of PCIE 4.0 which should be plenty for the GPU.


As mentioned, there's like a 1-2.5fps difference between PCIE 3.0 and 4.0 on a RTX3090 so PCIE 5.0 seems way overkill for GPUs but what is yet to be seen is just how much PCIE bandwidth Direct Storage needs.
 
One of the reasons that I'm super thankful for when it comes to SSD, is my laptop. Remember how a laptop got slower over time? That doesn't happen with an SSD. Carrying around a HDD obviously damaged it over time especially with the occasional fall, but my i7 lappy which is 4 years old still starts up in like 10 seconds max.

It's a NVME though, 7700hq with 8gb ram and a GTX 1050. It's perfect for office work. I'll use it till it dies then I'll just fly in another from Amazon. No ways will I ever do office work on a kak laptop again.

I'm still rocking an Acer Aspire i5 8th gen laptop. 4c8t, 8Gb RAM, 1366x768 screen and mechanical HDD 😅
TBH I don't notice a huge difference when doing simple stuff like word/excel/access/browsing/email/coding.

But maybe I should move to something with an M.2 drive and full HD screen.
 
I'm still rocking an Acer Aspire i5 8th gen laptop. 4c8t, 8Gb RAM, 1366x768 screen and mechanical HDD 😅
TBH I don't notice a huge difference when doing simple stuff like word/excel/access/browsing/email/coding.

But maybe I should move to something with an M.2 drive and full HD screen.
If you don't swing it around much it could last quite a while actually. So keep using that until you start to feel it slow down, then you just swop it out with a SSD. Sorted for years :)
 
I'm still rocking an Acer Aspire i5 8th gen laptop. 4c8t, 8Gb RAM, 1366x768 screen and mechanical HDD 😅
TBH I don't notice a huge difference when doing simple stuff like word/excel/access/browsing/email/coding.

But maybe I should move to something with an M.2 drive and full HD screen.
What type of coding are you doing?
 

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