GoKawiilWe tested gaming performance with both NVMe and SATA SSDs across 11 games to determine if upgrading to a faster drive is worth it. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been a staple of PC gaming for years, but their importance grew significantly with the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2020. Both consoles feature high-speed NVMe SSDs and storage architectures designed to fully leverage their capabilities, enabling faster asset streaming and reducing traditional storage bottlenecks.
As a result, game developers have increasingly developed their titles for SSDs, with many modern games now listing them as a minimum system requirement. But how exactly do games use SSDs during gameplay, and does upgrading to a faster SSD actually improve gaming performance? In this article, we'll examine SSD activity in modern games and determine whether higher storage speeds translate into a better gaming experience. Given the surge in SSD prices, will a slower drive deliver comparable gaming performance to high-end alternatives?
Load Times
Load Times
While this article focuses primarily on SSD activity and performance during gameplay, loading times remain one of the most significant advantages of solid-state storage. It's well known that games can take several minutes to load from an HDD, whereas modern SSDs typically reduce load times to just a few seconds.
The gap between SSDs is much smaller. In some titles, PCIe NVMe drives can load games several times faster than SATA SSDs, but in many cases, the difference is relatively small. Naturally, different generations of PCIe SSDs have even smaller differences, with flagship drives often delivering only marginal improvements to loading times despite their substantially higher sequential throughput.
Disk I/O Operations in Games
Disk I/O Operations in Games
Before examining the performance results, it's important to understand the types of disk I/O operations that games typically generate. Two key metrics are block size and queue depth. The block size of an I/O operation defines the size of the chunk of data a game will read at one time, while queue depth is the number of pending I/O requests that a storage device has queued at any one time.
During gameplay, the vast majority of storage activity consists of random read operations as game assets are streamed from storage into memory. Sequential reads are less common, and write activity is generally minimal.
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