Does a SSD improve game performance?

Soldato
Joined
29 Aug 2010
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Hi,

Was chatting to a friend today about SSDs and he said SSDs don't help in games other than loading times. I agreed, because to the best of my knowledge this is true.

But, I just wanted to check, can SSDs improve fps in games?
The only way I think it could would be in the unlikely situation the game was hitching because it couldn't load textures quick enough.

Did I miss anything?
 
the only improvement you will see is map loading in games and general PC functions. worth getting if you don't have 1
 
Did help on my PS3 with loading textures on some games when i put a 480gb SSD but later patches fixed those issues, got 1tb SSHDs now in PS3 and PS4. Loading times on PC would be better, sometimes dramatically depending on the game but actual gameplay, probably not.
 
SSD stop the drop in FPS you sometimes get while streaming data of the hard drive. You might drop down to as low as 5fps without and SSD but with the SSD never drop below 30fps. Getting shuttering from data loading is rare with an SSD.
 
If a game is streaming textures or similar it can help to make it a bit smoother and might increase framerates in very specific circumstances, by and large games don't spend significant time waiting on disc IO by design with most games designed to pre-cache assets they are likely to need for a given level even if not immediately in use.
 
I haven't noticed any difference apart from loading times e.g WOT with my normal HD I used to get "in game" around 15 seconds into the countdown timer, with a SSD I'm in as soon as the countdown starts. Plus it's a great little boost to your normal everyday stuff on the PC, I would recommend one and wouldn't think of ever having my OS on a normal mech drive.
 
For what its worth, I found ZERO improvements and only recently, I have toyed with aRAM disk, and thats even faster than my fastest SSD and even using a RAMDISK, I found absolutely ZERO improvements in gameplay.

Sure, the actual loading was better by a second or two, depending on the game, but once the game was up and running... I realised that I had wasted my time entirely in even hoping that I would be better off.

In my honest opinion, 8GB of RAM is plenty and 16GB if you are fuity and flush is lal 98% of us will need ( for now ) and as for the HD, an SSD for the Windows Drive and a HD for your toys. Maybe go OTT like me and get multiple HDs for different uses, but other than that, its often just a feel good or a cosmetic thing and not really a performce one.
 
I went totally SSD, Sam 256GB 830 OS+Apps had this SSD a good while and 500GB EVO 840 Games with a USB:3 1TB External HDD for Back Up.

Worth every penny.
 
If a game is streaming textures or similar it can help to make it a bit smoother and might increase framerates in very specific circumstances, by and large games don't spend significant time waiting on disc IO by design with most games designed to pre-cache assets they are likely to need for a given level even if not immediately in use.

ArmA 2 was a horrible experience on 5400 RPM HDDs with small L1/2 caches because of this.
 
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