Top reasons I love PCIe NVMe storage:
- no cables
- virtually no additional physical space taken
Sure thing, if I need to add/replace/remove one it is a bigger hassle and probably involves removing the GPU as well, but it is rare for me to need to do that, so I prefer the simplicity of doing away with SATA.
Out of all the games tested, only two showed measurable performance differences between SATA and PCIe SSDs: Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.
Across all other titles, PCIe SSDs provided no meaningful performance advantage, and there were no observable differences between PCIe generations. In the vast majority of games tested, a SATA SSD delivers comparable performance.
My cheap ass can’t tell the difference either
I can tell the difference between nvme and sata when booting and loading applications. It’s so small that I’m happy to remain a cheap ass. I also went to college in the “turn on your computer, then go make breakfast” days, so I guess I’m more tolerant of it.
Why would any of this matter at the moment? We use the SSDs we already have or can somehow afford. Cost is pretty much the only factor that matters. Virtually nobody had the money to care about trivial things.
Is the answer a secret or are you not seeking to inform but just have me click the link?
They only tested frame rates. There was no real difference between PCIe versions and most games ran nearly as well from SATA SSDs.
It would have been nice if they tested load times.
I imagine this would show up as texture pop in as often they will load the lower resolution textures first while the higher resolution ones load in, which wouldn’t shown up in n average framerate graph. I’d like to see a frametime plot as well as 1% lows don’t really tell enough of the picture for stuttering.
Exactly - most game engines now will hide this rather than stutter.
Got an NVMe and a RAID array in my gaming desktop; the RAID does about 1 GB/s sustained read and write, which is good, but its latency is quite bad. Was playing Elden Ring directly from it since I couldn’t be bothered moving it - load times were good, but “fog doors” appear over doorways and cave entrances while they’re being loaded, which never happens on SSD. Never dropped a frame, though.
Yes, exactly. Testing storage with game frame rate betrays a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how modern video games work.
