# Does NVME drives PCI 3.0 or 4.0, improve min/99th percentile frame rates in gaming?



## Space Lynx (Aug 6, 2019)

Been wondering this for awhile, has anyone actually tested it that you know of?  @W1zzard  -EDIT BEGIN-  Feel free not to respond W1zzard, it seems my thoughts were misguided here. Just was a momentary idea I had and noticed no actual testing has been done on it that I can find, and no I am not asking you to test it, just was curious if you heard of anyone testing it out. -EDIT END-

SSD vs NVME pci 3.0, vs nvme pci.e 4.0 - all with rig say a navi 5700 xt and ryzen 3600 on x570 board.

not max fps or even avg fps, I know those prob don't change, but is there any possibility the 99th percentile frame dips and min fps overall would improve with nvme over ssd?  texture pop in was cured going from HDD to SSD, is anything improved from going to SSD to NVME besides load times? We have evidence that texture pop ins do improve with SSD over HDD, so I don't think my question is too far off base, I don't see anyone ever testing it.

mods if you consider this to be a dumb question, please excuse my ignorance, I genuinely am curious. just PM me and close thread if it is dumb. cheers.


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## EarthDog (Aug 6, 2019)

How would it do that???

Storage really does zero for FPS... at worst you get a hiccup on loading some things, but it doesnt directly effect fps.


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## Space Lynx (Aug 7, 2019)

EarthDog said:


> How would it do that???
> 
> Storage really does zero for FPS... at worst you get a hiccup on loading some things, but it doesnt directly effect fps.



What about texture pop in improvements? Is it possible Pci Express 4.0 generates a seemless integration of textures that SSD's can't handle?  Or is my thinking going in the wrong direction? I guess what I am asking is, are there any benefits at all besides loading times, or is texture pop in maxed out already with the HDD to SSD jump?


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## Deleted member 158293 (Aug 7, 2019)

Any games in mind?  Textures should be preloaded in vram on properly coded engines at level load.  With the exception of Maybe MMOs, but that should be on older game engines especially . Haven't seen texture pop in ages.

I can't really see a use for faster nvme drives just for games.


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## Space Lynx (Aug 7, 2019)

yakk said:


> Any games in mind?  Textures should be preloaded in vram on properly coded engines at level load.  With the exception of Maybe MMOs, but that should be on older game engines especially . Haven't seen texture pop in ages.
> 
> I can't really see a use for faster nvme drives just for games.



I seem to get texture pop in sometimes in Witcher 3 still, but I am not sure what it is related to. It might just be I have very slow ram, 2133 mhz 2x8gb - gtx 1070 is 8gb, and 2tb ssd, i7-7820hk.  maybe when I go back to desktops with faster ram that will fix itself (which I intend to do soon) - I might also have no idea what I am talking about at the moment, little out of my league on the texture pop in technicalities. lol


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## crazyeyesreaper (Aug 7, 2019)

Many people don't seem to realize that quite a few games have started streaming assets from Storage to GPU. Granted thats why bigger vram buffers exist (a game might use 8 GB of vram for instance but it might only ACTUALLY be using 5 GB with 3 GB being cached assets). This is why storage speed doesn't matter all that much and only really impacts load times.

That said, no its not likely to improve 99th percentile frame rates. Typically, a game that sees drops due to assets loading is not going to see the problem disappear just because of faster storage. You can throw faster hardware at certain problems and never see a return be it due to coding / game engine etc. because typically texture pop-in may be a problem but typically it still has to handle shaders / post process. So even if that texture gets there 0.01% faster its not going to give you a discernible difference. Your still going to get pop-in due to how the game was coded to handle those assets.

The only games I can think of that would maybe benefit from faster storage would be Gamebryo / CreationEngine (Bethesda Fallout / Skyrim / etc) and Rage with its mega texture technology. Even then moving from SSD to NVMe drive makes very little difference. However HDD to SSD does in Rage typically result in quicker texture loading however it didnt impact framerates just how quickly the texture quality improved.

While faster storage can help eliminate the odd drop in frames, typically trouble spots in certain titles will remain as such.

HDD vs SSD = faster load times. SATA SSD vs NVMe = no difference.

I have multiple generation of SSDs be it SATA and NVMe between them all even the one thats SATA 2 based there is no difference you would ever notice other than the fact they all make HDDs feel like dinosaurs.


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## Chris_Ramseyer (Aug 7, 2019)

You are actually on to something that was discussed and proven a long time ago. Around the time affordable consumer SSDs came to market (think $500 for a 256GB) Intel released a white paper on gaming and SSDs that went beyond load times. We now call it frame pacing. Intel never released the tool and the white paper disappeared. I'm sure there is a copy floating around somewhere but I don't have a copy or link to share with you. 

The focus was on SATA 3Gbps SSDs vs. HDDs so it won't do you much for your question about PCIe 3.0 vs. 4.0. At this time there is very little benefit using PCIe 4.0 SSDs over 3.0 since the random read performance is similar.


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## vega22 (Aug 7, 2019)

Nvme stopped most of the texture pop in arma for me. I think the sheer number of ops really helped but I can't think of any other titles where I noticed anything like that.


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## EarthDog (Aug 7, 2019)

I'm going to simply say no on the texture pop thing. I have premium NVMe's with games only on it (not even an OS) and I still see texture pop in PUBG. In that title, seems like it is just the game and how it works.


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## londiste (Aug 7, 2019)

Texture streaming should be the main thing involved. Larger bandwidth isn't too helpful as texture streaming is generally not very sequential process.
Did PCI-e 4.0 improve latencies over PCI-e 3.0?

The way game (engine) handles texture streaming and larger texture cache in VRAM play a much larger part than storage performance. 
HDD to SDD definitely improved things, SATA to NVMe to some degree. But from there on? Unlikely.


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## Vario (Aug 7, 2019)

Might be of assistance on a FiveM, thats the only game that SSD speed really affected for me.


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## kapone32 (Aug 7, 2019)

Having NVME, SSD, HDD and even SSHDs in my system I will say that NVME provides faster load times, quicker turns in (some) strategy games and a 2-3 FPS increase in the same. While it blows HDDs out of the water, SSD (especially in RAID 0) is just as fast in gaming. Where NVME does make sense is games that have a lot of textures in 4K. I have noticed that games like Total War Warhammer 2 (mortal empires) will use all of the VRAM and a good 10-13GB of DDR4 too (unless you have 32GB+) so having a page file on NVME does help some. In testing I noticed a 5 second decrease in turn completion vs an SSDas the page file.


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## londiste (Aug 7, 2019)

kapone32 said:


> I have noticed that games like Total War Warhammer 2 (mortal empires) will use all of the VRAM and a good 10-13GB of DDR4 too (unless you have 32GB+) so having a page file on NVME does help some. In testing I noticed a 5 second decrease in turn completion vs an SSDas the page file.


Page file? Dude, you need some more RAM


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## Deleted member 158293 (Aug 7, 2019)

Even with AMD's engineering optimizations which did help slightly, the TW game engine threading is still horrible and full of bottlenecks.  While  constantly re-releasing the same game with different texture packs the devs should seriously work on a new engine.  Maybe faster load times can help on some bottlenecks, but it can't be very much.


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## Calmmo (Aug 7, 2019)

It only will when the software can utilize it. Que depth/thread (and i dont mean cpu threads) count matters. New consoles advertised as having nvme means it might be a reality by 2021


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## phanbuey (Aug 7, 2019)

EarthDog said:


> How would it do that???
> 
> Storage really does zero for FPS... at worst you get a hiccup on loading some things, but it doesnt directly effect fps.



Ive put games like farcry 5 on a ramdisk to see if it would fix the hitching when picking up items/auto-saving but even that did nothing.  Anything past a normal sata ssd for games is unnoticeable imo.


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## kapone32 (Aug 7, 2019)

londiste said:


> Page file? Dude, you need some more RAM



Well I would agree with you but I already have 32GB in my system. Using a page file on an NVME is not like the HDD days especially in RAID 0.



yakk said:


> Even with AMD's engineering optimizations which did help slightly, the TW game engine threading is still horrible and full of bottlenecks.  While  constantly re-releasing the same game with different texture packs the devs should seriously work on a new engine.  Maybe faster load times can help on some bottlenecks, but it can't be very much.



The new engine (3 Kingdoms)  is actually really good and runs smoother than any TW before it. Warhammer is a dog though in regards to what you are talking about. For faster load times I used an NVME drive  and it reduced my load times substantially vs even an SSD. Even then the engine does some wonky things.



phanbuey said:


> Ive put games like farcry 5 on a ramdisk to see if it would fix the hitching when picking up items/auto-saving but even that did nothing.  Anything past a normal sata ssd for games is unnoticeable imo.



How did you fit Far Cry 5 on a RAM disk? Isn't that game like 40-60 GB of data?


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## cucker tarlson (Aug 7, 2019)

in general

hdd to ssd - yes
sata ssd to nvme - not really.the differences are not noticeable even if nvme was 5% ahead.


what I'd like someone to test (too lazy myself) is this momentary stutter when you fast travel to an area.how much of it do you get on deferent drives.

also,remember nvme is just a protocol.there's nvme drives that would perform worse than sata.frankly,most of those budget ones do when they run out of cache space.


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## Deleted member 178884 (Aug 7, 2019)

kapone32 said:


> How did you fit Far Cry 5 on a RAM disk? Isn't that game like 40-60 GB of data?


Not for me.


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## phanbuey (Aug 7, 2019)

kapone32 said:


> Well I would agree with you but I already have 32GB in my system. Using a page file on an NVME is not like the HDD days especially in RAID 0.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I had an extra 32 gb quadchannel kit laying around (upgraded from 3200 c15 to 3733 c17) and was playing around with 64GB of sysram to see if there was any benefit to my workflows (there was not, the faster 32 was better).

Farcry 5 @ high fps was one of the jerkiest experiences as you walk around the world if your system isn't an 8700K or 9900K, so I wanted to see if putting everything in ram would eliminate the 'load in' frame drops as you walk around the world.  No such luck.


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