# Does a SSD give gaming performance (fps) boost over HDD?



## neatfeatguy (Nov 2, 2016)

I can't say I've heard anyone claim that installing games on a SSD over a HDD has caused a jump in performance (frames per second) in games. Anything I do find asking a similar question says no to very little performance (fps) improvement.

I've heard people say they've noticed reduced loading time in games between menus and such, but not actual performance. I don't recall getting a fps performance increase in games when I moved to a SSD, though I wasn't doing a comparison when I went from a HDD to SSD so maybe there was and I just never noticed it.

TweakTown says otherwise: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7911/upgrade-test-gtx-760-vs-1060-ssd-hdd-system/index.html


_HDD to SSD upgrade (with GTX 1060):  _
_3DMark Fire Strike - 11.8% slower on SSD_
_Heaven - 9.9% faster on SSD_
_Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - 21.6% faster on SSD_
_Grand Theft Auto V - no change from HDD to SSD_
_Overwatch - 18.6% faster on SSD_
_Battlefield 1 - 32.5% faster on SSD_

I don't normally read through tweaktown, but I came across the link at another forum I browse through from time to time and I was curious if it was true. Does anyone have any actual data to back this up or heard of similar performance increases? Me, I'm too short of time to install Windows on an HDD, install games on it and then test a them, then to swap in a SSD, install the same games on it and test them again.


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## FireFox (Nov 2, 2016)

neatfeatguy said:


> I've heard people say they've noticed reduced loading time in games between menus and such, but not actual performance.


There you have the answer to your question.

Btw, when installing Games on a HDD better to go for those 7200rpm .


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## RCoon (Nov 2, 2016)

The only time you'll get an FPS increase from an SSD upgrade is when the storage transfer speed becomes the bottleneck during gameplay. If a game is coded to drag textures back and forth from storage (most games load what they need into VRAM), then you may see a difference between HDD and SSD. If your VRAM is limited, and your system RAM is full and overflowing into the Page File (located on the primary C:\ drive), then you'd see a difference of FPS betwixt HDD and SSD.

I'd imagine in most cases there'd be no difference, especially on a custom build. The only cases I can see this being prevalent is if the system you're gaming on is woefully imbalanced/underpowered.


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## cadaveca (Nov 2, 2016)

neatfeatguy said:


> I can't say I've heard anyone claim that installing games on a SSD over a HDD has caused a jump in performance (frames per second) in games. Anything I do find asking a similar question says no to very little performance (fps) improvement.
> 
> I've heard people say they've noticed reduced loading time in games between menus and such, but not actual performance. I don't recall getting a fps performance increase in games when I moved to a SSD, though I wasn't doing a comparison when I went from a HDD to SSD so maybe there was and I just never noticed it.
> 
> ...


I see no differences in most applications with my own systems, but RCoon covered it pretty well.

Also, I want to point out that the numbers listed aren't entirely accurate. What do you care about - the max FPS, or the minimums? Some of those results that show SSD faster actually show the SSD lowering the minimum FPS, and that is NOT an upgrade in my books.


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## neatfeatguy (Nov 2, 2016)

RCoon said:


> The only time you'll get an FPS increase from an SSD upgrade is when the storage transfer speed becomes the bottleneck during gameplay. If a game is coded to drag textures back and forth from storage (most games load what they need into VRAM), then you may see a difference between HDD and SSD. If your VRAM is limited, and your system RAM is full and overflowing into the Page File (located on the primary C:\ drive), then you'd see a difference of FPS betwixt HDD and SSD.
> 
> I'd imagine in most cases there'd be no difference, especially on a custom build. The only cases I can see this being prevalent is if the system you're gaming on is woefully imbalanced/underpowered.



That's kind of what I thinking - seeing as how the SSD is so much faster over a HDD, cached info into the paging file would clearly go faster with the SSD. I'm just not sure you'd see that big of an impact for fps boosts.



Knoxx29 said:


> There you have the answer to your question.
> 
> Btw, when installing Games on a HDD better to go for those 7200rpm .



That's loading times, not actual fps increase. The article in tweaktown shows an increase in fps, not loading times.


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## qubit (Nov 2, 2016)

No, there's no increase on fps, as the others have explained on here. Only loading times and hitching will be improved.

Looks like the TT writer was on crack when he showed there was a difference, or is just straight up lying. A 32% increase in BF1? Yeah sure.


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## cdawall (Nov 2, 2016)

qubit said:


> No, there's no increase on fps, as the others have explained on here. Only loading times and hitching will be improved.
> 
> Looks like the TT writer was on crack when he showed there was a difference, or is just straight up lying. A 32% increase in BF1? Yeah sure.



I am trying to figure out how anything storage related could increase it by 32%


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## alucasa (Nov 2, 2016)

It is possible. The epeen effect of playing games on a SSD might make one feel that they are getting higher fps.

You know what. This is something funny. Console gamers play games. PC gamers are so focused on fps, temp, and load spikes meanwhile.


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## FYFI13 (Nov 2, 2016)

Arma series games is the only case where i have seen nice performance improvement when using SSD. While FPS remained about the same, gameplay felt much smoother since Arma is constantly streaming textures, especially if you're using tons of mods.


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## cdawall (Nov 2, 2016)

alucasa said:


> It is possible. The epeen effect of playing games on a SSD might make one feel that they are getting higher fps.
> 
> You know what. This is something funny. Console gamers play games. PC gamers are so focused on fps, temp, and load spikes meanwhile.



I will say after playing fallout 4 installed on a raid 5 array vs my NVME SSD it is a completely different feeling. I swear I had enough time to go get lunch on some of the loading screens on a regular spinning disk. I think console gamers are just used to that peasantry.


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## alucasa (Nov 2, 2016)

I donno. I have games on Samsung Evo 250gb as well. Haven't seen that much of an improvement if any improvement at all.

But then the my games are different than most play here: Football manager, sometimes Civ 5, Crusader kings, that sort of stuff - which is why I am happy with just 760.


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## RejZoR (Nov 2, 2016)

Framerate, no. Framerate stability, possibly. I've seen less hitching and stuttering with Unreal Engine 3.x and 4.x games on SSD or SSHD than on HDD alone due to faster texture streaming. You'll also decrease initial level load by quite a bit.


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## The Riddler (Nov 2, 2016)

Sometimes yes.

There are couple of instances about this. One of the biggest example is Batman:Arkham Knight which is based on Unreal Engine 3 and uses a lot of texture. Watch Dogs is another game that have these kind of issues. It stuttered many times when i installed it on HDD, and on SSD i never saw any stuttering. UE3 is very notorious on texture streaming from mechanical disk drives.

Megatexturing is not common and it never caused stuttering when the game is on HDD BUT if the game  can't read virtual texture data fast enough there are some texture pop ups happen. You can install Doom on HDD if you want to observe. And RAGE was a worse story because fast SSDs are not enough too, you have to use RAMDISK to get rid of this problem.


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## SomeOne99h (Nov 2, 2016)

So, *texture streaming feature* can be bad for HDD?
In *Mount and Blade with Anno Domini mod*, having *texture streaming* enabled is causing stuttering for me. Luckily, you can *disable* this feature on the options.
I guess if someone is gaming with an HDD, better to look in the game options for *texture streaming* and make sure to *turn it off if possible*.


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## Jetster (Nov 2, 2016)

I think its fair to mention. If you have a system with minimal ram and high use of a paging file then you might see higher frame rates but I think this would be rare. The only real benefit would be large maps loading times are reduced. Like with BF4 maps would load in 20 sec compared to 90


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## eidairaman1 (Nov 2, 2016)

Ive always read that it helps in load times only


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## TRUELOVE95 (Nov 2, 2016)

cdawall said:


> I will say after playing fallout 4 installed on a raid 5 array vs my NVME SSD it is a completely different feeling. I swear I had enough time to go get lunch on some of the loading screens on a regular spinning disk. I think console gamers are just used to that peasantry.


I agree, I can claim the same with Fallout 4 on ssd. Other games, I did not bother trying to notice the difference.


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## RejZoR (Nov 2, 2016)

SomeOne99h said:


> So, *texture streaming feature* can be bad for HDD?
> In *Mount and Blade with Anno Domini mod*, having *texture streaming* enabled is causing stuttering for me. Luckily, you can *disable* this feature on the options.
> I guess if someone is gaming with an HDD, better to look in the game options for *texture streaming* and make sure to *turn it off if possible*.



It's not that easy or simple. Texture streaming resolves VRAM capacity issues or limitations. With texture streaming enabled, you can use super high resolution textures that are streamed to your VRAM on graphic card on the fly depending on where you stand in the game and game simply fetches the required textures. If you disable texture streaming, game has to load ALL needed textures into VRAM. Yes, it'll fix hitching and stuttering, but you'll need loads of VRAM. Because with texture streaming, it can work in a modern game with awesome graphics even on a model with only 2GB VRAM. If you turn it off, it just won't work or VERY badly. I have plenty of experience with this in Killing Floor 2 (Unreal Engine 3.x) where this stuttering and hitching was often experienced by HDD users. One way was disabling texture streaming if you have enough VRAM or increasing texture streaming cache or designating how much VRAM can be used, so it swaps textures around less often.


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## biffzinker (Nov 2, 2016)

Skyrim Special Edition's installed on 2 SSDs in RAID0 shows the loading screen for a few seconds then I'm in game. When I played Skyrim before Special Edition I had it installed on a 1 TB Seagate 7200 RPM HDD, and there was plenty of time to read the text on the loading screen. Fast traveling in game benefits from the SSD as well.


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## ASOT (Nov 2, 2016)

SSD only good for loading time on game,else is 0


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Nov 2, 2016)

I don't think you can expect much regarding fps increases but since I use  a ssd with games on mid level load glitches are reduced as well as some load times.


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## jboydgolfer (Nov 2, 2016)

There's only one time where I've noticed a solid-state drive showing benefits in FPS or game smoothness and that's with a heavily modded Arma 2,  and although I'm no professional I'm going to guess that's because Arma 2 calls to the hard drive for all those mods repeatedly during gameplay

 And of course loading times but technically that's not anything to do with gaming In particular at all it just happens to be that the loading is in a game but that's not gaming related increase in performance


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Nov 2, 2016)

GTA V on ultra at 4k uses some gram(oh dear meant vram ,my mind yo) and is mostly what I was thinking of but doom using 1 GPU with villas bah Vulcan and everything ultra or nightmare @ 4k for example.


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## ViperXTR (Nov 3, 2016)

hitching and long loading times are the only ones resolved in my case, no increase in overall framerate


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## The Riddler (Nov 3, 2016)

SomeOne99h said:


> So, *texture streaming feature* can be bad for HDD?
> In *Mount and Blade with Anno Domini mod*, having *texture streaming* enabled is causing stuttering for me. Luckily, you can *disable* this feature on the options.
> I guess if someone is gaming with an HDD, better to look in the game options for *texture streaming* and make sure to *turn it off if possible*.



Disabling texture streaming gives me black textures on Arkham City.


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## slozomby (Nov 3, 2016)

the heaven benchmark makes sense to me since it counts min and average fps. and the scene shifts are counted towards fps.

I've moved my steam games back and forth between 512gb evo 850 and my raid 5 (4x4tb wd reds) and other than load time there is no perceivable difference in gaming.


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## ratirt (Nov 3, 2016)

Hmm honestly I have never seen FPS increase when using SSD drive. I got a SSD into my PS3 and haven't noticed any fps boost. Although its a console so I'm stuck at 30 anyway but the load time is way faster.
With that texture streaming. I noticed that GTAV eats a bit of vram and I can't go with all the opts set to full since of my GTCX 780 ti 3gb limitation. crossing that margin of vram game goes nuts and textures are not there sometimes. Wonder if I could go with that texture stream feature and play with all the opts full and still see smooth and all texture in place while playing? Not sure if GTAV has that option in the game.


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## Komshija (Nov 7, 2016)

The only thing I noticed is reduced loading time in games. However, the differences (game loading times) between common 2.5" SSD and fast 3.5" HDD like Toshiba X300 are not so big.


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## D007 (Nov 7, 2016)

Load times are improved, not much if any fps gains though. Still it's a big difference, even in the general performance of the pc.. I highly recommend them.


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## Disparia (Nov 9, 2016)

Perhaps we should split off NVMe SSDs into their own camp as the protocol is a good deal more efficient. Now, gains on the desktop are generally not going to amount to much but perhaps we could see _something _in tailored tests such as the games with streaming textures mentioned earlier.


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## Gettoxp (Feb 8, 2018)

I have resently upgraded from 5600rmp hdd to an ssd and with the hdd I tested 3d mark time spy and got around 20-30 fps with my ssd I get 53-78 fps I must say that the hdd was about to die and was a really slow model from 2002. The physx score is still the same about 12 fps but loading time reduced from half n hour to a couple of seconds. Firestrike had a minimum fps of 18 but that increased as well to 48 fps the average fps here is the same loading time again is much faster. I think that the upgrade to an ssd will only increase fps if textures on the storage must be read or written. Then read and write speeds of the disk will benefit the fps in games.


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## mad1394 (Feb 8, 2018)

ASOT said:


> SSD only good for loading time on game,else is 0



Not really. On my laptop I had stuttering in cs go before I installed it to the ssd. So while it might not increase frame rate it does in my experience make for smoother gameplay in some titles.


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## cucker tarlson (Feb 8, 2018)

https://www.purepc.pl/pamieci_masow..._co_daje_gdzie_ten_wzrost_wydajnosci?page=0,5

https://www.purepc.pl/pamieci_masow..._co_daje_gdzie_ten_wzrost_wydajnosci?page=0,6

https://www.purepc.pl/pamieci_masow..._co_daje_gdzie_ten_wzrost_wydajnosci?page=0,7


the difference is noticeable mostly in open world games which ten to produce less stutter on SSDs, not in actual fps.

and loading times are greatly reduced

https://www.purepc.pl/pamieci_masow..._co_daje_gdzie_ten_wzrost_wydajnosci?page=0,3

https://www.purepc.pl/pamieci_masow..._co_daje_gdzie_ten_wzrost_wydajnosci?page=0,4


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## Gettoxp (Feb 8, 2018)

In my case it's definitely the read and write speed between texture transfer on the disk. Te minimum fps will go up because of the required time to read and write the textures on the disk. This will mean less stutter.


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## Jetster (Feb 8, 2018)

It could also be paging textures if you're low on ram. SSD would be way faster


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## Punx223 (Feb 8, 2018)

Has anyone taken a look at this masterpiece?  how is it going form a regular TITAN Xp to a TITAN Xp CE (Star wars card) you get massive performance gains?

the standard TITAN Xp and CE version are same memory/speed/GPU and Clock speed....   I must assume at this point that numbers are being made up or something is seriously wrong with Anthony's test bench.

https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8511/final-fantasy-xv-windows-edition-benchmarks-far/index3.html

This is on top of the fact that he has made public posts bashing PUBG as not able to get playable framerates even on low graphics on his test system and a TTIAN Xp which I personally run and run fin at high settings...   dont get me wrong, The game is horribly optimized but not that horrible... I feel like he's too caught up on writing as many click baity articles that the attention to detail is gone...

This is purely my opinion.


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