I've done the tests. I didn't do many for each, just 1 sample.
It was quite troublesome because you need to restart a lot of times to do these, so it's only natural people would get discouraged.
Anyway, there wasn't as much difference as you would think. All of them were in the miliseconds range.
The tests were done in this way:
-Used a game I've booted before and have played at least a little to cache shaders to NVIDIA shader cache;
-All done in SN850X;
-Gaming Mode tests were done on Auto, with the SteamLibary folder listed as a Gaming Mode folder;
-Changed between drivers using Device Manager;
-Solidigm Driver used was the newest one with Foward I/O support.
Software I've used is:
-LiveSplit = stopwatch;
-HWInfo = some bonus data;
-OBS = recording;
-Resident Evil 4 2023 (Remake) = game used for the test.
I used RE4R because it is a game that don't take a really long time, it's easy to capture and is recent enough to use a NVMe drive to it's max.
As soon as I click, I also pressed the LiveSplit hotkey. Stopwatch ends when the loading bar is 100% full.
Without futher ado, here's the videos:
SN850X MS Driver Gaming Mode OFF
SN850X Solidigm Driver Gaming Mode OFF
SN850X MS Driver Gaming Mode ON
SN850X Solidigm Driver Gaming Mode ON
As you can see, the best peformant ones were MS Driver Gaming Mode ON and Solidigm Driver Gaming Mode OFF. It makes sense why MS Driver Gaming Mode ON would be one of the most peformant. As Western Digital put, Gaming Mode 2.0 uses "
Predictive Loading" which, I guess, function like Solidigm's Smart Prefatch, were it finds predictable read streams and keeps a high and stable sequential read. I don't know if their "
Adaptive Thermal Management" is also at play, because that naming is very confusing and they don't explain both Predictive Loading and Adaptive Thermal Management in any web page.
Solidigm Driver Gaming Mode ON is the 2° worst peformant one (still very quick!). I assume this is because Predictive Loading and Smart Prefatch are fighting each other to speed sequential reads which makes that take more time and don't do much benefit to the loading times. It just wins by 5 miliseconds versus MS Driver Gaming Mode OFF, which is pretty much a margin of error.
I hope this is helpful to show that the driver does make a difference. Even though my SN850X don't like the Solidigm driver that much, it still makes a difference. If in CrystalDiskInfo you see some difference (especially in sequencial reads), be sure that your game will load, at least, 1s quicker than before. I guess this driver helps more HMB based drives, as those don't have DRAM or some quirky features like Gaming Mode - and Solidigm made these drivers for HMB drives in the first place.
Again, thank you very much, Mr. THEBOSS619 for your hardwork!
Doing all of this for no money at all, in your free time, which is not much since you have a family is very nice of you. On top of all that, even supporting it and coming regularly to this forum to thank, help and improve the custom driver is very heartwarming. The world needs more gentle and nice people like you!
If anyone feels like going out of their way to also test it like this, don't need to be in games, using 3DMark daily use is a very good test already, please, share it with us.