Many readers may be wondering if playing on a SATA drive resulted in any visual anomalies, such as slower loading textures, additional pop-in, or other visual artifacts. We did not notice any such issues in the 11 games we tested. There are some games that exhibit pop-in, but that is consistent across all storage devices. All of the drives we used in our testing provided an identical visual experience.
Out of all the games tested, only two showed measurable performance differences between SATA and PCIe SSDs: Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart .
In Forspoken , moving from a SATA SSD to any PCIe SSD – regardless of generation – resulted in a significant improvement in 1% lows.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart showed more nuanced results. During the portal sequences at 1440p and 1080p, average framerate and 1% lows were slightly higher on the SATA SSD, as slower loading increased the time spent inside the portals. Since the portals contain less on-screen complexity, framerates are naturally higher within them. However, at 4K resolution, PCIe SSDs delivered better 1% lows. Outside of the portal sequence in normal gameplay, there was no measurable performance difference between any of the drives.
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.
Dan Mateescu is a PC enthusiast with many years of experience benchmarking PC hardware. In 2021, he started his own YouTube channel called 'Compusemble' where he benchmarks hardware in video games and the latest tech demos. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Dan Mateescu Social Links Navigation Contributor Dan Mateescu is a PC enthusiast with many years of experience benchmarking PC hardware. In 2021, he started his own YouTube channel called 'Compusemble' where he benchmarks hardware in video games and the latest tech demos.
Gururu The researcher in me wants to know why. Once we have determined that all drives perform the same on Intel and AMD, and with any video card and amount of memory, why is this the result with games? Reply
Zaranthos What about benchmarking with the newer NVMe storage drivers currently disabled in Windows 11 that server versions now use? How much will this change when Windows 11 gets actual modern NVMe and SATA optimizations without the legacy SCSI translations slowing everything down? Reply
FunSurfer Why there is no loading time benchmark? Forspoken has a special game engine, never seen anything like this, the game loads in 0.5-1 seconds! even UT2004 takes longer to load on my PC. Reply
Vicecrow With a Enterprise class drive don't see any improviments. Just can do more things at same time. Toshiba 3.0 1.5gb/s R/W same time. Load times same as normal drives. Even optanes don't do a thing! Games are make to slow devices and is It. Reply
mras2 Gururu said: The researcher in me wants to know why. Once we have determined that all drives perform the same on Intel and AMD, and with any video card and amount of memory, why is this the result with games? Poorly optimized game devs, that thought it was a brillant idea to use many small files, and never looking at optimize loadtimes, for what's most optimal on a avr gamer pc. You don't reach 9MB/sec, on a ssd, unless you never looked at this. + prolly some DRM shizle in over, to waste CPU calls at arbitary code, never used. The small files combined with odd ssd choosing, also would explain why a Gen4 pcie ssd, can win over a Gen5 pcie drive, in some of those tests. The drives ran out of DDDR cache. . There is also something fundemental wrong, if you need to write over a GB, when loading these games. Third option, is that gamedevs didn't understood locking mechanisme in the game/os, and the reads was stalled by a "to be written file", for an absurdly long time. Reply
doomtomb surprise surprise. it's all about access times of flash to stream assets, not shear bandwidth unless the game just loads up on huge uncompressed assets which we dont see in the data. Reply
USAFRet Nice to see further confirmation on this. But this has been known for years. Reply
PEnns I remember a similar test 6-7 years ago (without PCIe 5) which reached the same conclusions. Reply
USAFRet PEnns said: I remember a similar test 6-7 years ago (without PCIe 5) which reached the same conclusions. 4YoRKQy-UO4 View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YoRKQy-UO4 4DKLA7w9eeA View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA GQ9LyNXpsOo View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9LyNXpsOo gl8wXT8F3W4 View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8wXT8F3W4 Reply
jkhoward Should have tested an MMO RPG.. Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/we-tested-the-impact-of-ssd-speed-on-gaming-performance-in-11-titles-we-analyzed-from-sata-to-pcie-5-0-to-see-whether-upgrading-to-a-faster-nvme-ssd-would-have-an-impact#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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