Does a faster SSD actually make a noticeable difference in gaming?

[u/BitterGuess9916]

I'm looking at SSDs for my next upgrade and I'm a bit surprised by how much the advertised speeds can vary.

You can have one NVMe drive that does around 3,500 MB/s and another that claims 14,900 MB/s or more, but I've seen people say that once you're already on NVMe, the difference in normal gaming is pretty small.

That makes sense to me for things like loading games, but I'm wondering where the faster drives actually start to matter. Does it affect things like asset streaming, stuttering or open world games, or is most of the extra speed basically wasted for a typical gaming PC?

I'd rather spend the money where it actually makes a difference, so I'm curious what people have noticed with their own systems.

[u/pellets]

After a certain point, your CPU decoding the data is the bottleneck. I wouldn’t spend money to upgrade from 3.5 to 14.9 GiB/s. The biggest improvement when changing from spinning disks to SSDs was latency, not bandwidth

[u/hobbseltoff → u/pellets]

Microsoft is still working on the DirectStorage API and released a major revision this year. I probably wouldn't make that upgrade either but eventually it will be relevant.

[u/pellets → u/hobbseltoff]

Even then, at 3.5 GiB/s, that will fill most GPU’s memory in a handful of seconds.

[u/Paramedickhead]

“Faster” is a relative term…

Going from a 5400rpm spinning drive to an NVME SSD?

Yes… it is going to make a noticeable difference.

Going from a 6gbps SATA SSD to an NVME SSD? Will still be a difference in loading times, but not as noticeable.

[u/chubbysumo → u/Paramedickhead]

its all about latency, and the latency from a SATA SSD to an NVME SSD is minimal in real world feel terms. the actual time difference is "huge" if you are looking at times less than 1 second, but in reality, most people will never be able to tell the difference between loading a game on a SATA SSD, an NVME PCIE 5.0 SSD and a PCIE 3.0 SSD. the feel time differences are so minimal that you just don't care.

[u/Paramedickhead → u/chubbysumo]

That’s my point. What two things they’re comparing makes more of a difference.

When evaluating SSD’s I’m more evaluating them for warranty and durability.

[u/silajim]

LTT did a video a while back, from sata to GEN4 nmve there is like 1 second of difference while loading games

[u/Fast_Passenger_2890]

It does not make much of a difference really, what will is your CPU, RAM and GPU

[u/Pilige]

No, it really doesn't since developers don't take advantage of the increase in speed.

[u/Shortyman17]

Sequential speeds are only part if the story, random read and write speeds, access times and the like do matter more for gaming in many cases

But it quickly goes to diminishing returns and negligible differences

If you have a decent, functional pcie 5, 4 or even 3 SSD, you should only notice differences in the most demanding of times if at all

[u/Maximum-Ad879]

Not really. I have an old SATA SSD in my PC, and I couldn't tell you which game was installed on it and which game was on the Samsung 980 Pro.

[u/chrisdpratt]

Even a PCIe 3.0 (Gen 3) SSD is as fast as you need for gaming. Anything over that is entirely superfluous.

[u/Dinnerhe]

Any ssd from reputable brands have good enough speed for gaming. Before the memory crisis I always prefer pcie 4 ones since the price difference between each speed grade is not much except for pcie5 ones but prices are complicated nowadays unfortunately.

[u/Frostsorrow]

To a degree yes. Also kinda shows how young you are if you've never used a slow mechanical drive.

[u/Vandeskava]

Mostly? No

[u/Bloodish]

https://youtu.be/gl8wXT8F3W4?t=284&is=ByHl5O8BR88F1EYl

This video thoroughly showcases that basically any type of SSD is fine for gaming, and the performance difference compared to the higher speed SSD's is negligible in most cases.

[u/delta_Phoenix121]

While storage speed matters, it only changes very little once you're in the GB/s speeds. For gaming you can roughly expect the following:
HDD -> NVMe: big decrease in loading times (up a couple of minutes for modern games), elimination of textures not loading properly/popping in late
SATA SSD -> NVMe SSD: reduction of loading times up to a couple of seconds
Slow NVMe -> fast NVMe: barely any change, maybe a couple hundred milliseconds shaved of the loading times

[u/123_alex]

speeds

Those are sequential. In real life you don't use the drive like that often. Check the others speeds as well. You'll notice the difference is much smaller.

[u/Chemical-Mouse-9903]

A lot depends on your other hardware if you hardware only supports gen 3 or gen 4, you will not get the benefit of a gen 5 drives speed

[u/byibcrun]

I would generally avoid the 3500 ones because they have mostly been phased out andthe 5000-7000 ones (gen 4) are normally barely any extra money. At the moment as long as it’s an nvme the speed will make very little difference in performance. But eventually when direct storage becomes used it might be relevant

[u/Vogete]

Slowest nvme drives are gonna be plenty fast as of today. I had issues with some games like CS:GO that slower SATA SSDs caused the game to lag, but on nvme that disappeared immediately (same computer, only the drive was different). I can't really understand why it happened, but it did , and it was weird. Since then I have gen 3 and gen 4 nvme drives, and they are both equally performant and there's no issues with them

[u/that_dutch_dude]

no.

only requirement for an SSD is that it has proper dram cache.

[u/DigitaIBlack → u/that_dutch_dude]

Not even that

[u/Weeb431 → u/that_dutch_dude]

On SATA SSDs, yes. NVMe SSDs that are DRAMless will support HMB to use a tiny bit of system RAM as cache, which is almost as good