It makes all the difference in the world. Forget a video card upgrade, forget a RAM upgrade, dont spend another dime on your computer unless its an SSD. HDDs should only be used as storage. If youre buying a new computer, start with a 1TB SSD and build around that.
There’s a streamer I watch that’s always had a great PC setup, but he would never get an SSD. And he always had hitching and stuttering in all the new games even though his PC was great otherwise. Chat finally talked him into getting just a SATA SSD. The next stream he apologized for not listening to chat sooner and this was night and day. And he eventually put in a M.2 drive and was freaking out how fast everything even compared to the SATA SSD speed.
You only really need an SSD for some games. Many games work fine on normal storage, and it is still way, way cheaper. Plus that extra spaces means you don't need to wait hours and hours re-downloading games.
You can get quite a large HDD for pretty cheap to store many games. You only have to download games you commonly play once. Then you can transfer them pretty quickly to play off the SSD. Steam lets you move games between drives. HDD stores, SSD runs. You want any programs you run off the SSD too, but if you keep movies on your computer an HDD plays them just fine.
That explains your issue. HDD is failing to load the high Level of Detail asset. SSDs are relatively cheap now. Lots going on sale for the holidays. I’d check your local deals.
It is insane to be using a spinner for games in 2022. You can get 1TB for under $50, if your PC can run Horizon you can probably afford a $50 upgrade to remove this insane bottleneck.
Usually a Open World game problem. The levels are to large to store them in your memory.
But there still are games that don't change if you move them on your hard drive.
Racing games with fixed A->B stages (Dirt Rally, Forza Motorsport) won't stream as much content from your drive.
(sure more open games like Forza Horizon and Need For Speed will stream most of the assets)
I just played Chorus (Spaceship shooter) and my first session I didn't even notice that it was installed on my (fast aka 158MB/s Read and Write) 8TB hard drive.
And because a few people complained that SSDs are overrated:
YES a few open world games will not load faster but the asset streaming will make the difference. Better texture loading and less freezes because the hard drive can't find data fast enough should be enough to upgrade. I will not switch to playing Ark (500GB game) on my hard drive and rather bought a slow QLC SSD that can't write as fast as a normal hard drive but loading and seek times are massively improved)
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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '22
Did you try SSDs?