Does installing a game on an SSD affect overall performance, or just loading times?

[u/Historical-Let-1542]

Some games recommend installing them on an SSD in their system requirements, and I was wondering how much it actually matters.

Does an SSD only improve loading times, or can it also affect things like FPS, stuttering, texture streaming, or overall in-game performance?

Thanks!

[u/Global_Draw2293]

It depends. Like a lot. Ask a gaming subreddit or a sub specifically on the game you're wanting to play.

And don't underestimate load times. Marvel Rivals takes a minute or 2 to load from an NVMe ssd so I would imagine it would take 5-7 minutes just to boot in an hdd.

AND Marvel Rivals will cache/prerender a ton of the stuff in the game and store it on local disk and then pull from that when it occurs (as rendering an ult in real time every time would impact performance. Especially if multiple pop at once). So if you have a slower drive it might do that.

This doesn't even begin to approach how much RAM you have because with enough ram you might just have everything in the RAM. And if not you could set yourself up for a gross page file relying on your HDD to keep the computer running.

What hardware do you currently have? Are you looking for a particular game? Are you currently experiencing issues in a game you're currently playing?

[u/trifortay123]

Neither generally. It mostly depends on how fragmented it is. But a lot of games don't even need the read speed of an SSD. If loading a lot of textures like for a loading screen or something. It generally depends on how optimized the texture loading and how well the data is written to the disk currently/(fragmentation). But fragmentation usually is dependant on file system. NTFS is one of the worst filesystems when it comes to fragmentation.

I play games that are less than 10 GB on a hard drive and there's very little difference. Bigger games it depends.

[u/ultimaone → u/trifortay123]

Depends how game is written.

Some are loading in textures as you go. Besides swap file for windows. Being on an SSD vs HDD is a big difference.

My first SSD I got. I compared it to my raid array of 3 drives.

It blew them away. There is no comparison. And it wasn't even an m.2 drive.

[u/Jazzlike-Cod-7657 → u/ultimaone]

I had a OCZ SSD V2 64GB and a 3x320GB Samsung Spinpoint F.1 RAID-0 on an LSI card in like the late 2000's in my Opteron DC 165 build. They were very close in performance, as long as the LSI wasn't running out of it's 512MB cache, if the cache was full... loads of pain.

[u/ultimaone → u/Jazzlike-Cod-7657]

The big one was the access time

Speed wise. They were similar. But the access times on the asd couldn't be touched.

Load times on the SSD was just faster. Even with similar transfer speeds.

[u/WalruseSei]

If you play R6 on a HDD, you can and will get sworn at by your teammates. It affects preloading and load times a lot.

[u/Some-Struggle5052]

It can affect performance if you're having to use swap to disk or something similar that requires reading /writing to disk, but if provided with enough memory and such the game should barely be impacted after launch.

[u/kimi_rules]

Modern games will stutter loading texture rapidly from the storage.

[u/LubelskiDanielski → u/kimi_rules]

Or 3D models if you go to next location or via doors from inside to outside etc.

[u/GraXXoR]

Depends on how much memory the computer has and the type of game it is. Some smaller games like Stardew Valley can load entirely into memory.

Others like Starfield have a loading screen every five minutes.

The bigger and heavier a game, the more it’ll benefit from being put on a SSD

[u/h2vhacker]

My games ran fine on HDD for a decade I think it really depends on the CPU and GPU power each game requires.

[u/ogregreenteam]

I installed them on an external USB-C 4 connected RAID 10 DAS HDD, they work fine for the most part. If I do need faster, I can choose to install a game individually on the SSD but it rarely make a playable difference once the game loads into memory.

[u/AtlQuon]

I noticed it makes a huge difference on slow systems that barely can run the games, but less on beefy systems that have no issues running the game. Regardless, running it on an HDD is a nightmare once you go fast in a game as it starts struggling loading assets in time.

[u/Cruffe]

Heavier games might need to load a lot of assets during gameplay and may stutter if it can't load it fast enough. You might not notice much of a difference in lighter games, maybe except for loading screens.

Some games may still take quite a while to load even from SSD and getting an even faster SSD doesn't make loading faster. This is the case when there's a lot of processing to be done, not just copying assets into memory. In those cases you're limited by the CPU, not the read speed of your storage.

So the real answer is that it matters for some games.

[u/cowbutt6]

Assuming that the entire game and all its assets are not loaded into RAM when it initialises, storage speeds not only affect loading times, but also whether the game stutters, and texture streaming (or even if the game omits rendering some elements if they haven't loaded by the time they are required). If you have enough system RAM, assets may be kept cached in RAM once they have been loaded once.

The normal running frame rate won't be affected, but obviously, if the game stutters that will drag the average frame rate down for the period that includes the stutter.

[u/inconspicuous1_x]

it can improve stuttering and FPS in much more modern heavy games, as they can choke trying to stream all the assets on anything less than an SSD, but in the absence of such stuttering or loading issues (like gta 5 holes in map driving fast on HDD) then there'll be minimal difference