I assume I’m not the only one who has played the same games on different type of storage: commonly HDDs and SSDs, but I also set up two RAID 0 filesystems (one on two HDDs, one on two SSDs), and I even installed Deep Rock Galactic on RAM.
However, more often than not loading times have been too similar across storage media.
Personal experience (tl;dr):
- Deep Rock Galactic is so small it easily fits in your system’s memory, so you probably won’t be surprised to read that in my tests its loading times have been the same between HDD, SSD and RAM; any big chunk of data on disk is cached by the OS after being loaded for the first time, and it’s not like ALL data needs to be read at once in the first place.
Quantitatively: loading times range from 2s to 40s (~15s on average), presumably because world generation and netcode hijinks take most of the time.
All of this makes sense to me so far. - On the opposite side, Project Zomboid greatly benefits from faster storage if you’re using lots of mods.
I haven’t measured world loading times, because it takes much more time to load and unload mods (it’s a Java game) than reading a bunch of jpegs and some kilobyte-sized files deciding where to place them: the former process takes ~ twice the time to complete if the game’s installed on an HDD rather than a SSD, haven’t tested it on RAID0/SSD; it’s a somewhat CPU intensive process, but some mods are BIG - my game’s workshop directory weighs 24GB.
All of this still makes sense to me so far. - Then there’s Baldur’s Gate 3: the game is so chonky and I play it so infrequently that I have to keep it on my RAID0/HDD filesystem for logistic reasons, but at some point I had it on an SSD; I haven’t timed loading screens, but they are very long and I barely noticed an improvement on the SSD.
- Helldivers 2: same as above, but netcode hijinks make metrics less reliable; besides, considering all the spaghetti code in it, that game is more Italian than me.
- BeamNG: same as BG3, but less chonky and currently on RAID0/SSD.
Some other games I’ve played on several media matched the usual “SSD faster” expectations, namely Satisfactory, X3, X4, Abiotic Factor (or as I like to call it, “Antibiotic Factory”), Halo:MCC.
I’m asking this mostly because I’m considering getting two SSDs dedicated to a RAID0 setup, as of now my RAID0/SSD filesystem is “only” 200GiB wide and it’s sharing its drives with the OS and other things, but since I’m not short on space it may or may not be worth the price to set up a reasonably large FS with fast I/O.
I also suspect that my game loading times may be limited by the fact that I’m running most of them on Linux via proton, if everyone’s experience contradicts mine then that’s probably why; in fact, I’m pretty sure VKDX shader compilation adds some CPU-bound time.
TechSpot / Hardware Unboxed did some tests (on Windows, where DirectStorage is available so this will alter some of the results compared to your own context) on this recently: https://www.techspot.com/article/3023-ssd-gaming-comparison-load-times/ (video form: YouTube)
In their results (which again may not map 1:1 to your own environment given OS differences etc), there was some difference when moving from a SATA SSD to a “slow” (by current standards) PCIe gen 3 NVMe SSD, but pretty negligible difference beyond that within gaming contexts when moving from that to other, newer/faster NVMe SSDs.
If I were to hazard a guess for your specific setup (assuming you’re currently loading mostly from a SATA SSD), it sounds like you might eke out a small loading speed improvement with either a RAID0 (or similar) SATA SSD setup or by moving to an NVMe drive, but the gains are probably only going to be generally meaningful if you’re able to somehow use DirectStorage (or a “Linux’d” version of it) somehow. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was the only game within the tested samples that saw meaningful improvements without using DirectStorage when moving to something faster than a single SATA SSD.
Thanks for the link, it addresses both of the doubts I’ve expressed in the post; perhaps at some point I’ll play a game with DS and see how well it carries over to Linux despite the lack of a similar API, I’ll probably stick to the small RAID0 fs I already have and use it for X4 or something.