Average read/write speed needed for gaming for the next 5 years

[Himalayas]

Is there any lags, or latency, from SSDs, with gaming, ever noticed, with about 500 mb/s, or is the m.2 more reliable, and do I need to consider the heatsink version.

 

[LukeTbk]

Needed ? Your average good sata ssd should do would be my guess. But that only a guess.

Is the question how fast would it be needed for it to be impossible to see any difference with a faster drive ? Who knows, the way caching, compression-decompression, game dev goes can influence that the Play station 6, Xbox One X 2 has well.

Forspoken dev made some premilary test with direct storage (pre-GPU decompression), the value are with decompression taken into account (that why sata achieve to go over 600mbs), there probably a near 2:1 compression ratio going on.

Making it look like gain after 2500 MBs could become very limited, on a PS5 going 40% or so slower nvme drive does not seem to make much a difference:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22608153/ps5-ssd-speed-test-storage-expansion-m2-playstation-5
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2021-the-worst-and-best-nvme-ssds-tested-on-playstation-5

I am not sure if it something we can know for sure, has there are competing force (has compression-uncompression get better the less raw bandwidth drive read matter for example, game engine could become giant asset if there is a breakthrought in nvme drive size-price and unlimited bandwith become the norm or game install stagnation continue to be really strong has having just 1TB for your game library continue to be the norm for a very long time)

 

[Himalayas]

So, that is mainly not about the loading time, as I always get to see objects, showing and hiding, while the game is already loaded, and shadows are loaded, based on distance, of the character, and so on. Higher storage speed should help, with that issue. Correct if wrong.

 

[Denpepe]

That graph should realy state NVMe iso M.2 as you also have M.2 sata drives.

More on topic, things also depend on the rest of your system, having speedy drives and a slow CPU, low amount of RAM or VRAM can all influence how well something runs or loads.

 

[xDiVolatilX]

Good question. While I'm not sure I do know playstations recommend a certain speed meaning fast like a pcie nvme drive. For example one of the most common playstation drives is the Samsung 980 Pro 2tb which is in a million playstations. So based on that recommendation I would say to be safe go for a pci e 4 nvme drive and call it a day never to worry about it for the foreseeable future.

 

[Himalayas]

Sure! I was also wondering, if buying a 7gb/s nvme is better than the 5.5 gb/s, that ps5 supports, or will I get nothing added.

 

[Himalayas]

One more question, does allocation unit size make any difference, for pc gaming, to help with the issues, that I mentioned, even with hard drives.

 

[Himalayas]

That graph should realy state NVMe iso M.2 as you also have M.2 sata drives.

More on topic, things also depend on the rest of your system, having speedy drives and a slow CPU, low amount of RAM or VRAM can all influence how well something runs or loads.

That is my current PC:

i5-10400
Crucial ballistix 32GB 3200MHz 4x8GB
MSI RTX 3070 8GB X
Z490M GAMING X

 

[xDiVolatilX]

Might as well get the faster drive because it's higher quality memory.
If you want 2tb I have the 980 Pro it's fantastic top tier product.
If you want 4tb I have the SN850X it's also a fantastic top tier product.
Both perform very similar with almost identical speed and temperatures.
I have them both installed on my Z790 Aorus Master motherboard and I love both the drives and I'm very happy. They are both blazing fast PCI-E 4.0 drives can't go wrong with either if your board supports PCI-E 4.0.
There are some other drives that aren't as expensive but I wanted top quality so I went with the Samsung & Western Digital.

 

[Himalayas]

And is there a specific configuration, for the storage, to make it work, with best efficiency, with games. I Google about allocation unit size, and I found that the higher it becomes, the better.

 

[xDiVolatilX]

And is there a specific configuration, for the storage, to make it work, with best efficiency, with games. I Google about allocation unit size, and I found that the higher it becomes, the better.

No special config. Just installed and format then load fresh install of Windows.
If it's a secondary drive just installed and go to disk management and format and done.
When all said and done can download crystaldiskmark to check performance and the manufacturer M.2 software Samsung has it's own, Western Digital has It's own, Gigabyte has It's own etc most manufacturer has It's own software.

Oh and of course the manufacturer software is used to update the drives firmware which should be done first. It's the push of a button to update it. But that's it it's an easy setup.

 

[ochadd]

For gaming I've noticed no difference at all NVME vs SATA. I'd buy a drive from a big name manufacturer that has some dram cache onboard. Something with software that allows for easy firmware updates. If I were [H] and looking for a fast drive I'd wait to see how PCIe 5 drives perform. It would be fun to have a drive that could do 10-12 GBps even if there's no practical use for it. My guess is they will struggle to hit 100 MBps on random Q1T1 workloads like virtually every other drive out there. That's the torque of the SSD world, imho.

 

[Abula]

SSDs are wonderful tech on todays age, specially for people coming from spinning disks, but the difference in gaming between ssds and even sata or nvme is unrecognizable for most, for now M.2 can fulfill most needs 2-4tb versions, i feel we might even see 8tb drives in the next few years, but after that, i think M.2 will be struggling due to space, and we might need to move toward U.2/U.3 formats, which should be a long term solution for people needing bigger drives.

For now, what i recommend, go with biggest sata ssd you can buy, if gaming is all you want. NVME M.2 imo are great for someone that will take advantage of their speeds, but gaming is not one of them.

 

[d3athf1sh]

For gaming I've noticed no difference at all NVME vs SATA. I'd buy a drive from a big name manufacturer that has some dram cache onboard. Something with software that allows for easy firmware updates. If I were [H] and looking for a fast drive I'd wait to see how PCIe 5 drives perform. It would be fun to have a drive that could do 10-12 GBps even if there's no practical use for it. My guess is they will struggle to hit 100 MBps on random Q1T1 workloads like virtually every other drive out there. That's the torque of the SSD world, imho.

yeah, but when directstorage drops and starts becoming a requirement for the latest games, you're gonna need a pcie 4 ssd.

and to o.p. yes you're gonna want it heatsinked, especially the high performance ones. if your drive doesn't come with or your board doesn't include one, or you want a better one, you can pick one up for $15-20. there's tons of them on amazon

 

[LukeTbk]

yeah, but when directstorage drops and starts becoming a requirement for the latest games, you're gonna need a pcie 4 ssd.

Is that a known fact ?, considering an Xbox (2.4 GB/s) has a significantly slower than PCIE 3 max bandwidth drive (4GB/s), PS5 go just fine with under 4GB/s PCIE 4 drive speed.

Depends what people mean by need, that a difference between an PCIE 4 vs before will be possible to be shown thus creating a need (a la you need more than X gig of vram) or actual need a PCIE 4 for DS games to work or work well enough ?
3.5 gig seconds with a 2.5:1 compression ratio and you are still comfortably reading over 8.5gig of game data a second, I feel like we will often see 2.5 gig by second type of actual drive read speed

 

[pendragon1]

 

[pitingres]

Could you briefly summarize? I loathe having to sit though all the video blather.

 

[pendragon1]

Could you briefly summarize? I loathe having to sit though all the video blather.

you can skip through the video pretty easy, look at the graphs...

 

[likeman]

there is generally no diferance between a SATA and nvme SSD for game loading times (unless benchmarking) the IOPS of a Sata SSD is more than enough, CPU is the limit once you have at least a SATA SSD





(this was before they optimized rust to not have 30k worth of small files loading) this also has a SSHD in there some of the others might as well (problem with SSHD they require a learning phase so when High latency happens it caches that to the small NAND on second read the random IO comes from the NAND instead, it's quite hard to benchmark a SSHD and no longer worth it becomes a similar size 2TB< SATA SSD is not far off price wise)


only time is Noticeably faster to have a NVME is when your installing them but thats an one time event or when doing 1-100GB patches