[SOLVED] Should I expect major upgrades in load times for games with a 970 Pro

Aug 13, 2020
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I bought a Samsung V-NAND 970 Pro NVME M.2 and proceeded to transfer my games to it. While the load times are improved..by how much seems dependent on the game. Killer Instinct is pretty much instant but Recore still takes far too long.
I used crystaldiskmark and the read and write speeds are 3500/2700 mb/s.
I was checking the speeds during a load screen in Recore from the task manager, and the highest the read speed got was around 700 mb/s. So is the game just not designed to be loaded faster or is something affecting my ssd?
 
Solution
Got it. Just wanted to make sure you weren't on an old mobo without PCIe Gen 3 x4. Your board has that.

Again, your Crystal Disk Mark results suggest the drive is performing as expected. As shown above, not every workload will leverage that full performance.
Aug 13, 2020
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Compared to.....?

well my hardrive has a read/write of 223/196 mb/s if thats what you're asking.
I'm new to building gaming pc's so I dont know how everything is supposed to work exactly. Maybe its more a question of why my 970 is advertised to hit multiple gigabytes of read and write speed for fast loading, but when loading a game its not close to that?
 
What's the specs of the rest of your system. Please include motherboard make/model as well.

As your Crystal Disk Mark results show, the drive will perform to the specs when hit with favorable conditions. Large queue depths (concurrent read/write calls). However, most real world usage is at a queue depth of 4 or less.
sustained-sr.png


Also performance varies on file size also.
tvYhBT9isYwUqTs9ZiHMJd-650-80.png.webp


Also, load times aren't necessarily 100% bound by storage performance either. Less so if you're playing a game online.
 
Got it. Just wanted to make sure you weren't on an old mobo without PCIe Gen 3 x4. Your board has that.

Again, your Crystal Disk Mark results suggest the drive is performing as expected. As shown above, not every workload will leverage that full performance.
 
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Solution
Sequential performance is irrelevant for game loading right now.

Generally you will find that a fast NVMe SSD can be up to 20% faster than a SATA SSD, depending on the game. The majority of games will see little to no benefit, on average for games that do it's in the 5-15% range with some better than others. The 970 Pro is MLC-based so is pretty fast as MLC has lower read latency than TLC & QLC, plus NVMe is faster than AHCI (SATA).

The leap from HDD to SSD is much larger - I tested as much as 160% faster between my 7200 RPM WD Blue and my NVMe EX920.
 
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