Will games take better advantage of M2 NVME speeds in the future?

[jimfreeman92]

Hi all,

I've been doing some research ahead of a new build (hoping to purchase parts during cyber monday sales) into the different SSD options that exist today. I'm coming from an aging 7200rpm HDD that takes quite a while to boot and load games, and want to have my socks knocked off.

I've figured out that, on paper at least, SSDs can be ranked by speed slowest to fastest like so:

• 
  SATA SSDs & M.2 SATA SSDs (same speed cap)
  M.2 PCIe SSDs
  M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs (via m.2 slot, or PCIe card)

Correct me if wrong. What I've also found out is that while NVMe drives, etc, can make a measurable difference in PC startup times, and large file transfer times as measured VS SATA SSDs, the difference in gaming load times today really isn't significant enough to justify the price difference.

I'm looking at SSDs for gaming load times first and PC startup time second, and I don't move big blocks of data around with any particular frequency.

So do we think that games in 2019 and beyond will make better use of these advanced SSD drives to open up that performance difference between NVMe and SATA SSDs? E.g. move a 10 second load time on SATA / 9 second on NVMe down to something like a 10/5 difference?

Here are the 2 drives I'm considering.
$140: WD Black NVMe M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
$85: WD Blue 3D NAND 500GB PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s 2.5"/7mm Solid State Drive

Is the first a smart buy?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Games already benefit as much from faster storage as they're probably ever going to, at least in the areas that they DO benefit from it which is only in terms of initial loading of the game, map and level loading and loading things like textures. Actual gameplay does not rely on storage so there is no benefit to gaming performance for the most part from faster storage.

Storage getting faster in the future isn't going to change that. Games will STILL only benefit from it when storage is 5x faster than today, in the areas where it already sees an advantage from it. You will never get more FPS from faster storage. You will only, mostly, have far less time to wait when something has to load or something on the drive has to be accessed which does not account for the majority of what slows down gameplay.

However, get the fastest storage you can reasonably afford, that is still sufficient capacity for your needs. There are a great many other areas where fast storage makes a big difference, like other processes in Windows that run alongside games, that CPU resources get held up for waiting on the OS to access data off your drive. So in that way, it might still be beneficial on top of faster loading times.

 

[2sidedpolygon]

Eh, maybe. I'd highly recommend a fast SSD anyway, but honestly I don't see devs implementing them too much into games. There's really just not much of an incentive. Right now, what we need is devs working on taking advantage of chips' multithreaded performance.

 

[jay.wooster]

Nope. I have both mate and they give a 1 second boost to load times, whether it be a 30 second load or a 10 second load it seems to be consistently ~1 second improvement. It only provides a significant improvement during file transfer or when using editing/rendering software. Get the WD Blue, i have a WD Black in my PC now and the extra i paid for it for gaming wasn't worth it.

 

[jay.wooster]

And i think the next move will be Optane based SSD's anyway

 

[Darkbreeze]

I think Optane will fade away, much like Rambus memory did. With newer SSD controllers starting to offer much better Optane like performance, and WAY better sequential performance, like the Phison E12 based drives, I don't think we'll see Optane take off the way Intel has hoped it would. Wouldn't be the first time I was wrong, but things certainly seem to be trending that way anyhow.

 

[jay.wooster]

I.e Don't guess about future proofing, get the cheaper Sata SSD and you wont regret it mate, in fact if you can double the size of the SSD for the same price as the M.2 Nvme i would recommend that instead and have a 1TB SSD over a 500GB M.2 NVME

 

[Darkbreeze]

I'd agree. But if you can get the capacity you are looking for AND get a good NVME drive while your at it, it sure can't hurt.