TL;DW:

  1. You’ll want a PCIe 3.0 NVME drive at minimum for an optimal gaming experience. Anything beyond PCIe 4.0 is excessive and is a poor use of your money.

  2. SATA SSDs are still viable but on the cusp of unplayable.

  3. And lastly no one should game on a HDD/harddrive as the performance is beyond abysmal.

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51M

Does it make a difference beyond level loading time?

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141M

Yes. Texture and asset streaming is affected pretty significantly by the speed of your storage. Load times are a large part of where SSDs of different classes can help, but the better your SSD performs for I/O operations, the better for overall visual performance.

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81M

Doesn’t even make a difference for that, for the most part. Most game loading is still CPU bound once you go past spinning rust.

Nik282000
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If the game is genuinely fun, no, it’s all wank. I still use an HDD and the load times are long but not long enough to justify buying more stuff.

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The video even shows it makes a difference, although it only touches on that part, with no in-depth analysis. Some modern games don’t work properly on HDDs and you get tons of glitches and pop-in.

In older games it probably won’t affect much more than load times though.

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1M

The Gothic 3 community made a extensive study about stutter and optimization steps for HDD vs. SSD (no stutter) in ca. 2010ish for a game from 2006. So, generally for 3D games, yes, except if you compress textures in a trade for higher CPU usage.

Btw, this game looks surprisingly good with the right tweaks atop the community fixes.

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