this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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They only tested frame rates. There was no real difference between PCIe versions and most games ran nearly as well from SATA SSDs.
It would have been nice if they tested load times.
I imagine this would show up as texture pop in as often they will load the lower resolution textures first while the higher resolution ones load in, which wouldn’t shown up in n average framerate graph. I’d like to see a frametime plot as well as 1% lows don’t really tell enough of the picture for stuftering.
Might even get better performance with slow drives, with lesser/no textures used for longer periods
Exactly - most game engines now will hide this rather than stutter.
Got an NVMe and a RAID array in my gaming desktop; the RAID does about 1 GB/s sustained read and write, which is good, but its latency is quite bad. Was playing Elden Ring directly from it since I couldn't be bothered moving it - load times were good, but "fog doors" appear over doorways and cave entrances while they're being loaded, which never happens on SSD. Never dropped a frame, though.
Yes, exactly. Testing storage with game frame rate betrays a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how modern video games work.
lmfao what in the hell does the storage medium have to do with frame rate. You can't really start rendering anything until you've loaded the things that should be rendered. And at that point the storage medium should be finished doing its thing.
If your frame rate depends on your storage medium, I would consider that a bug, lol.
Some games do streaming on the fly when you enter a new area to avoid loading screens for massive-world games like maybe the new Zelda games and GTA style games. But once the data is loaded, lay off the storage device.
There are a number of games
particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm
that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.
I'd assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it's got a strategy more sophisticated than just "load resource first time it's requested". But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.
Bethesda uses the term "cell". I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.
searches
It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is "sublevel", for the units loaded.
https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/
Right, that's what I was referring to in my comment. Games that load while playing to avoid loading screens between areas. 👍