Right so TLDR, building my first rig since a 2008 era q66 stepping 1st gen quad core... I've had mac's since but all are circa 2008-2012 retrofitted with sata3 ssd's... This will be my first 'modern' pc with a m.2... I've got a B550m pci-e 4.0 m.2 motherboard... Now I was going to splash out on either a 2 or 4tb 7300/6800mb/s 'fast' m.2 drive for it... This rig will ONLY be turned on for gaming, nothing else. I thought sweet it'll boot super fast and loading times in games should be rather snappy - now I've recently heard this isn't the case? Am I better off just getting a 3500mb/sec m.2 instead and saving myself a third or more off the price? The price doesn't bother me but I would be VERY angry if I literally don't gain anything and think I have when I could of just got a 'slower' m.2? Any feedback is welcomed! Ta!
Games frequently load lots of small files and there's an element of processing involved leading to other bottlenecks so it can often be the case there's negligible differences between Sata and PCIE SSDs nevermind between PCIe 3 and 4, but there are new techs like direct storage IO etc designed to speed up the path, when titles in PC space will take advantage who knows but in all likely hood you'll have your drive for years, so get the best you can afford, but you'll not miss the speed unless transferring many 10s of gigabytes about.
Yeah I mean there's around a third of a difference in price, so I'm not too fussed about spending the extra... It was just a bit surprising to me that load times weren't blazing fast when you've got 32gb ram, fast m.2, good cpu and graphics card etc... I was a bit underwhelmed tbh.
Having just built a system with a 5600X with a 1tb wd blue, i didn't do much on it besides install windows 11 and run a few stress tests using unigine superposition to tune the fan curves, but bootup was blazingly fast, superposition load time seemed pretty quick too. my rig with a 5800X and a 512 firecuda doesn't boot that fast, but that's more likely due to the current state of the windows installation and all the crap i've installed over the last 3 years. i think it's currently a case of the technology has advanced way ahead of what your average home user requires, so you could get a cheaper drive sure, but what i'd probably rather do is get 2x 2tb drives*; 1x 7000MS/s pcie4 for boot and current games, another slower 2tb for backups and overflow. when the software starts to cathcup and things like direct storage become more common and better implemented, you've got that faster drive to so the job. *admittedly i've only looked on scan, but 4tb m.2 drives are the price of 3x 2tb drives and the PCIe 3 one was more expensive than the pcei4.
I guess the relevant question is: when will directstorage come into play? For a gaming machine, the fastest SSD doesn't make much sense due to other processing bottleneck as mentioned...... I guess things will change when directstorage becomes common.
Yeah I have been tempted by 2x2tb fast pcie 4 drives... Means I could hackintosh the other drive as well haha, all AMD after all
Basically you have to deal with multiple issues: 1: The advertised headline speeds aren't all that relevant, if you tried copying a 40GB blu ray iso from one Seagate Firecuda 530 to another then yeah, you'll benefit from the high speeds of a bleeding edge pci-e 4 drive. But as a boot drive or for loading games there are other more relevant performance metrics that have improved far less over the years. 1b: Said other performance metrics could have improved... if Intel hadn't abandoned Optane. 2: DirectX12 does have DirectStorage, but it lies dormant unless game developers enable it and considering they can't be arsed to ship finished products you can do the math on what the chances are they'll add extra stuff. 3: In multi player games you'll often be waiting for the slow loaders on a decade old 5400 rpm laptop drive regardless.
Don't know how much it's an issue as I haven't looked too far into it, but cache-less PCI SSDs have Host Memory Buffer now as well. I decided to avoid getting one as Ableton uses as much memory as it can when loading samples etc., so it didn't sound like a great idea to me to be taking some of that memory away to allocate to a drive. Like I say though, I haven't looked too far into it and have been distracted by other things but I'm sure someone here will be able to clarify. With Direct Storage, are you then going to have to upgrade other parts like the motherboard to be able to use it, or will you be positioned to just "turn it on"? If it's part of DX12, sounds like the latter, but Anfield's point above makes sense re: developers and priorities. Seems the main real-world advantage of m.2 vs SATA appears to be space savings and neatness at this point.
1: Piracy, how dare you at least convert it to mkv first 2: I hope you're not insinuating game dev's like EA for example half arse things? 3: They must get up before the suns up to join the server Ah nice, you make beats I used to, and record mates live performances in DnB etc... Yeah mate I just bought a brand new b550m so that'll be staying as I like it's OTT hench size heatsinks Yeah it would seem that way now I've delved down the rabbit hole! I shall be borring one of my sata ssd's for a month before getting the m.2, purely so I can afford to build the system end of this month a month early So it will be interesting to see if I notice any difference the month later with an M.2...
For directstorage to work you need an nvme drive (technically doesn't have to be m.2, although most consumer nvme drives are m.2), plus you need a DX12 GPU and a Windows version that supports DX12. You don't have to turn it on on your end as it is supposed to just work in supported titles. Not sure on the exact amount of work required on the game devs side beyond its on them to support it all.
They are already on version 1.2 with support for HDD, we've yet to see any game that implements it. https://www.techpowerup.com/307531/microsoft-releases-directstorage-1-2-with-hdd-speedups
Nice, I had missed that update to it in April. There is one game that implements directstorage, Forspoken (unfortunately doesn't make the game world less bland cookie cutter open world).
In PC land not having a consistent platform means implementation and use becomes a niche thing, in the console space (latest ones PS5 etc) this type of thing is already in use, as such I'm sure most game engines could probably be enabled with support when it makes sense if they already support the consoles doing it for performance reasons. Some benchies on forsaken here. https://www.thefpsreview.com/2023/0...sds-compared-in-forspoken-directstorage-test/
