Game-related benchmarks

The synthetics

3DMark 11 and Vantage are useful tests to track changes within the same system and they are often used to give a rough comparison between platforms.

Vantage

First up we look at Vantage on the HDD using our GTX 670 and i7-3770K at stock speeds.  Looking carefully at each of the tests, all drives fall within a very small margin of error.

Here is the chart.

There is no difference running a SSD or a HDD for Vantage.

Now let’s look at 3D Mark 11.

3D Mark 11

Now lets check out the score with the same system:Here is the chart of our results:

There is no difference running a HDD or a SSD.  Let’s look at Heaven Benchmark and Crysis to see if there is any difference in frame rates between SSD and HDD.

Heaven 3.0 & Crysis framerates

We run Heaven 3.0 on all 3 of our drives at identical settings:

We compare identical runs and chart the result:

No difference.  We cannot substantiate Kingston’s claim that “Kingston’s HyperX SSD lets users load games and applications faster, increase frames per second (FPS)”.

Now we will go to a very practical test of something we all do, file copying.

File Copy: Crysis 2

In this test we are using MrK’s method of installing the Crysis Warhead game to the drive being benchmarked. The game folder is copied to another folder on the same drive using Microsoft’s Robocopy GUI and the time used is noted. This real world benchmark tests both the read and the write speeds of the drive at the same time. This time we choose Crysis 2 for this purpose as this game has 10GB of files of various sizes. This should test the hard disk transfer speeds across vast sizes of files and is indeed a real world scenario.

Here is the chart of the copy time reults in seconds.

The 128GB SDD took 2 minutes and 6 seconds on average to copy nearly 10GB. The HyperX 240GB SSDs only averaged 1 minute and 35 seconds while the HDD took 5 minute and 32 seconds.

Need we say more? Here we see a practical difference demonstrating the advantages of SSD and even the advantages of the faster HyperX SSD over the consumer grade Vnow 200 series.

We have already seen very slight improvements in video editing and multi-tasking when the drives are accessed and huge gains in copying big files.

Gaming Load times

Solid-state drives won’t increase game framerates but they can certainly reduce game startup times and save/load times. This means less time waiting for the game to load and more time playing the game. There is also the issue of “immersion”. If it takes a long time to load a level or an autosave, it may cause irritation, and getting back quickly into the game after your character dies is important for staying immersed in any game.

There is an incredible variation in game loading times between the HDD and SSDs, depending on the game engine used.  Some games bring you almost instantly back into the game, with very little difference between HDD and SSD.  The ones that take longer, tend to favor the SSD and load noticeably more quickly.  The differences between the two HyperX SSDs is imperceptable and there is less differences between the Vnow 200 SSD and the HyperX series than there is between the VNow Series and the HDD,

If you are into saving time, the SSD is definitely faster in loading PC levels and autosaves. The SSD will not improve your framerates – or your aim – but it may improve immersion by getting you back into the game a bit more quickly. And we also note that the 96GB SSD is a fraction quicker than the 128GB SSD.

 Benchmarking and testing overclocks

One thing that a reviewer or overclocker will appreciate is the ability to test hardware while pushing it to its limits, will often cause a display driver to stop responding or the operating system to crash.  Using a HDD takes quite a while to recover and return to testing compared to benching with a SSD.  This editor estimates that using a SSD over benching with a HDD for a major CPU or video card evaluation, saves twenty percent of his time!