Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 2 – Is the SSD “smoother” than the HDD in Gaming?

Sleeping Dogs 

 Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games in conjunction with Square Enix London Studios and published by Square Enix.  Sleeping Dogs takes place in Hong Kong and focuses on an undercover operation to infiltrate the Triads.

The game started development as an original title under “True Crime”, but as a result of high development budget and delays, it was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011. Six months later, it was announced that Square Enix had picked up the publishing rights to the game, but the game was renamed Sleeping Dogs.  It sold over 1.5 million editions by September of last year and it looks to be a new franchise for Square Enix.  It is a DX11 game that requires a high-end enthusiast PC to run well with all settings set to maximum even at 1920×1080.

Here is the Fraps Logs of the HDD with an average of 38.63fps and the SSD with 38.65fps:

We now see nearly the same score using the HDD in the official benchmark results- slightly faster at 38.9 v 38.6 with Fraps – rounding calculations may make the slight difference.

Now lets look at the SSD run of each of these runs for a frame rate comparison; it is .0.1 of a single frame rate faster and the maximum and minumums are also very close to the HDD run and also to the FrapsLog report:

 Lets’s look at the frame time chart for the HDD.

Now check out the frame time chart for the SSD:

There is about as much variety between the charts as there are between individual runs.  We see spikes in the same place, the only difference is that the largest one is in the beginning of the HDD run and the largest one on the SSD is at the end – however, the spikes are generally in the same spots.  Because of the human variability in starting and stopping Fraps, there will not be perfect charts that line up exactly.

Here is the HDD ranking:

Here is the SSD ranking:

There is really no difference

Let’s look at our latest benchmark, Hitman: Absolution.