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

   Hitman: Absolution

Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix as the fifth entry in the Hitman series. Hitman: Absolution runs on IO Interactive’s own custom DX11 Glacier 2 game engine which was specifically built for it with an emphasis on rendering very dense crowds of up to 1200 individuals.  It was released November, 2012 (week 47) and it is ABT’s latest DX11 benchmark. 

Here are the settings we chose.

Here is the benchmark run on the HDD with an average of 41.8 fps:

We now see a slightly higher fps using the SSD at 42.5 fps although the minimums are also similar.

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

It certainly appears that occasionally, spikes can be generated randomly.  One spike appears in the HDD chart that does not appear at all in the SSD chart that also does not appear in other HDD runs of this benchmark.  Now compare the frame time chart for the SSD:

There is about as much slight variety between the HDD vs SSD charts as there are between individual runs on either the HDD or the SSD.  Generally they look very close.  Because of the human variability in starting and stopping Fraps, there will not be perfect charts that line up exactly but they should show the difference in benching two video cards as we will explore in our follow-up evaluation.

Here is the HDD ranking:

Here is the SSD ranking:

There is really no difference in ranking.