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

Crysis 2

Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter developed by Crytek, published by Electronic Arts and released in March 2011 for PC and console. Crysis 2 is the DX11 sequel to the 2007 video game Crysis.  It was the first game to showcase the CryEngine 3 game engine and the first to be released on consoles. It is a demanding game with excellent DX11 visuals which we ran at Ultra settings with the texture pack. Crysis 3 will be released this year.  

Here are the HDD results which also show the settings:

Now the SSD results:

The SSD results of this run was 0.6 faster.  Here is the hard disk drive frame time results with a single spike which topped out at 34ms:

Now the SSD frame time results with a larger spike at 40ms:

We again note in a single benchmark chart, a single random spike at about 14 seconds that does not appear in the other HDD bench frame time charts.   The SSD also has a large 40ms spike (at about 4 seconds) that is seen in other runs but is smaller on the HDD chart so it cannot be attributable to the disk.

Now the HDD ranking.

And the SSD rank.

There is very little difference in the rankings or the runs that indicate that the drive – SSD or HDD – makes no difference to the smoothness overall in this benchmark.  Let’s look at our last benchmark using the Unigine 3.0 engine.