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

Heaven 3.0 – Unigine

Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 3.0, on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card.  One DX11 game based on Unigine was released next year, Oil Rush. We use the setting for “extreme tessellation” and high shaders and we also set AF to 16x.

Here is Heaven 3.0 benchmark with maxed settings, extreme tessellation and 4xAA at 1920×1080:

Let’s go right to the graphs and first check the basic tests with the default benchmark score using the HDD.

Both the SSD and the HDD scored exactly the same minimum, maximum and averages and for once, both runs are exactly identical.

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

It certainly appears that just as with the Jane Nash scene, the Heaven 3.0 benchmark has been optimized for frame rates and not smoothness.  Now check out the frame time chart for the SSD:

These two runs nailed it as far as being the closest of the benches we ran.  Because of the human variability in starting and stopping Fraps, there are also the rare perfect charts that do line up almost exactly.

Here is the HDD ranking:

Here is the SSD ranking:

There is really no difference between the gaming experience regarding smoothness using a SSD or a HDD.