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



Heaven 3.0 – Unigine

unigine 1.0 150x150 Exploring Frame time measurement   Part 2   Is the SSD smoother than the HDD in Gaming?

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:

heaven settings Exploring Frame time measurement   Part 2   Is the SSD smoother than the HDD in Gaming?

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

heaven HDD results Exploring Frame time measurement   Part 2   Is the SSD smoother than the HDD in Gaming?

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.

heaven HDD FT Exploring Frame time measurement   Part 2   Is the SSD smoother than the HDD in Gaming?

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:

heaven SSD FT Exploring Frame time measurement   Part 2   Is the SSD smoother than the HDD in Gaming?

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:

heaven HDD rank Exploring Frame time measurement   Part 2   Is the SSD smoother than the HDD in Gaming?

Here is the SSD ranking:

heaven SSD rank Exploring Frame time measurement   Part 2   Is the SSD smoother than the HDD in Gaming?

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