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

Conclusion

This has been quite an enjoyable look at the alternate ways to benchmark PC games for smoothness.  We have learned that Fraps is a very useful tool for both framerate and frame time measurement and they can easily be charted using Excel or Frafs Benchmark Viewer.

We have seen no real difference between playing our PC games on a SSD or on a PC regarding smoothness although certainly game levels and saves generally load more quickly on the SSD.  We also note variences and spikes that randomly appear that can be disregarded after comparing many runs of the same benchmark.

UPDATED: January 14, 2013

Due to continued testing with an even faster 240GB OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD, we have noted two benchmark differences between the HDD and the SSD in terms of smoothness.  Of course, there are situations where the game must stream from the disk and there can be choppiness, hitches or jitter if the device is too slow to keep up with the requests.  In that case, a faster drive could be very helpful.  Of course, game developers has naturally targeted and optimized their streaming from the HDD, not from the SSD.

Games typically load content in the background as the player progresses through a scene.  The game has to request data from the storage media and the longer it takes, the game may contain frames that are not rendered evenly, as the rendering engine tries to keep up.  In a worst case, the game may stall.  According to Intel, uneven frame delivery occurs whenever 0.1 percent or less of total display pixels change for a duration of at least five frames.

In all cases, by their nature of being repeatable benchmarks, all of our runs were very similar with no apparent jitter differences – except for two benches.  Resident Evil 5 showed the benchmark running on the Kingston SSD to be a little smoother in the begining of the run than on the OWC SSD; and Far Cry 2 showed the benchmark running on the OWC SSD to be smoother than on the Kingston SSD.

Here is the FC2 bench as run on the Kingston SSD with our GTX 680:

Here is the same bench run on the OWC SSD with the same GTX 680 and everything else, the same:

We see that the OWC SSD exhibits smoother framerate delivery and less incidents of jitter.  In this particular case, we can assume that a slower drive can contribute to uneven delivery of framerate.  If you are a gamer and you want absolutely the best chance for the ultimate gaming experience and you already have a high-end PC, you might also consider using a very fast SSD and seeing for yourself if you can notice the possible differences between the HDD and a SSD in gaming.

For all of our testing, we will continue to use the same drive for all of our benching and we feel confident that we can move forward to test video cards for smooth delivery of frames using Fraps and our charts.  We can rule out differences due to our disks except for random “noise”.  Of course, we shall always test apples to apples and games that are run on a GeForce on a SSD will also be compared to a Radeon on the same SSD and games that are compared from a HDD will always be compared to game also on an identical HDD.

Stay tuned, there is a lot more coming up from us regarding frame time measurement.  Next up, we compare our HD 7970 at GE clocks to the stock GTX 680 and eventually we shall present side-by-side video for your examination.

Happy Gaming!

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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