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

CRYSIS

Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek.  After all these years, it remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment.

Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering.  CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies. All of our settings are set to the in-game maximum’s “very high” including 4xAA for 1920×1080 and we force 16xAF in the control panels.

Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark GPU run as expressed by two runs and charted by Fraps log:

Let’s go right to the graphs and first check the basic tests with the default benchmark score using the SSD – 54.82 fps as compared to to 54.625 as reported by Fraps – the differences perhaps cause by rounding off calculations.

They are very close. Lets’s look at the frame time chart for the HDD.

Crysis also appears to have been more optimized for frame rates and not as much for smoothness.  Now check out the frame time chart for the SSD:

There is about as much variety between the charts as there are between individual runs, they are very close.

Here is the HDD ranking:

Here is the SSD ranking:

There is really no difference.  Let’s move on to Far Cry 2.