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

FarCry 2

Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story.   There is also a third game, Far Cry 3, which is also published by Ubisoft whose devs created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.

The Far Cry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation . First we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1080 with AI enabled and we use the Ranch Smsll benchmark with ultra settings plus 8xAA.

Here are the settings we chose:

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

Here is the benchmark’s same test, now run on the SSD:

 There is not a lot of difference in the framerates but there is always a little variability in running any benchmark.

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

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 with the spikes being very uniform.

Here is the HDD ranking:

Here is the SSD ranking:

There is really no difference

Let’s move to Resident Evil 5 which appears to be a smooth high fps gaming experience even on a medium enthusiast PC.