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

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror third-person shooter developed and published by Capcom that has become the best selling single title in the series. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil series and it was released for Windows in September 2009. Resident Evil 5 revolves around two investigators pulled into a bio-terrorist threat in a fictional town in Africa.

The developer’s emphasis is in optimizing high frame rates but they have implemented HDR, tone mapping, depth of field and motion blur into the game. Re5’s custom game engine, ‘MT Framework’, already supports DX10 to benefit from less memory usage and faster loading. Resident Evil 5 gives you choice as to DX10 or DX9 and we ran the DX10 pathway.

There are two benchmarks built-into Resident Evil 5. We chose the fixed benchmark.

Here is the benchmark’s first test, RE 5, run on the HDD with an average of 175.9 fps:

We now see nearly the same score for RE 5 using the SSD – slightly faster at 176.1 fps – benchmark noise is the difference.

Now lets’s look at the frame time chart for the HDD.  We were originally surprised by the spikes and the differences between the charts, but need to put this into perspective – the spikes hit 12ms (dropping to around 95fps) at their worst, varying over the average of 6ms and this is perhaps why Resident Evil 5 is perceived as being rather “smooth” by most players.

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 and we do see a a lot of 2-4ms spikes which are not easily noticed.  And because of the human variability in starting and stopping Fraps, there will not be perfect charts that line up exactly.

Here is the HDD ranking:

Here is the SSD ranking:

There is really no difference.  Let’s move on to the STALKER,  Call of Pripyat benchmark.