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

STALKER, Call of Pripyat

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat became a new DX11 benchmark for us after GSC Game World released a another story expansion to the original Shadows of Chernobyl. It is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. All of these games have non-linear storylines which feature role-playing game elements and “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI.

Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine using DirectX 11 and real-time GPU tesselation.  It features Shader model 3.0 & 4.0 graphics engine featuring HDR, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, weather effects and day-to-night cycles. As with other engines using deferred shading, the original DX9c X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled, although the DX10 and DX 11 versions do.

We are using the stand-alone benchmark by Clear Sky’s creator and we picked the most stressful test out of the four, “Sun shafts”. It brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10/DX10.1 and DX11 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX11.0 with “ultra” settings plus 2xAA, including applying edge-detect MSAA which chokes performance even further. Here we present our maxed out DX11 settings for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat DX11 benchmark with 2xAA at 1920×1080:

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

You can compare them individually to the official benchmark results. Here is the benchmark’s run on the HDD which is the same as on the SSD.

72,5 fps compares 72.6 recorded by Fraps.  Lets’s look at the frame time chart for the HDD.  It has a single higher spike to 78ms in the beginning of the benchmark while the SSD only spikes to 52ms.

Now check out the frame time chart for the SSD; it appears to have a smaller spike at about 1:40 but there is very little difference between running this benchmark on a HDD or on a SSD:

There is about as much variety between the charts as there are between individual runs.

Here is the HDD ranking:

Here is the SSD ranking:

There is really no difference except for the size of the spike in the beginning and another near the end.