DirectStorage testing reveals that PCIe 3 SSDs are as fast as PCIe 5 SSDs, PCIe 4 SSDs almost similar
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Kaarme
It's still a sample size of one game, which is also the first of its kind. Maybe a few years from now we will be a little wiser. On paper, it seems like an attractive feature for open world games, so there is a potential market for it. That being said, it's another question how strict requirements studios would dare to place on it. There are a whole lot of choices in the NVMe SSD market. Even if studios don't want to go with the lousiest, cheapest drive available, perhaps a decent PCIe 3 speed will be chosen, instead of demanding for more for smooth gameplay.
cucaulay malkin
told you.
only difference you'll get from a pcie4/5 is 1. mobo price 2.drive price 3. synthetic sequential bandwidth numbers.
loading will still depend on nand and controller,even with Direct Storage.
I bet with newer nand sometime in the future, upcoming budget pcie3 drives will load faster than those 11GB/s early pcie5 ones.
By all means, people can keep buying those ridiculously priced mobos and ssds with fans to run CDM..... None for me, thanks.
vestibule
Well, for future reference, that's good to know and my wallet can stop fretting now . 🙂
RealNC
The main point is finally being able to utilize the "GB/s" of NVME vs the "MB/s" of SATA. For now, it shouldn't matter too much how many GB/s you have, as long as you are in the GB/s ballpark.
I suspect PCIe 4/5 will start making a difference once there's games out there that have DS as a requirement instead of a recommendation?
Kaarme
Newer NAND has, thus far, mainly meant more bits per cell, allowing the manufacturers to release bigger capacity by using the same amount of silicon, and 3D stacking, of course. As far as I know, multi-level cells have made NAND slower, not faster. I think we need something else than NAND to have a real revolution. Maybe 3D XPoint would have had that potential if it hadn't been kept behind a wall of proprietariness till it became irrelevant.
Picolete
Speeds might be bottlenecked by the CPU
cucaulay malkin
bottlenecked by 7700X ? ridiculous assumption.
and nand speed matters a lot. SN570,which is 112l bics5 on pcie3 loads games faster than sabrent rocket pcie4 w. 96l bics4.
cucaulay malkin
you're being taken for a ride with pcie5 nvmes, just like early pcie4 nvme/x570 adopters.
don't buy drives because of the interface, the technology on the drive is the same, it's only the connector that's changed.
geogan
Good point. Manufacturers can stick the same NAND chips on a 10 trillion gigabit PCIE100 interface and charge much more for it (the main point of the exercise 😉) it'll still be same speed or unnoticeable to humans anyway.
I still can't tell any discernible difference between the expensive PCIE4 Sabrent Rocket 4 motherboard based drives I use now on X570, and the old SATA based Sandisk Ultra II drive I used to use years ago...
Reardan
I don't understand, am I retarded? Isn't the Gen4/Gen5 SSD 25% faster here? Where's the "as fast as" coming from?
RealNC
The difference is only three (3) seconds. Which for all intents and purposes can be described with "as fast as." If you're coming from an HDD where it can take whole minutes, then 10 vs 13 seconds isn't really a difference.
Maybe this will change in future games.
Venix
You get a 2tb gen 3 SSD for 120 euros or so and a gen 5 for 250 (roughly) how much 3 seconds are with to you ? 😛
I said that in the past for now even a decent mid range gen 3 drive seams more than enough and when direct storage becomes common place in a year or two you will have the whole picture plus ssds will be much cheaper! There is absolutely no reason to fork money now to be ready for the chance of utilizing it in the future .
cucaulay malkin
8200 pro is 64l micron tlc, far from the fastest available. it was great 2-3 years ago, now the standard is 176l.
990 Pro is the latest on the other hand.
It's not just pcie being compared here, 990 Pro has other advantages.
Reardan
Yeah I completely disagree, is 95 and 105FPS the same thing? If I put you in front of them, would you be able to consistently tell the difference? Seriously doubt it. But would you rather have the 95 or 105FPS video card? Would you say they "Perform the same"? No one would, the whole forum exists to stratify tiny differences between an entire range of video cards and CPUs from multiple manufacturers where a difference of a few percentage either way turns a card from useless garbage to amazing value.
I wish I could go back in time when people were trying to liquid cool their Raptors and show them this post where we go "eh 3 seconds, who cares, basically the same" they'd be appalled. I want that scene back, this one is boring.
schmidtbag
Pretty much what I predicted:
Gen 3 would be fast enough but show signs of being slower.
Gen 5 would have no noteworthy benefit over gen 4.
Relatively speaking, games don't stream that much data from disk, even during a loading screen. I only see DS being useful for real-time loading or when there isn't enough VRAM.
nosirrahx
Its going to matter more in the future, just like how it took a while for lots of codes to matter for games. Existing games are also not going to benefit much, just like how older games can't take advantage of adding a pile of cores.
schmidtbag
Outside of the 2 scenarios I mentioned, I'm not so sure of that. Games just aren't that disk intensive, which is why SATA SSDs still offer adequate performance in most cases. Of course, NVMe does offer a significant bump in performance, especially now that we're getting more games optimized for 4K, but even then, we're only taking what... 3, maybe 4 seconds faster loading times at best?
The reason why games (even new ones) can't take advantage of a "pile of cores" is because they have to be explicitly developed to do so. Games don't parallelize very well, as almost everything has to be done sequentially (where offloading work can slow things down as you wait for threads to synchronize). Any tasks that could be easily pushed to another thread don't take hardly any processing power to be worth the complexity. As a result, nearly all games use a finite amount of threads, and often no more than 8.
Anyway, I think the existence of DS is warranted but I think gen 4 speeds will be as fast as we're realistically going to need for several years. Once games are optimized with resolutions greater than 4K, that's when I think more bandwidth will become necessary.
TheDeeGee
No need for watercooling either with Gen3 and 4.
cucaulay malkin
if anything this is just 990 Pro having much newer Nand and controller than 8200 Pro. They could have used a bics5 drive for pcie3 testing.
NEP6XSBW
Forspoken isn't really pushing NVMe SSDs to the limit - even Gen3 drives. It's not using GPU decompression. Once games start utilizing GDeflate, we could see a bigger difference between the different generations.
Also, as is stated in the description of the video where the comparison is taken from, there will be faster Gen5 SSDs with faster NAND coming than the one used in this benchmark.
