They are literally the most data intensive software you have in terms of UX. Your movies, music, documents, and even non-served databases are all browsable on low bandwidth low IOPS devices just fine with sophisticated algorithms.
Your load times for a level of Call of Duty are always reflective of how long it takes to get texture data off the disk and into vram, and that is constantly being hammered. It sometimes even causes texture popping on crappy notebook hard drives.
I have 256GB SSDs in my desktop and notebook (with intents to find a nice 1TB drive next year, since we are at the tail end of SATA3) and my Steam library on my desktop is 176GB by itself.
My OS on its own (Arch) discounting pacman provided games (0ad, doom3bfg, darkplaces, doom, etc) is around 6GB, and most of that is Qt doc, Python2 site packages, 300MB of wallpapers, and 600MB of locale.
Not only is load time reflected by the time it takes for texture data to be copied into vram, but what constitute reasonable load time is to a degree based on developer platforms and those have a tendency to use above average hardware. If in the past 10s load time was maximum, that number will now be more likely based on SSD speeds rather than HDD.
Same reason as you'd want an SSD for anything else? Fast loading times of lots of data? Also, some operating systems make having programs installed to volumes other than the boot volume hard.
You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.
Right now, you maybe put your favorite game on the SSD, not the whole steam library - and that is what gamers often recommend themselves. FPS don't get influenced by the HDD, only loading times, and those are normally not too high. Many new games have only two loading times: loading the game and then loading the save. Afterwards, everything is streamed, and a proper HDD is fast enough for that. And that is what the people responding to your comment here miss completely.
You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.
It is a pity unconditionally. I expressed a subjective impression related to the topic at hand and asked constructively for explanation. There was simply no reason to downvote.
The downvotes and the first-generation replies to my comment show that this is not the place for a discussion about the worthiness of SSD's for games.
If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?
You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.
Improved loading times and better texture loading in games where it is heavy (think Fallout 3 or Skyrim) is a great reason to wack an SSD in your system.
Skyrim and Fallout 3 are in my eyes counter-examples for using an SSD, since you basically have only the two loading times and afterwards it's streaming. Maybe if the Quicktravel takes too long on the HDD.
> If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?
Oh, sure then :) It is only a waste in the relation of price per gigabyte vs. the possible performance improvement ingame.
> You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.
I have a 500gb SSD which cost ~200$. Sure 5 years ago I would agreed with you, but now days it's really not that expencive and in game load times feel much longer. IMO, Skyrim is load happy, sure the open world is fine, but go to town, get into your house, get out of your house get out of ton is 4 load screens in ~1Min of gameplay.
That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.
An SSD will not improve your framerate much at all (That's not what you use an SSD for).
You cited main loading times like loading a game and loading a save, which are enough reason themselves to want an SSD in there. Some games are painfully long in these areas (take any Total War game as an example) and an SSD will help.
I gave Fallout 3 and Skyrim as an example of texture loading where an SSD would matter. You claimed it didn't, as this is contrary to all avaialble information.
These games (like many open world games) stutter when new cells/areas are loaded (I'm not talking about regular texture streaming). Again, this is where SSD's will make a difference.
An SSD becomes even more useful when you start installing high-resolution texture mods to games like these. My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.
There is nothing about SSD's being used to store games that is a 'waste' if those things are important to you.
I have two SSD's in my personal machine, one 128Gb for the OS and one 500Gb for Steam and some games. They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it? There is literally no reason for me to not do this in a high-end system meant for playing games.
Other games will go on my regular HDD's because you are right at least in saying that not all games will benefit from it, but some will.
That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.
I don't like your tone. If texture streaming would profit much from an SSD, you would see that in the FPS.
Fallout 3 was played by me on a very old machine, of course without an SSD, and I remember no noticeable cell loading outside. The streaming of those engines is just too good. Fallout: New Vegas I played for more hours I'm comfortable admitting, heavily modded, on a better machine, same story there.
> My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.
Ingame, in the widlerness? Try it out. I doubt it. Initial loading times will be better of course, and loading times when switching locations, but not performance otherwise. You underestimate the performance of a regular HDD that is not a shitty 2.5 model cooked to death in an overheating laptop.
> They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it?
Like I said: No reason not to, if you have the SSD anyway. But normally, SSDs are a lot more expensive than a HDD, see above.
You did not say that you played Skyrim first on a HDD and then on a SSD…
> Area/Cell transitions are MUCH faster on an SSD.
I think we were not talking about the same thing (anymore?). Like I wrote below, explicit area transitions - entering a city, loading a save game - will of course benefit from an SSD, a lot. That is loading though. But you also have cell transitions that are streamed – you talked about texture streaming above - when travelling on foot through the game world. If I remember the engine from my morrowind mod days correctly, that is a special case in those games with its explicit cell system, but it probably basically applies to all 3D-games that include moving through big areas, since they all have to load textures at the time they come in reach. It would be quite interesting if an SSD would have a real effect here, and to my knowledge it so far does not. It would be interesting because those transitions can stutter if the streaming system does not work properly, or if the HDD is really too slow, which is a likely cause of bad minimal fps (and depending on the benchmark, could lower average fps) or rather explicit stuttering, measured in fps or not.
I'm not saying SSDs do not help with loading stuff, I say that to my knowledge, they do not help with streaming - which are two different things.
I never felt those explicit transitions were too bothersome when I played Fallout/Oblivion/Morrowind, that together with the streaming system outdoors is why I see an SSD as not necessary for those games. But of course, if it bothers you - and maybe loading really takes longer in Skyrim? - an SSD is a good load time minimizer.
I used to have roommates that were intense gamers (blew thousands of dollars on new GPUs and other desktop gaming parts per semester) and all they talked about were SSDs. SSDs are pretty big in gaming.
