3DMark has a gaming benchmark… for SSD
Photo Credit: 3DMark 3DMark has pointed out that gamers have a wide variety of SSDs to choose from, ranging from hybrid drives to SATA and NVMe options. The problem is that many measurement tools have been developed for hard drives rather than SSDs and almost all use synthetic workloads to measure performance, which can skew the results compared to actual use of the SSD. This new benchmark corrects these problems by directly supporting all the latest storage technologies right from the start. Additionally, the benchmark specifically focuses on real-world gaming performance instead of using a synthetic workload.
Storage activity actually consists of input and output operations. 3DMark notes that it is possible to record these operations, called traces, while the SSD performs an activity. With this in mind, the 3DMark Storage benchmark uses recorded tracks from popular games to measure real-world gaming performance. 3DMark lists the following scenarios:
Loading Battlefield V from launch to the main menu. Loading Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu. Loading Overwatch from launch to main menu. Record a 1080p game video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch. Installation of The Outer Worlds from the Epic Games launcher. Game progress saving in The Outer Worlds. Copy of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Steam folder from an external SSD to the system drive. Like other 3DMark benchmarks, the tests provide an internal score of your SSD's performance to compare against other devices. The benchmark also offers the bandwidth and average access time of the SSD, but the main score will be the most important information.
Photo Credit: 3DMark For example, 3DMark has already tested four NVMe Gen SSDs. 3 and Gen 4 in its new benchmark and their scores include the following:
Storage Device 3DMark Storage Benchmark Score Intel Optane SSD 900P 280 GB (PCI Express 3 M.2) 4,241 Samsung SSD 980 PRO 500 GB (PCI Express 4 M.2) 2,858 WD_BLACK SN750 NVMe 500GB (PCI Express 3 M.2) 2,014 Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1 TB (SATA III) 1,193 These scores highlight that Intel Optane - of the four drives - can deliver the best performance in the gaming sector, while the 860 EVO the worst ones. This probably won't mean having more FPS, but having a faster SSD will make game loads faster as long as your CPU is not the bottleneck (system requirements indicate that you need to have at least a quad processor -core from 3GHz).
With the current speeds of SSDs, especially NVMe SSDs, having a slow CPU can affect their ability to run at full speed. As more and more games require fast storage for better gaming performance, this benchmark could prove to be quite useful for verifying which SSDs are best for gaming in the future.
