this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Does it make a difference beyond level loading time?
Yes. Texture and asset streaming is affected pretty significantly by the speed of your storage. Load times are a large part of where SSDs of different classes can help, but the better your SSD performs for I/O operations, the better for overall visual performance.
Doesn't even make a difference for that, for the most part. Most game loading is still CPU bound once you go past spinning rust.
The Gothic 3 community made a extensive study about stutter and optimization steps for HDD vs. SSD (no stutter) in ca. 2010ish for a game from 2006. So, generally for 3D games, yes, except if you compress textures in a trade for higher CPU usage.
Btw, this game looks surprisingly good with the right tweaks atop the vommunity fixes.
If the game is genuinely fun, no, it's all wank. I still use an HDD and the load times are long but not long enough to justify buying more stuff.
The video even shows it makes a difference, although it only touches on that part, with no in-depth analysis. Some modern games don't work properly on HDDs and you get tons of glitches and pop-in.
In older games it probably won't affect much more than load times though.