PC games are starting to require SSDs

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Marees

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Microsoft held its Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday and revealed that Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years, Starfield, will require 125GB of SSD storage when it debuts on September 6th. It’s not a recommendation — it’s a minimum spec to play Starfield on a PC.

A single game isn’t a trend, but at the same time CD Projekt Red also revealed that it’s bumping the minimum specs of Cyberpunk 2077 to require an SSD at minimum and phasing out HDD support. While the system requirements change for Cyberpunk 2077 is related to the upcoming Phantom Liberty expansion that won’t ship on older HDD-powered Xbox One and PS4 consoles, the base PC game will be updated soon to this SSD minimum spec.

“One of the changes is the choice to stop supporting HDDs for the minimum requirements – SSDs offer faster loading times, improved streaming, and better overall performance when compared to HDDs,” explains CD Projekt Red in a blog post.

Cyberpunk 2077 won’t suddenly stop working on HDDs, but CD Projekt Red will discontinue active support and stop testing the game on HDDs so players could run into performance issues or bugs eventually.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23761845/pc-games-ssd-minimum-specs-starfield-cyberpunk-2077
 
I presume due to very large single file textures and such, vs many many small files, which sure seek time is better, but decent programing would load most things into RAM anyways for a related section of a game.

But, also these days, if you can afford the hardware to run most of these games well, you better already have an SSD of some sort...
 
MrGuvernment said:
I presume due to very large single file textures and such, vs many many small files, which sure seek time is better, but decent programing would load most things into RAM anyways for a related section of a game.
Click to expand...
I didn't understand. You admit that seek time is where SSDs really outperform mechanical drives. So therefore shouldn't textures being in 1 large file actually be the best case for mechanical drives and therefore that is not the reason that SSD is required these days?
 
serpretetsky said:
I didn't understand. You admit that seek time is where SSDs really outperform mechanical drives. So therefore shouldn't textures being in 1 large file actually be the best case for mechanical drives and therefore that is not the reason that SSD is required these days?
Click to expand...
the fastest 3.5" consumer HDD's can do up to 275MB/s if the file is contiguous and not fragmented. I am pretty sure they are using 2.5" HDD's in the current systems that use HDD's, and those are slower.
Low end SSD's can do 500MB/s no matter how the file is located across the SSD.
this is one of my fastest HDD, an 18TB Western Digital Red Pro 7200RPM,
CrystalDiskMark_20220429115727-WD-18TB-Red-Pro.jpg
 
No surprise as it makes loading and streaming assets so much easier. They probably won't stop working on HDDs, they will just suck and have long lad times and stuttery load in.

For those old enough to remember there was a time like that with CDs and HDDs. Some games could partially or even mostly run off your CD to save drive space, but it meant your load times were dogshit.
 
This makes total sense with larger games. The price of SSD's have gone way down.
 
I've considered them a requirement since I first got one and found out that it virtually eliminated the pauses in Fallout: NV(as well as other Bethesda games) that occur when you cross the invisible boundary into another map zone. In many games it simply reduces load times which is also nice but I'd go to great lengths to avoid any sort pauses or hitching in the middle of gameplay.
 
Zepher said:
the fastest 3.5" consumer HDD's can do up to 275MB/s if the file is contiguous and not fragmented. I am pretty sure they are using 2.5" HDD's in the current systems that use HDD's, and those are slower.
Low end SSD's can do 500MB/s no matter how the file is located across the SSD.
this is one of my fastest HDD, an 18TB Western Digital Red Pro 7200RPM,
View attachment 577096
Click to expand...
I think your data agrees with me right? The alternative is small texture files, where mechanical drives would get completely slaughtered instead of just slightly losing. Look at your random 4k read for example.... that's about 100 times slower than a 870 EVO ssd: https://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-870-evo-sata-ssd-review-1tb-and-4tb-benchmarked_225276 , a signficiantly bigger loss than sequential reads. The best case scenario for mechanical drives is large textures files (they still lose), the alternative is significantly worse.

Or was the original argument that new games are using lots of small texture files? (I'm not familiar with what new games use...)
 
serpretetsky said:
Or was the original argument that new games are using lots of small texture files? (I'm not familiar with what new games use...)
Click to expand...
I think like most game like cyberpunk will use a very small amount of giant compressed files on the harddrive, it seem to use mostly for data 13 files averaging 5+ gig, to take advantage of the fact that reading continuous block tend to be head ahead of many small files
 
Sycraft said:
No surprise as it makes loading and streaming assets so much easier. They probably won't stop working on HDDs, they will just suck and have long lad times and stuttery load in.

For those old enough to remember there was a time like that with CDs and HDDs. Some games could partially or even mostly run off your CD to save drive space, but it meant your load times were dogshit.
Click to expand...
oh god i'd rather forget about those days..
 
I don't see this as a problem. Just about everyone with a system that can play these games has an SSD. They're pretty cheap now too.

I've been using SSD exclusively for games for several years now...I do have a 16TB mechanical but that's for media storage. I don't run games off it. And why would I want to?

I have seen several headlines about this today. Seems like some think this is a big deal? Nothing to see here folks, move along.
 
Zepher said:
the fastest 3.5" consumer HDD's can do up to 275MB/s if the file is contiguous and not fragmented. I am pretty sure they are using 2.5" HDD's in the current systems that use HDD's, and those are slower.
Low end SSD's can do 500MB/s no matter how the file is located across the SSD.
this is one of my fastest HDD, an 18TB Western Digital Red Pro 7200RPM,
View attachment 577096
Click to expand...

But it is actually worse than that.

The number that is more important than the sequential transfer rate for system responsiveness and gaming is the low queue depth random 4k read on the bottom left.

Even the absolutely oldest and slowest SATA SSD is going to be 10 times higher in this metric.

The headline sequential numbers are cool and all, but that's not where the real performance lies.

For comparison, here are some low queue depth RND4k numbers from my own testing of random drives in my house.

Drive​
Type​
Seq (Q8T1)​
Seq (Q1T1)​
Rnd 4k (Q32T1)​
Rnd 4K (Q1T1)​
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB​
NVMe 4x Gen4 TLC​
6881.03​
4077.2​
511.21​
83.16​
Samsung 970 EVO 1TB​
NVMe 4x Gen3 MLC​
3289.19​
2565.27​
538.67​
48.81​
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 2TB​
NVMe 4x Gen4 TLC​
4795.94​
2141.76​
647.71​
42.66​
Intel SSD750 400GB​
NVMe 4x Gen3 MLC​
2248.19​
1123​
283.19​
31.86​
Samsung 870 EVO 250GB​
6Gb/s SATA TLC​
569.08​
500.43​
329.72​
31.65​
ADATA SP600 32GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC​
409.18​
368.04​
135.91​
27.66​
Samsung 850 Pro 128GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC​
554.12​
502.77​
342.18​
26.87​
Intel S3700 100GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC​
499.52​
451.67​
305.99​
26.21​
Samsung 850 Pro 512GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC​
569.42​
518.23​
334.06​
26.15​
Samsung OEM CM817a 256GB​
6Gb/s SATA TLC?​
561.77​
496.19​
273.77​
26.08​
Samsung 840 Pro 128GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC​
554.85​
521.01​
299.93​
25.71​
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB​
6Gb/s SATA TLC​
553.94​
488.64​
286.13​
25.32​
OCZ Vector 256GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC​
531​
453.33​
318.75​
23.24​
Samsung OEM PM830 128GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC?​
518.68​
417.34​
245.12​
19.31​
Intel 320 160GB​
3Gb/s SATA MLC​
284.55​
261.14​
160.16​
17.67​
Sandisk 64GB​
6Gb/s SATA MLC​
545.47​
484.22​
38.95​
16.43​
WD Blue 1TB WD10EZEX​
6Gb/s SATA 7200rpm​
192.38​
192.25​
2.35​
0.71​
WD Blue 250GB WD2500AAJS​
3Gb/s SATA 7200rpm​
94​
95​
1.67​
0.64​
WD Green 3TB WD30EZRX​
6Gb/s SATA 5400rpm​
132.13​
130.04​
1.87​
0.57​
 
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If this happened 5 years ago, it would have been a more notable story.

With 1 TB SSD's being under 50 bucks, and 2TB SSD's being under 100 bucks these days (closer to 70), a lot more folks are now SSD-based, and mechanical hard drives with aluminum platters are basically only used for massive storage.

On my main work PC, my last mechanical drive was a 4 TB Seagate 7200 RPM drive, which was actually pretty fast, but ever since I bought an Intel M2 SSD 2 TB drive and cloned the old one, I'm never going back. If anything, I'm kicking myself for not having made the change a long time ago.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
The number that is more important than the sequential transfer rate for system responsiveness and gaming is the low queue depth random 4k read on the bottom left.
Click to expand...
I feel the jump from hdd to ssd is so much bigger for game than ssd to optane, that if it is more important it has rapid diminishing return for games. With Optane usually still beating in game faster sequential read PCI4 nvme, it show that random is also important (but they beat in random nvme drive much more than those beat them in sequential and their sequential is probably fast enough to be faster than what cpu can handle to decompress-compile-use the data they read)

In one hand you probably load long list of small dlls and system lib on the other, games often try to package assets in few giant files more and more to take advantage of the much faster sequential read (and I imagine engine were build to be able to run on HDD until yesterday, PS4 and Xbox using those)
 
Dion said:
It's funny people still read PC requirements in this day and age. News flash.. They don't mean shit.
Click to expand...

It's always been that way.
I remember reading a PC Gamer article or something in the 90s talking about people playing games on PCs that didn't meet the minimum requirements. It's always been a thing. "minimum requirements" is really "minimum recommended". The only thing that can mean anything is the disk space required and sometimes the system ore video memory required, but even those are often higher than needed to actually run the game.
 
Sycraft said:
No surprise as it makes loading and streaming assets so much easier. They probably won't stop working on HDDs, they will just suck and have long lad times and stuttery load in.

For those old enough to remember there was a time like that with CDs and HDDs. Some games could partially or even mostly run off your CD to save drive space, but it meant your load times were dogshit.
Click to expand...

Back in the day I used to run both my PS2 and Xbox games off hard drives. It got rid of most of the DVD loading time, as the mechanical hard drive was way faster than the slower DVD drives.
 
Starfalcon said:
Back in the day I used to run both my PS2 and Xbox games off hard drives. It got rid of most of the DVD loading time, as the mechanical hard drive was way faster than the slower DVD drives.
Click to expand...
When I first played the OG Fallout I had a pathetically small HDD, like 170MB, so couldn't do more than the minimal install. That meant that zoning was a painfully long procedure, long enough I'd try to do everything in an area before moving. Life got much better when I was able to get a larger drive.

While the HDD -> SSD conversion isn't nearly as big a leap, it is still significant and I understand for sure why game companies don't wanna bother to optimize for HDDs. There is a lot more work that has to go on if you are going to make sure that textures and such can stream in a timely fashion from a HDD than from an SSD.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
I don't know if Starfield actually utilizes the tech, but it was a given this was coming ever since DirectStorage was announced.

Honestly, SSDs have realistically been minimum spec for at least the last six-eight years.
Click to expand...

I was pretty sure, for the point release of DirectStorage, they realized "oh yeah, we can DMA from any disk controller to video ram, too".

But yeah, not a lot of reason to be loading games from spinning drives these days. Heck, even windows 10 can't figure out how to run well from a spinning drive; just keeps writing small amounts forever, killing perf for sequential reads, so you're stuck in seekville.
 
Good. Less holding back modern games due to old hardware. But studios still need to optimize without using it as an excuse to release un-optimized games, so that there is actual advancement and not just one step forward, one step backwards.
 
sharknice said:
"require"
You'll still be able to play it on an HDD. Performance will just suffer sometimes
Click to expand...

That is how it already is. A lot of games will have micro stutters. Been that way for a while. What they're saying is they will no longer test it on HDDs, at least for Cyberpunk.
 
The only HDD I have is a backup hard drive. SSD's have been my go-to for a lot of things, although I didn't start using SSD's for game drives until around 2008-2009 when prices came down a little. It's good to finally see that developers are starting to move away from HDD's, maybe we'll see more direct storage capable games coming out.
 
I'd be curious to see what happened if you winged it with a faster HDD. I've had my PC's exclusively outfitted with SSDs for a few years now (SSD's seem to fall into your lap when working at an PC repair shop...). Love HDDs in my NAS. But last I remember trying HDD for games, I was surprised by their performance (similar to SSD).
 
This seems a lot like when a certain CPU is listed on the minimum requirements. In most cases it doesn't mean that an older CPU wouldn't work. Most "minimum requirements" seem somewhat arbitrary and seem to be calculated more based on something the company can point to when customers complain rather than useful guidance.

I seriously doubt that any of these games have anything that would actually prevent them from being run on a traditional hard drive. It's just common sense that most people don't like loading times. Some of these games might even be attempting to load textures on-the-fly as you traverse the in-game world. There is also a grey area with SSD caching, tiered storage, and hybrid drives. Many are probably also playing on laptops, where 2.5" 5400rpm (or god forbid 4200rpm) drives are pretty much a worst-case scenario among traditional hard drives.
 
Hard drives are for big bulk storage, ssds are for speed. This hasn’t changed since 2008.

Want fast, get an ssd, and ideally a boot load of ram to act as cache.
 
THRESHIN said:
I don't see this as a problem. Just about everyone with a system that can play these games has an SSD. They're pretty cheap now too.

I've been using SSD exclusively for games for several years now...I do have a 16TB mechanical but that's for media storage. I don't run games off it. And why would I want to?

I have seen several headlines about this today. Seems like some think this is a big deal? Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Click to expand...
People on Steam are going to be whining about it. One of the most popular CPUs in their hardware survey is still the FX-8350. You think people still running that CPU are going to be using a SSD?
GotNoRice said:
This seems a lot like when a certain CPU is listed on the minimum requirements. In most cases it doesn't mean that an older CPU wouldn't work. Most "minimum requirements" seem somewhat arbitrary and seem to be calculated more based on something the company can point to when customers complain rather than useful guidance.

I seriously doubt that any of these games have anything that would actually prevent them from being run on a traditional hard drive. It's just common sense that most people don't like loading times. Some of these games might even be attempting to load textures on-the-fly as you traverse the in-game world. There is also a grey area with SSD caching, tiered storage, and hybrid drives. Many are probably also playing on laptops, where 2.5" 5400rpm (or god forbid 4200rpm) drives are pretty much a worst-case scenario among traditional hard drives.
Click to expand...
The issue comes in with streaming assets. You'll still load into a game with an HDD, but the pop-in is going to be atrocious. At worst, you will have pausing and hitching as the game cannot continue until the required assets are loaded. We've seen what happens in a game like Forza Horizon 5 when the hardware can't keep up with the data streaming requirement.
 
I have a a combination.. 1xM.2, 1xSSDsata, 1xSSHD, 3xHHDs. I have a megaton of games, photos, and videos and I don't want to unistall/reinstall so HDDs are a must have. I did research it before buying my 8TB and 10TB HDD and after seeing game loading times in tests like the one I've linked, the extra 5 to 50 seconds required to load a game doesn't bother me. From this thread its obviously a personal preference. I guess my point is HDDs are still a very valid option for you PC storage. The smaller 2 to 4TB HDDs are dirt cheap and great for someone on a tight budget.

NVMe M.2 SSD PCIe vs. SATA SSD vs. SATA SSHD vs. SATA HDD Game Loading Times
 
Oh good lord, I couldn't imagine living with a shit mechanical hard drive ten years ago let alone today.
 
Armenius said:
People on Steam are going to be whining about it. One of the most popular CPUs in their hardware survey is still the FX-8350. You think people still running that CPU are going to be using a SSD?
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I am for an emulator box lol

Like 30$ for 500 GBs for os and emulators. Roms are shared via NFS
 
sharknice said:
It's always been that way.
I remember reading a PC Gamer article or something in the 90s talking about people playing games on PCs that didn't meet the minimum requirements. It's always been a thing. "minimum requirements" is really "minimum recommended". The only thing that can mean anything is the disk space required and sometimes the system ore video memory required, but even those are often higher than needed to actually run the game.
Click to expand...

That's a valid statement for today's games.

The same will hold true for future games. Even the fastest mechanical drive will eventually get to the point where it can't keep up with the sheer speed advantage of even your lowest end SSD. You'll still be able to play it, until you get to a point where you have to have that stream of data coming in, at which point, you'll stutter, lag, etc.

One day, when I get a chance, I may just hook up that old 10K RPM 36.7 GB Ultra 160 SCSI drive I have in a drawer, assuming I can find a controller that will work on today's computers, just to test it. That was easily my fastest mechanical drive I've ever owned, and when games get to that above critical point, I'll certainly be curious. Now, of course, if the game requires more than 36.7 GB (entirely possible...) then that's a scratch...



Back in the 90's, though, you still had quite a few people using 16 bit computers (80286-based), and many a game started to require a 32 bit processor. For example, the Ultima 7 games simply couldn't run on a pure 16 bit platform, nor could X-Wing, Doom, etc.

When I refer to 32 bit processors, though, that only meant the internal workings, and yes, even those 386 SX CPU's (32 bit internal, 16 bit external) could run most of those games. Some, such as Ultima 7 and Ultima 7 part 2, ran OK, and X-Wing on absolutely lowest graphic settings, could be somewhat playable when the action was light.

Doom took forever to load, and even on the smallest screen on low detail, it would still get choppy. I think it was the equivalent of using a 4" diagonal monitor (assuming your standard 14" CRT monitor of the time).

Heck, even Rise of the Triad could be played (not decently at all) on those 386 SX platforms, again if you minimized the screen to the smallest size. The folks at Apogee, though, put a not-so-subtle message in red letters around the border of the smallest screen size that said "Get a 486."
 
I think the move to requiring SSD's is overdue.

I wonder if game engines and developers will start to change how they build their game files out knowing SSD's are there.
 
I have a 1TB platter in my current box for active mods and emulation stuff, an 18TB external for storage, and a 2TB external for backups. Everything else is now a SSD.
 
My system doubles as a plex server so I got some spinning rust in there. Also use it as general storage device too, but who knows the way SSDs are dropping in price may get to a point where I say screw it, although currently still think big drives are too big of a price differential
 
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