Uses for NVME SSD in Gaming
First and foremost, don’t expect a massive upgrade to your gameplay by using an NVME SSD to play your games on. In most games, you’ll lose about 1 second of load time, see this video for reference.
Between an MX500 500GB SATA SSD (afl) and a 970 EVO 500GB NVME SSD (afl), there’s about a $57 difference in price. Seems like a fair amount of wasted money for not much gain in performance eh?
That being said, if you really want to have the best hardware in your gaming rig, NVME SSD is where it’s at. If game engines are optimized for NVME, we’ll see big drops in game loading times.
On the capacity front (related to price), if you wanted a 500GB NVME SSD for your enthusiast-class gaming rig in 2016, you generally were looking at a Samsung 950 Pro NVME SSD, which was about $500. Back then, SSD was still very new, and very expensive. I remember buying my first SSD (Samsung 840 EVO 240GB) for about $200.
Now, you can get a Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVME SSD (afl) for about $200. We’ve moved from $1/GB to 50c/GB, AND we’ve also gained significant performance gains in reads, writes, and IOPS (Input/output Operations Per Second). IOPS are the more important measurement of storage speed, rather than sequential read/write numbers.
So, if you really want an NVME SSD in your gaming computer, you won’t get much of a performance boost in-game, but at least it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
