[NBJack]

The game is released on both PC and PS5, the latter of which was designed (and marketed) to take advantage of SSD speeds for streaming game content near real time.

The latest Ratchet and Clank, the poster child used in part to advertise the SSD speed advantage, suffers on traditional hard drives as well in the PC port. Returnal is in the same boat. Both were originally PS5 exclusives.

[mikepurvis]

Noting in particular that the PS5's internal storage isn't just "an ssd", it's a gen 4 drive that can sequential-read at up to 5500 MB/s.

By comparison a SATA III port caps out at 6Gbps (750 MB/s), and first generation NVMe drives ("gen 3") were limited to 3500 MB/s.

[PunchyHamster]

the speed is one thing but seek times are just orders of magnitude different too.

SSD on SATA is still "not bad" for most games, but HDD can be awful if game does not do much sequential

[mikepurvis]

My understanding is that optimizing for sequential read is a big reason for historical game install bloat; if you include the common assets multiple times in the archive, then loading a level/zone becomes one big continuous slurp rather than jumping all over the place to pick up the stuff that's common to everything. Obviously this didn't matter with optical media where the user wasn't impacted, but it's annoying on PC where we've had a long period of users who invested in expensive, high-performance storage having to use more of it than needed due to optimizations geared at legacy players still on spinning rust.

I expect that low-latency seek time is also pretty key to making stuff like nanite work, where all the LODs for a single object are mixed together and you need to be able to quickly pick off the disk the parts that are needed for the current draw task.

[shantara]

The HDD performance suffers very much during the portal loading sequences in Ratchet and Clank, but even the entry level SSD performs fine, with little visible difference compared to the PS5 one. It’s more about random access speed than pure throughput

[garaetjjte]

I played Rift Apart from HDD and apart from extra loading time during looped animations it was fine. On the other hand Indiana Jones Great Circle was barely playable with popping-in textures and models everywhere.