If you want to learn more about the specific differences between HDDs and SSDs, check out our full guide. Your PC boots faster, games launch and levels load faster, and hitches caused by games pulling assets from storage become far less frequent. When you upgrade from an HDD to a high performance SSD, the benefits are immediately apparent. Rather than using magnetic media, most SSDs use NAND flash memory that enables superior read/write speeds and lower latency than HDDs can achieve.
SSDs are integrated circuits with no moving parts.
When you’re playing, these delays can mean a longer wait to load up an individual level or assets, as well as momentary hitches and stutters as the game pulls new assets from the disk. Inside an HDD, an actuator arm moves over circular tracks on a spinning platter to retrieve or save data.īecause of the arm’s seek time and the platter’s rotational latency, HDDs have slower random read/write times than SSDs.
We’ll walk through some of the reasons this performance gap exists below. SSDs generally outperform HDDs in gaming by excelling in key performance metrics like random read/write speeds as well as overall reliability. Some players only want a couple of titles installed on their gaming PC at a time, while others will want several terabytes of space to manage their game library and save gameplay highlights. No matter what storage solution you choose, if you want to install multiple new releases at once, you’ll likely want at least 500GB for your primary drive.īeyond that, it’s up to personal preference. Given that Windows 10 requires 20GB of space, it’s easy to see that some smaller drives-such as a 256GB SSD - could be almost full after installing just one AAA game. While not every game takes up as much space as Modern Warfare or Red Dead Redemption 2 (150GB), AAA titles will likely continue to grow in install size as the quality and complexity of assets increases. Because decompressing assets like audio files creates more work for the CPU, developers have sometimes chosen to use uncompressed assets (increasing install size) so that their game runs smoother on lower-spec machines. Games vary in the ways in which they compress art assets, video, and audio. The Unreal 4 engine, for example, specifies that a single 4K texture may take up 10.6-20.3MB of space using supported compression. Although developers use image compression algorithms to reduce the size of stored assets, more high-res textures still mean more space used. Why do game install sizes continue to increase? It’s in part because they feature more high-resolution assets, such as 4K textures, that have a larger memory footprint. Install sizes have grown in recent years, with recent titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare taking up over 200GB by themselves. You’ll need a significant amount of space to play modern PC games. Capacity is the specification you’ll see listed first when looking at storage drives, so let’s start there.
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