5 Ways an SSD Will Improve your Gaming Performance – 2024 Guide
Everybody knows that in order to be good at games, you’ll need to have a comfortable gaming experience. In order to have a comfortable gaming experience, you need a setup that you’re comfortable using. That’s a lot of comfort, isn’t it?
Well, unfortunately, most competitive multiplayer games nowadays rely on muscle memory and practice, and a person cannot earn those things unless they feel 100% comfortable while playing. This is why many of us invest in higher refresh rate monitors, gaming mice with better ergonomics, larger mousepads, comfortable chairs with adjustable heights and tons of other things as well.
But, the core of the gaming setup is of course, the PC. If your PC is not delivering the performance it needs to deliver, what good is all the expensive and fancy equipment?
Even those who are not very familiar with computers know that the “core” and “key” components in a computer are the CPU, the GPU, RAM, The Motherboard and last but not least, the hard disk drive. The hard disk drive is responsible for all of your read-times, boot time and storage of all sorts of data, including installed games. But, Hard Disks are kind of “last year”.
It’s 2024, and the current standard are solid-state drives, something that’s at least ten times faster than a hard drive. Solid-state drives are called SSD’s, and today we’re here to talk about them. Here’s how implementing an SSD in your PC, replacing your old HDD can spike up performance in games.
1. Better texture loading time
Every game has textures, and you don’t have to be a video game developer to know this. The textures are basically responsible for how the in-game objects, terrain, characters and everything else will really look like. And, in games where textures are a big deal, for example photorealistic games such as Crysis, Metro 2033, Far Cry and tons of others, read times are important. Of course, the CPU plays a huge role here as well, but an SSD will give you a huge boost in your frames per second in such titles. PUBG is one of the examples where switching from a HDD to an SSD will provide a huge performance boost.
Your overall loading times will be shorter as well. This means you can get in-game before everyone else, giving you an advantage. If you have a sluggish HDD, you’ll have to wait until all the textures load to hop into the game, putting you at a disadvantage.
2. Faster boot time in case you need to reboot PC and reconnect
Disconnecting from a game happens to all of us. It’s really frustrating, but it’s part of the experience. Sometimes our connection is interrupted due to bad weather, or a technical issue at our ISP’s headquarters. The latter seems to be happening way more often than it should. Looking at you T-Home. But, sometimes our PC glitches out completely, overheats or god knows what happens to it, so we have to reboot. It’s a common thing. For most people, those that have HDD’s mostly, rebooting can be a real hell. But, an SSD will reduce your PC boot time from more than a minute to less than five seconds. It’s pretty amazing actually, and once you switch over, you cannot go back to using a sluggish hard drive. Not to mention all the weird sounds coming out of it. It’s just an outdated thing. LaptopExplorer is a website where you can learn more about laptops and SSD upgrades.
3. More FPS in games where texture load is a huge factor
Let’s say that you play PUBG, or even Fortnite. Both games are very popular and they have a lot of players, so chances are that some of you reading this are fans of either one. These are games that simply cannot display the entire map to the player for the sake of their PC’s well-being. So, depending on where you’re landing when you jump out of the plane, the textures will start loading one by one. If you have a very slow hard-drive, this can be a huge performance hell. With an SSD, textures will load much faster.
However, you have to remember that the game has to be installed on the SSD. Although it’s great to have your Windows installed on it for faster boot times and all that, your game needs to be on it as well if you are looking to see performance increases.
4. Better Windows performance due to higher speed
Every gamer wants better performance in-game, obviously, but they also want to have more performance while casually using their PC for anything, even for getting in-game. Well, an SSD will definitely speed up your regular windows performance if you install the windows on it. Unfortunately, if you are making the chance, you will have to re-format your PC and re-install the windows on your SSD, otherwise, you won’t see any performance boosts.
5. You can “dedicate” an entire SSD to your main game
Last but not least, a “bloated’ storage drive is not a rare thing, especially if you use your computer for a lot of things other than gaming. People store videos, photos, documents and entire TV series on their drives, it’s common to see that red line in your “My Computer” section on your PC. When a hard drive is bloated and out of space, your performance in-game may be slower. When you purchase an SSD however, since they are not very large by nature in terms of storage, you can dedicate one for your main game and keep it that way for maximal performance boosts. Don’t put anything else on it.
Conclusion
Hard-drives are pretty much outdated looking from a 2024 standpoint, and we suggest that you all switch to using an SSD for the sweet performance games both in-game and while casually using your PC for browsing the internet or any other activity. They are pretty cheap nowadays because they are no longer considered a brand-new technology.