Compy ← Home
Placebo

Putting a game on an SSD for more FPS

Also searched as: ssd fps · ssd more frames · nvme fps · ssd vs hdd fps · fast ssd gaming frames

What it does

Moving a game from a hard drive to an SSD (or to a faster NVMe SSD) expecting a higher frame rate.

The honest verdict

Once a game is loaded and running, the frames come from your GPU and CPU — the drive is barely in the loop, so your average FPS looks the same on a hard drive, a SATA SSD, or a fast NVMe drive. What an SSD genuinely transforms is everything AROUND the frame rate: far shorter load times, and much less of the hitching and texture pop-in you get when a fast-moving game streams data off a slow hard drive — so an SSD can smooth your 1% lows and stutters even when the average number does not move. Use an SSD (it is one of the best feel upgrades there is); just file it under load times and smoothness, not raw FPS. Jumping from a good SATA SSD to a faster NVMe one does almost nothing for games today.

How Compy treats it

Compy won't recommend it. If you're curious anyway: change one thing at a time, measure it on your own rig, and revert unless it's clearly better — that loop is exactly what Compy is built around.

The Compy Blackbook holds 174 graded entries like this one, judged against your hardware — and every change it does make is reversible, with the receipt to prove it.

See Compy →