Games that Benefit from SSD

by Paul | Last Updated: July 5, 2022

Maximizing your SSD for the Best Gaming Experience. Owning a device, you cannot use or explore its features is almost as good as not owning it at all. Purchasing an SSD is amazing as it is designed to give its users a better experience by boosting the computing power of a laptop, PC, gaming console, or any device that can use it. As amazing as that sounds, this boost is not evident in all games or applications.

Games that benefit from SSD?

  • Forza Horizon 4
  • CyberPunk
  • Fallout 4
  • GTA V
  • Call of Duty Games
  • Battlefield Games
  • Fortnite
  • Apex Legends
  • Call od Duty Warzone
  • Witcher 3
  • Guild Wars 2
  • Quantum Break
  • Team Fortress 2
  • Red Orchestra 2
  • PUBG
  • Overwatch
  • Skyrim
  • Rocket League
  • Elder Scrolls
  • Final Fantasy XIV
  • Assassins Creed (new editions)

Basically, any game that requires a lot of loading screens, a lot of space and texture, strategy games, hardware-intensive games, games with highly detailed environments, open and dense world games.

Well before we dive in, please note that even if your SSD is a thousand terabytes, it will not improve your gaming on a laptop or desktop if they do not meet the RAM and CPU requirements.

The question you might have is; if SSD improves your PC, shouldn’t all games benefit from SSD? Well, the short answer is not all games can.

Games like solitaire, candy crush, splinter cell: chaos theory, double agent even conviction and other games that are either old or are “light” it will not be any different when you use an SSD, if you are currently experiencing any challenge playing these types of games, it could be either an issue with your disk: space or fragments.

Gaming with SSD

Speed

HDDs have moving parts; a needle keeps moving to read and write data. This process makes it slow in loading games, this makes the game started slowly, save slowly and sometimes you might experience a glitch or freeze while playing the game.

For SSDs, there are created with NAND technology, this makes them faster as they use flash memory and have no moving parts. If your computer specs meet the requirements for a heavy-duty game, switching to SSD will give you a faster loading time and gameplay. This is also applicable to gaming consoles.

Insulation

The non-movement design of the SSD asides speed serves as an insulator. The HDDs keep spinning to access memory and this process makes it run hot this also affects the system being used.

When the SSD starts running a game, it maintains the same temperature throughout, it also reduces the “burden” on the system making it have a “low” temperature.

Enjoy Extreme Portability with External SSDs

With external SSDs, you can save your game files on it, then play on another system. This will save you the hassle of installing and uninstalling. It is also a good complement because HDDs are generally cheaper than SSDs. So, some users might prefer to use HDDs as their PC’s default storage and an SSD for gaming.

Capacity

It is true that the HDD has higher storage space available but as we have pointed out earlier, it has a poor speed in comparison to SSDs. Gaming with SSD means you are often going to have 2TB as the highest capacity available for sale. For gamers, a minimum of 500GB is ideal to enjoy at least 4 heavy-duty games.

Noise

Remember the saying “empty vessels make the loudest noise”? Okay, that might be too extreme, but the moving parts of HDD put a strain on your PC’s fan which results in noise more like a loud humming sound. The SSD on the other hand improves the overall performance of your PC effortlessly and quietly.

Battery life

If you have read everything up to this point, you will understand that SSD is here to make your gaming experience better. It does not just stop at software performance or taking off the burden on your PC, it extends to giving you longer battery life. This amazing benefit is a result of the low power consumption of the NAND technology.

Variants of the SSD

Form Factor

SSD can come in three form factors, one of which has already been explained. These 3 are: 2.5-inch, M.2 and External drive. The 2.5 inch is an attempt to easily accommodate SSD as it can be use for hard disk and solid state drives.

This is good for people who want to replace their drive for better computer performance. The greatest challenge of the 2.5-inch is that is does not allow SSDs to “reach their full potential”, it fails to maximize SSD’s capacity.

The M.2 is a form factor designed to efficiently accommodate SSDs. The beauty is that they are so small, they can be single or double-sided, the latter represents more capacity. They are also very easy to attach to your motherboard if you have a complaint slot.

Interface

The SSD can interact with computers using one (PCIe) or both interfaces: Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) or Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). PCIe has four common sizes (PCIe x1, x4, x8, x16), they are referred to as lanes, and the higher the number, the higher the performance.

NVMe communicates through the PCIe and can boost performance by up to five times faster than just the regular PCIe. Specifically designed for SSD, it leverages PCIe which has higher bandwidth and a lower latency when compared to SATA (old connection).

As a gamer, if your games do not require heavy disk usage to process it, you can stick with the SSD PCIe but if it does PCIe NVMe will be the best option.

With everything we have described in this article, what decisions are you making to improve your gaming experience? Will you change your internal storage to SSD? Will you get external storage to make your gaming more portable? Would you prefer to use the SSD as complement storage? Whatever decision you make, remember, using an SSD for “heavy” games will always give you a better experience.