Douglas Fisher78 said:I figured it wasn't worth putting MMOs on an HDD since I don't see much difference, so I'd just stick to single-player games. Guess I'm not the smartest guy here.
Actually, it’s quite the opposite. In many titles like Call of Duty, you get faster loading times—the map loads quickly once, and then everything else stays consistent.
MMORPG players say:
I experienced the most dramatic difference about two years ago when Star Wars: The Old Republic went free-to-play. I had just sold my desktop and was waiting for a new laptop, so I was playing on this ancient Dell Latitude (C2D 2.0GHz, x1600 mobility, 3GB RAM, some old HDD). It was a decent enough laptop, even though it sat well below the game's minimum specs, but while the levels were loading, everything ran above 24FPS at 1024x768. Since I had an SSD lying around, I thought I'd try installing macOS on it to see how it would perform on an NVMe setup with such an old machine.
To my absolute surprise, everything ended up running significantly better. My FPS hovered around 30 at 1280x800; sure, there were drops below 20, but I also saw spikes up to 40. Regarding questing in open areas where the game is constantly streaming in extra textures, NPCs, and other background assets—whenever I moved from one zone to another—FPS drops were inevitable on an HDD while things loaded, but with the SSD, they were almost non-existent.
Since I've spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft—both on a mechanical drive and an SSD—I can tell you there is a massive difference. This is especially noticeable during raids when a phase changes, a big bad boss casts a spell that covers the whole raid, or teammates trigger spells they haven't used yet during the fight. Or even when you use Fast Travel to land in a city and everything starts rendering. Of course, you still see some FPS drops even with an SSD, but they are drastically smaller—barely noticeable compared to the struggle on a mechanical drive.
The specific example I remember best from WoW, back when I was raiding heavily and made the switch from an HDD to an SSD (CPU: i5 760 @ 3.8GHz, GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 @ 950MHz), was fighting Sauron on Epic Games difficulty. When the AOE phase started with all those little effects, the HDD would struggle to keep up with all the AOE spells and animations the boss threw at us, causing my FPS to tank to nearly unplayable levels of 15 FPS (otherwise, it rarely dipped below 30 in similar scenarios). Once I switched to the SSD, the drops only went down to 30 FPS, and situations that previously hit 30 FPS were now holding steady around 45-50.
Even in some single-player games, there's a benefit; for instance, in an open-world game like Stalker, you won't experience stutters in certain areas unless you're running on an SSD.
