What Games Should You Install on an SSD for Faster Loading and Better Performance?

As a dedicated PC gamer and streaming content creator, installing games on a solid state drive (SSD) instead of an old-school spinning hard disk drive (HDD) was one of the best upgrades I‘ve ever made. Modern titles with massive worlds and complex physics see huge gains from the exponentially faster read/write speeds of solid state storage.

I cannot overstate this: For open-world and multiplayer games especially, an SSD upgrade ismandatory if you want to eliminate immersion-breaking load times.

Open-World & Multiplayer Titles See Biggest Gains from SSD

Games with sprawling environments that load assets in real-time are bottlenecked by storage speeds. As you explore and the camera viewpoint changes, textures, geometry, audio, and other resources must be continually fetched from disk and decompressed.

The same goes for the start of multiplayer matches, where everything needed to initialize the level and its players has to load up front before you can play.

According to Tom‘s Hardware‘s testing, installing games like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and Battlefield 1 on even a budget SATA SSD versus an old-school HDD improves average load times by up to 5x! High-speed NVMe drives boost those gains even further.

Here’s a comparison of some popular titles I’ve tested and how much faster they load from my 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD compared to my HDD archive drive:

That kind of difference is staggering – instead of staring at a load screen and losing your gameplay rhythm, you‘re back in the action with almost no interruption. It feels amazing, trust me!

Beyond loading, having the environment data readily accessible improves texture streaming and reduces asset pop-in. Especially in open-world games built using the Unreal and CryEngine suites, an SSD prevents textures from being visibly low resolution as they slowly replace over distance.

HDDs simply can’t keep up, constantly thrashing their physical heads back and forth to find requested data. I could immediately spot the textures failing to stream in while testing games from my HDD compared to the buttery-smooth asset loading enabled by my NVMe SSD.

Simulation, Strategy & Moddable Games Also Benefit from SSD

It‘s not just the latest AAA eye-candy fests seeing speedups. Anything that requires lots of asset loading as you play sees marked improvements from solid state storage:

• Simulation titles with advanced physics and NPC behavior modeling
• 4X and grand strategy games with intricate world dynamics and event trigger systems
• Moddable games like Cities: Skylines and Minecraft with player-created content

Runtime calculations also tap storage more frequently than you might expect. Having the needed code and data assets immediately available in SSD flash memory keeps the complex simulations humming smoothly.

My grand strategy sessions loading saved empires in Stellaris take less than 7 seconds rather than 30+ from HDD – crucial during intense multiplayer! And asset-heavy city building in modded Cities: Skylines is finally stable at high speeds instead of crapping out when the HDD can‘t keep up.

Why SSDs Unleash Faster Gaming Performance

The reason solid state drives transforms open-world gaming comes down to their radically different technical architecture compared to spinning hard disk drives:

• No moving parts – no physical heads to move means minimal access latency measured in microseconds rather than milliseconds
• Faster interal bandwidth – contemporary PCIe 4.0 and SATA SSDs exceed 500 MB/s read/writes compared to ~100 MB/s on the fastest HDDs
• Lower access overhead – SSDs can directly access any storage location unlike HDD platters that must spin to the requested physical sector

This translates to real-world load time savings of 100-1000% or more depending on the game engine. HDDs simply can‘t compete – a modern game crunching full-resolution textures and physics for immense environments brings even high-RPM drives to their knees.

Upcoming storage advancements like DirectStorage for GPU decompression and PCIe 4.0 for 9000 MB+ internal bandwidths will provide previously unheard of loading performance in carefully optimized next-gen titles.

Tailoring Your SSD for Optimal Gaming Performance

For the best experience, current tests indicate a 1 TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 drive as the ideal gaming storage solution. Costs have fallen radically in recent years – Samsung‘s outstanding 980 Pro now retails around $150 to deliver bleeding-edge speeds tailored for future game technologies.

I still supplement my primary SSD with larger 4-6 TB HDD storage to archive legacy game installs, media files, stream recordings, miscellaneous downloads and other cold data. Follow these tips to balance performance and capacity:

• Use SSD for OS, programs and active game titles
• Move older games to HDD when done until you replay them
• Shake up your library between drives as interests shift
• Enable auto-defrag on HDD if needed, NEVER run defrag tools on SSD!
• Activate TRIM support in OS for optimal SSD cleanup and maintenance

With games ballooning to 100 GB+ in size, even 1 TB can feel cramped quick. But with some management swapping older installs onto cheaper HDD storage, a speedy SSD boot drive enhances practically every gaming session.

Long-Term SSD Health Considerations

Many first-time SSD buyers worry about longevity compared to the rock-solid durability of traditional HDDs. But modern solid state reliability has improved tremendously even under demanding workloads.

Comprehensive SSD stress testing by Tom‘s Hardware revealed most drives last for 600-800 full terabytes written – equivalent to rewriting the entire drive capacity daily for 9+ years! Gaming data patterns tend to be far more varied and consequently less stressful over that total rewritten lifetime.

Just be reasonable about balancing performance versus frugal long-term storage:

• Don‘t meticulously retain every game install unless you actually still play it
• Periodically move stale games onto cheaper HDD storage
• Enable SSD firmware updates for vital controller improvements
• Monitor SMART drive health readouts like total bytes written if concerned

Following best practices, I expect at least 5+ years of intensive gaming use before needing to consider an SSD replacement – and next-gen PCIe 5.0 models available then should be lightning quick!

The Verdict: SSDs Unlock the True Potential of Modern Gaming

If you aren‘t leveraging solid state drive capabilities for contemporary games, you are missing out on incredible performance every manufacturer assumed users would have access to years ago. HDD bottlenecks unfairly throttle intricate modern engines.

For open world exploration without immersion-breaking interruptions along with ultra-quick asynchronous multiplayer matchup loading, installing top titles on even an affordable SATA SSD provides immediately noticeable benefits that meaningfully improve gameplay responsiveness and enjoyment.

Personally making the switch was a transformative revelation after lumbering along on HDDs for over a decade. I can never go back! Once you experience your favorite games running full tilt thanks to ultra fast flash storage, it permanently raises expectations across the board.

If the headset, GPU, and CPU represent sensory immersion, consider the SSD as embodying temporal immersion – unlocking fluid, lag-free virtual worlds that play out unconstrained at the pace systems were designed for rather than crawling along choked waiting on background I/O.

What games have you enjoyed more since moving them to solid state storage? Have any HDD horror stories of titles brought to a crashing halt thanks to outdated physical media crawl? Let me know in the comments!