Contrary to the numerous reports of Forspoken running faster on SATA SSD drives compared to NVMe, this test appears to be flawed.
Yesterday there were reports that Square Enix’s action-adventure game Forspoken ran up to 10% faster than NVMe when using SATA SSD storage drives. In this way, it was claimed that the addition of DirectStorage to the structure of this game had a significant impact on GPU performance. This test was specially conducted by the website PC Games Hardware, which used an i9-12900K chip alongside an RTX 4090 graphics card.
But the problem with this test is that it is wrong. When the initial loading page of the game Forspoken It is shown, softwares for recording the frame rate of game images like CapFrameX show a very high frame rate, while slower storage memories result in longer loading times. If these frame rates are not excluded from the test results, we will see that slower storage memories cause longer load times to have a large effect on the frame rate of the game in the benchmark.
Another problem with this test that claims Forspoken runs faster on SATA SSD drives is that DirectStorage on both drives SATA SSD and NVMe SSD are used. Using SATA SSDs disables DirectStorage can’t So the system that Running Forespoken on a SATA SSD drive doesn’t negate DirectStorage’s impact on system performance; The issue described here as the cause of the RTX 4090 performance drop. In fact, the performance drop of this GPU is due to the weak benchmark or test scale, not DirectStorage.
In this regard, ComputerBase has shown that the performance level of the game looks almost the same when using both types of memory drives by testing how to run the Forspoken game and excluding the jump in the frame rate of the images on the game’s loading screen. This test was performed during gameplay using an RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, which was used alongside a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD and SATA SSD drive.
So this test confirms that Forspoken game performance will not be faster when using SATA drives.
