how much do SSD's help the game

[Delsus]

I personally would recommend a SSD, if you only store Windows, FFXIV and other applications that need to read a lot of data. I wouldn't be too concerned about the endurance of the drive if I'm honest unless you are writing GBs of data every day or are planning on running a datacenter off it.

[ArkAurelius]

While I dont use a PC, and cant say how useful they are (apart from what's already been said on the thread), theyre absolutely amazing on consoles.

I, as a PS3 user, suffered from long load times and lack of unrendered NPCs. You can pretty much imagine the hell that is going into Garuda EX as a tank, only for her to dissapear (in your screen) and being unable to target her due to being invisible.

Or a more guilty example being hunts. Being a console player during hunts really hurts if you're using this route for gear progression. Almost never do your marks appear on screen. even if SE said that this was a bug that was fixed, this is still happening and it still hurts a huge number of players. Only way to solve this is with a SDD. dont think an SDD is just for hunts. Its good for numerous things, including load times and such.

[Songi]

SSD improves the speed at which things like divebomb markers (T5,9,13) and other warning markers load up which is absolutely key if you want some breathing room to be able to deal with mechanics. Honestly SSD is probably one of the best things you can think of to improve your gameplay experience.

[MiniTofu]

So i have a Lenovo Y580 with a I7 and a GTX660M

Bench scores 3700 on laptop high 1080p. It has a standard HDD in there right now, i believe a 5400rpm

would i see a significant increase in the bench if i ran the game off of a SSD?

SSD only helps loading time and Shader Cache enabled by Nvidia. Again it's all about improving loading time, other games with constant swapping contents as you move in the area will also help to prevent some stutters.

FFXIV is not the case that SSD will fix stutter framerates. Only improve loading map which takes about 2-3 seconds instead of 10-45seconds.

[Xoriam]

FFXIV is not the case that SSD will fix stutter framerates. Only improve loading map which takes about 2-3 seconds instead of 10-45seconds.

Yes actually it is, MMOs tend to suffer MORE from a slower hard drive.
You know new characters are always coming into the zone, mobs are spawning and being killed. These things are not rendered untill they actually become visable on the screen.
Try playing on a 5200 rpm HDD and then say the game doesn't stutter.
(or playing it on a PS3. horrible HDD)

[KaedrianLiang]

Only thing I noticed when upgrading to SSD was slightly faster load times for areas. Beyond that, there was nothing noticeable. That being said, the SSD is worth it for everything else involving Windows. Faster boot up times and everything's much snappier. For straight gaming though, doesn't make much of a difference, most people run their games off massive TB drives while keeping windows alone on their SSD.

A few people will install whichever game they're currently playing on SSD for the load time, but that's it.

Slightly? it decreases load time immensely. Get an SSD your teleports and zoning will be less than 5 second.

[314159265358979323846264338327]

Working in IT

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SSD

Working in IT

[CGMidlander]

I find my SSD more useful for relaunching after crashes or rebooting after 90k, to be honest.
The zone loading time difference isn't large enough to be the sole reason for buying an SSD IMO. (Comparing my M500 with the Caviar Black I used to have)
It's not really instant, since, as some people have mentioned earlier in this thread, there is network-bottlenecked stuff.

[Anneliese]

It can definitely be the difference between making it to a hunt mark and missing it.

[Monty]

Slightly? it decreases load time immensely. Get an SSD your teleports and zoning will be less than 5 second.

The 20-30 seconds it knocks off booting windows? That's immensely. The 3-5 seconds gained from loading a zone? That's slight. Most 7200rpm HDDs load zones up pretty quick. Again, this is all what people perceive as massive gains or not. It's like people who spend tons of cash on GPU upgrades year after year for a slight FPS performance and slight AA tweak, but to them it's huge gains.

From a strict gaming point of view, is 4-5 seconds of load time worth 100-300$? (depending which size/brand of SSD you get).