Does a faster SSD improve gaming performance?

[SHINRA-CORP]

Outside of loading times would upgrading my SSD to a faster SSD provide better in game performance? I'm at a point where I should consider upgrading from 1tb to 2tb for extra space but I'm trying to justify the purchase so I'm also wondering if it will give me more FPS in general.

[Ettanin]

M.2 SSDs are generally faster than SATA 3 SSDs, yes.
It might not improve FPS, but depending on the game, it might improve texture load times and may alleviate stuttering caused by texture streaming slowdowns

[crunchyfrog]

It depends entirely on how the game is constructed and operates.

It can indeed speed up loading. For games like 7 Days to Die I have that on my SSD as creating a new world can take ages from using it on a mechanical drive. Much less on the SSD.

But on other games if they load things differently, then it becomes far less important.

It really does depend.

[matt]

If you have a low end SATA SSD: yes. The performance is limited by the SATA interface, and it probably lacks a cache. There are circumstances where performance could tank. In-game, maybe not so much, but that will change eventually.

WIth a high end SATA SSD: maybe. Performance is limited by the SATA interface, but you'll have a cache. Some day, these drives will be obsolete, but they're fine for now. I use a 4TB Crucial MX500 for bulk storage and older games.

It's harder to say about NVMe SSDs. Older, low end SSDs will lack a cache and probably suffer somewhat for it. They may use older and slower technology -- even SATA! On the high end, you'll see less of this, but they'll still be limited to older revisions of the PCI-e spec.

New SSDs will have monstrous scores on synthetic benchmarks. Unless you're sitting around running benchmarks all day long, I don't see how that's going to impact your life. Eventually, DirectStorage will become more popular, and we'll see a bigger difference between old/new and low/high end.

I had a nice 1TB SSD, a Samsung 970 Evo, in 2018. It doesn't score so well today on benchmarks, but unless you're using DirectStorage, I kind of doubt you'd have a reason to complain. Then again, my newest SSD, a Crucial T700, is insanely fast. I've seen it reach speeds multiple times faster than my Samsung SSDs in real world circumstances.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

Answer: Only loading time affected, no performance gain.

ATM there no games that required NVME to running the game. And if you're talking about going from 3rd gen NVME to 4th gen YOU WON'T see any real changes in games.

[Elucidator]

Strictly speaking of the newest FPS games:
Not at all; no matter what you do, even the Nvidia RTX 5090 deliver 24FPS on Unreal Engine 5 games with Raytracing. If you upgrade anything anyhow you won't see a change in numbers.
UE5 is just ... crap

Modern games rely heavily on AI to get some FPS. In other words, UE5 games must support DLSS, AFMF or XeSS to even get a bit of frames above 60.
The only problem with AI powered frame generation is a player/server desync. You have no clue where you're actually aiming, but-- if done properly it may still look like on the server you headshot someone, although-- you might also see you get shot through a wall or things teleporting slightly.
And of course artifacts will be visible.

In case of older FPS games,
assuming you're already using an NVMe SSD, no.
likely even SATA SSDs still deliver 60FPS- most of the game is already loaded into RAM so it wouldn't matter.
unless that game is doing crazy saving and loading directly to disk for whatever reason... no

unless you have low RAM, which I doubt.

What 'could' affect FPS is fullness of the SSD, but it also depends on whether or not you're running in Page File. if you have enough RAM + VRAM, then you won't enter pagefile.

(Pagefile is when the SSD is used as RAM)