The Impact Of HDD/SSD Performance On Linux Gaming

The Talos Principle was just loading about three seconds faster with a SSD versus HDD.

While the Dawn of War 3's load time was about 10 seconds quicker with an SSD instead of HDD, but between the three SATA/NVMe drives, there wasn't any significant difference.

Unigine Superposition loaded much faster with a SSD instead of HDD while the NVMe SSDs were just a few seconds faster than the SATA 3.0 SSD.

Long story short, in games with a lot of assets to load from disk you will find a SSD to be faster than a HDD. But only in a few rare cases was using an NVMe SSD of noticeable difference over a SATA 3.0 SSD. I had tested other Linux games as well, but didn't bother including the graphs where the run times were identical across all the devices. If you are running demanding I/O workloads on your system, it certainly makes sense to go for a high-end NVMe SSD like the Optane 900P or the various other NVMe SSDs we have reviewed under Linux at Phoronix. But if your system is mostly a gaming box, it likely won't make too much of a difference and would be better to buy a larger capacity SATA 3.0 SSD. See the earlier Intel Optane 900P SSD Linux tests for the impact this drive has in other workloads.