So Starfield hammers the drive pretty bad, and this occasionally leads to stuttering.
I just so happened to have a 960GB Optane 905p drive kicking around. I bought it a while back when Intel announced they were getting rid of Optane, and they started dropping in price. I was going to use it for a project in my server, but that project never happened.
The drives have pretty poor sequential speeds by modern standards, but they still have absolutely MONSTROUS low queue depth 4K Random read speeds.
Allow me to illustrate:
Intel Optane 905p 960GB (4x Gen3) (possibly sabotaged by being my boot drive during test, and Win11 seemingly always hammering the boot drive)
Lets compare this to the other more common drives in my machine right now:
Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (4x Gen4)
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (4x Gen4)
Samsung 970 Evo 1TB (4x Gen3)
So, as you can see, despite being the slowest sequential drive here, compared to the 990 Pro, it is over 4x faster at low queue depth 4k random reads.
It has always been my theory, that for typical client workloads, this is the performance measure that really matters, and that has certainly been the case for me in Starfield.
I installed the drive today, imaged over my boot drive to it, and moved my Starfield install to it, and did some testing.
Now this is all subjective testing, as I don't even know what objective measure I could use, but the game feels WAY smoother in busy cities, with none of the normal stutter I was getting even on the 990 Pro.
Not sure the pricetag is worth it just to play Starfield more smoothly, but it is certainly interesting.
As for other aspects of the drive, I have noted the following:
- OS and program launches do feel a little snappier, but once the system has been up for a while, everything is cached in RAM anyway I guess.
- Traditional full boots (not fastboot / hibernate) are MUCH faster on the Optane than on my 990 Pro
- Fastboot hibernate boots feel about the same.
- Windows update installs go by in a fraction of the time that they take on my 990 Pro, which doesn't make any sense looking at the write speeds, so I can't explain it, but they do.
- Closing a VM and dumping the RAM to disk (suspend to disk) takes a couple of seconds longer than it does with the 990 Pro. As does resuming that VM from disk again.
Wendell at Level1techs did a video on this a few months ago. The performance difference can be quite astonishing:
In my subjective testing, running around New Atlantis is WAY smoother on my Optane 905p than on my Samsung 990 Pro.
Worth noting is that the AIC / PCIe versions of the Optane 905p are CRAZY expensive for some reason. We are talking thousands of dollars. But the U.2 versions, which are essentially the same thing in a different form factor are running for about $300 in new sealed boxes. They come with an m.2 adapter for those who need it.
I used a Startech u.2 adapter card, essentially turning mine into a PCIe version