Test Ran on Sata III vs NVMe Load Speeds

JSP

Hi everyone,

 

I thought I would share a test I recently ran when I added a 256GB Samsung 970 Evo to my rig instead of running everything off of my WD Blue SSD.

I first started by benching the SSDs on CrystalMark to make sure at least the theoretical numbers made sense, which they did.  On a 4K Q1T1 Read Test they came in at 37 MB/s for the SATA III vs 61 MB/s for the NVMe.

 

I created a 3 different scenes to test this on, but all of the scenes followed the same results, so I will just report on the scene with 3 G3Fs with various clothing and hair in an interior enviornment.

 

I ran the test with each scene in 3 different hardware setups:

1. Everything on SATA III (NVMe drive isn't installed yet)

2. OS and Apps on the NVMe, but Daz content on SATA III

3. Everything on the NVMe

 

I tested both the time it took to load the scene into DAZ (with no Iray preview) and the time it took to begin the render in Iray.  I didn't excpect the Iray render to launch any quicker since the textures should already be in RAM and just going to VRAM (I think that is correct).  I did expect the scene load times to decrease to some extent assuming the drive speed was at least some of the bottleneck, however that wasn't the case.  All scenes loaded in the same time no matter the SSD setup I had.  I got the following results from loading the scene 5 times and averaging the load times:

 

26 seconds to load into DAZ viewport and 107 seconds to load into Iray and begin the render.

 

So it appears that the drive isn't the bottleneck in regards to load times when comparing SATA III to NVMe speeds, or at least not for my system.  I wasn't too concerned with load times, but I figured if I was upgrading I'd go ahead and test it since I didn't find much data on it when researching.  If anyone has done a similar or other relevant tests and has results that show NVMe performing better I'd love to hear about it.

 

I'm pretty new to this so I only have about 60GB of content, but now I know for future reference that it is probably worth saving the money and putting all my content on a SATA III drive instead of going with NVMe as my library expands.

 

My build for reference:

Ryzen 1700X

32GB (16 x 2) Geil Forza 2400GHz RAM

Asus Prime x370-Pro (PCIe 3.0 x8/x8 for GPUs)

GTX 960 4GB (for monitors only)

GTX 1070 Ti (rendering only)

256GB SSD M.2 NVMe 970 Evo

500GB SSD 2.5" SATA III WD Blue (the older 2D Nand version)

Corsair TX750M PSU

 

 

algovincian

Thanks for taking the time to run the tests and post your results. I suspect that much of the scene/load processing is utilizing a single CPU core and this may be the limiting factor.

- Greg

prixat

That's some of the slowest RAM you've got installed. As you know Ryzen benefits from fast memory.

Have you considered changing the memory?

Even though it is an expensive and possibly wasteful option, I think you'll see a big improvement in Ryzen performance, particularly single core operations.