VonS:
I have to respectfully disagree - or at least raise a point of clarification:
Years ago, many people claimed that SSDs did not improve game performance, other than at "loading time". There are two issues with this; one is that 'loading' doesn't just occur at a single point, up front, in games the way perhaps it might have long ago, and two is that SSDs themselves have evolved significantly over time.
Most all games load things as you go through the map, or environment (whatever that entails in each specific game; sometimes it's a house, for example, as opposed to an outdoor map). All this detail is not loaded up front; it is loaded as you move through the environment, with progressively more detail as you get closer to areas/objects. That means things are constantly "loading".
This is one reason the stutter happens in WOFF - it comes from loading "things" (broadly and generally), be they sounds or bits of terrain, or what-have-you. Now, absolutely nothing is going to eliminate that pause (or dropped frames, or micro-hiccup, or whatever the PC term is these days), certainly not any current GPU technology.
What
will help, though - and potentially quite a lot - is the absolute fastest way to get a chunk of data to "load". (When we say 'load', what we're referring to is moving from permanent storage into the GPU RAM or system RAM.). So, this should illustrate that faster storage can have a considerable impact on smoothness (the opposite of pauses, hiccups or whatever...).
Also, with regard to speed, SSDs themselves have come quite a way: The earliest units were barely faster than plain hard disks, limited by a SATA 1.5Gb/s bus transfer rate ("SATA I", even though the SATA consortium doesn't recognize that term). Then, they moved to SATA II (3.0Gb/s; again, still not a recognized term) which increased speed enough that most hard drives were left behind. Finally, SATA III came along - 6Gb/s - allowing roughly 5-6 times the rate of data transfer of a hard disk. The interface was now fast enough that it made a noticeable difference in 'loading' anything (including games and the aforementioned movement therein).
Moving forward, SSD speeds have continued to increase, due mostly to improved transfer protocols (NVMe) and getting off the SATA interface entirely, in favor of PCI Express. Now, using NVMe/PCIe 3.0 drives on newer motherboards (and for about the same cost), SSDs are 5-6 times faster than the SATA III types (which were themselves ~5 times faster than conventional hard disks).
And the newest motherboards have now implemented PCIe 4.0; roughly twice the bandwidth of 3.0 - and the newest PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs are capable of twice the speed of PCIe 3.0 drives, which means
10 times the speed of SATA III SSDs, and thus
50 times the speed of conventional hard disks.So, it can make a huge difference, depending on the type of SSD - and 'loading' is essentially a constant during any game play (especially, as is the case with WOFF, flight sims - since aircraft generally must keep moving in order to remain airborne
)
I hope this makes sense and offers some enhancement to the subject being discussed.
I would also argue that most games/sims will actually benefit more from stronger GPU than CPU - WOFF/WOTR may be exceptional in this regard, but there have been recent discussions that perhaps CPU speed is not as much a factor as originally claimed.
In any event, more modern software relies extensively on the processing ability of GPUs, which has actually advanced past CPUs in certain areas (which is one reason why GPUs are used for mining).
Regards,
).
