It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was close to impossible through the spring and summer.
But it’s not a good time to build a new PC or swap your older motherboard out for a new one that needs DDR5 RAM. And the culprit is a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips that has suddenly sent SSD and (especially) memory prices into the stratosphere, caused primarily by the ongoing AI boom and exacerbated by panic-fueled buying by end users and device manufacturers.
To illustrate just how high things have jumped in a short amount of time, let’s compare some of the RAM and storage prices listed in our system guide from three months ago to the pricing for the exact same components today. Note that several of these are based on the last available price and are currently sold out; we also haven’t looked into things like microSD or microSD Express cards, which could also be affected.
We’ve been waiting a long time to see how DirectStorage performs in the real world. Forspoken is the first game to support it and it was released this week after a multi-month delay. Now it’s in gamers’ hands and we finally have some numbers to pore over, thanks to some benchmarks a hardware testing site in Germany has posted. They’re not for loading times but for overall performance. As it turns out, offloading asset compression from the CPU to the GPU does impact gaming performance. Your mileage may vary, of course, but in the first tests, it’s up to an 11% penalty in frames per second.
The tests were performed by PC Games Hardware. To test DirectStorage 1.1, it set up a test bench with a Core i9-12900K and an RTX 4090. On the SSD side, they tested three models: SATA, and PCIe 3.0 and 4.0. Oddly, the testers didn’t say which models of SSDs they used for testing. Regardless, DirectStorage doesn’t work with SATA, so we’re able to glean the effects of the asset decompression happening on the GPU instead of the CPU. The tests were run in 4K and showed some clear results.
In an unexpected twist, the SATA SSD offered the highest fps, coming in at 83.2 on average. When switching to the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD, the average frame rate was 11% slower at 74.4fps. The PCIe 3.0 drive was just as fast as PCIe 4.0, averaging a single fps more on average. Since they only tested at 4K, we don’t know if this situation is the same at lower resolutions. The good news for gamers is the 1% and 0.2% fps averages were essentially the same across all three drives. This would indicate that the player would not notice any performance spikes while playing.
Previously, it was reported that DirectStorage can lead to a huge increase in data transfer speeds. In that test, it was Intel’s GPU that was the fastest, beating out pricier GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. Clearly, more testing is needed across the GPU spectrum. We’d also be curious to see what a PCIe 5.0 SSD could do with Forspoken. Sadly, those drives are not quite ready yet. Also, keep in mind this is just one data point. Another YouTuber named Bang4BuckPC Gamer also has a SATA vs. PCIe 4.0 side-by-side, and in the majority of the scenes, the performance is the same. Sometimes, though, the NVME drive is noticeably faster than the SATA drive.
At this point, we need to see more SSDs and GPUs tested to see what the performance penalty is (if any). Though 11% is a higher number than expected, the game’s frame rate was still well above 60fps and it looks very smooth in the video. We also don’t think the RTX 4090 is the best GPU to test this on, as someone with that card never really has to worry about fps in any game, even at 4K. We’d be curious to see what the impact is on Windows 10 as well, as it has a watered-down version of DirectStorage.
As the famous poet Carl Johnson once said, “Ah sh*t, here we go again.” Apple’s newest MacBook Pros with M2 SoCs were just released and are now being subjected to teardowns. This has allowed us to peek under the hood at the SSD configurations. Sadly, it appears Apple is doubling down on hobbling the SSD speeds on the base models, 9to5mac reports. It did the exact same thing last year. Therefore, it’s not a huge surprise, but still a disappointment on a laptop with pricing that starts at $1,999.
What Apple has done this time is a replay of the M2 launch almost a year ago. When it announced the M2 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro it was discovered the base model used one NAND chip instead of the two in their M1-based predecessors. For example, on the M1 laptops, 256GB of storage was divided between two 128GB NAND modules. However, as time goes on, density goes up. So Apple switched to a single 256GB chip for the base models. The spot where the second chip used to be was empty and only filled if the customer upgraded its storage. Thanks to how SSDs rely on parallelism to boost performance, this meant the base model’s SSDs offered just half the speeds of machines with two NAND chips.
Benchmarks show slightly reduced write speeds but a pretty significant reduction in read speeds. (Image: 9to5mac)
Now we see it happening again on the new M2 machines as well. Despite the fact that the new M2 MacBook Pros offer 512GB of storage for the base models, Apple can now cover this amount with half the chips. Teardowns confirm the M1 MacBook Pro used four NAND modules and the M2 machines use just two. Benchmarks confirm a significant impact on performance, though 9to5mac’s speeds (above) are actually showing less of an impact than other reviewers are reporting.
For example, Max Tech compared the 16-inch M1 and M2 Pro laptops with 512GB of memory. The benchmarks show the M1 system is twice as fast in read speeds compared with the M2. In CrystalDiskMark, the M1 hit 6887MB/s, compared with 3462MB/s on the M2. For a 22GB file transfer test, the M2 system was 56 seconds slower than its M1 predecessor.
An Adobe Lightroom export of 499 photos with web browsing occurring in the background. (Credit: MaxTech)
In a multitasking and file export test in Adobe Lightroom, the M2 Pro showed noticeably slower performance than the M1 system as well. He exported 499 photos from Lightroom while clicking between 15 browser tabs. The M2 system took 70 seconds longer to export the photos. It also stuttered briefly during this process when switching tabs. The M1 never hitched at all in this multitasking comparison. Although, to be fair to Apple, the hitching was very brief. Also, in some CPU-based tasks, the improvement in CPU power of the M2 can make up for the SSD speeds, depending on the task.
As MaxTech states, when this happened with the M2 Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, it was mostly excused as those were inexpensive machines. The M2 laptops cost over $2,000, though, with the 16-inch model starting at $2,500. How much this will impact people in the real world is hard to quantify. But we can sure see it in the benchmarks, both synthetic and real-world. At the very least, it would be handy if Apple informed people of the situation before they bought one.
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