What Can An SSD Do For Destiny 2 On PS4? We Take A Look

I am such a sucker for Bungie’s Destiny, that I can’t be happy simply playing it. I need to benchmark it, too (OK, maybe not a huge surprise if you follow the site regularly). When the PC beta rolled around, I threw 11 GPUs at it, and last year, I included the game in an HDD vs. SSD performance look including the (then) just-released PlayStation 4 Pro.

A video version we posted last week, with a bit more depth

A couple of weeks ago, someone over at reddit asked me if I could perform some HDD vs. SSD testing with Destiny 2, and being the curious Guardian I am, I decided to do just that. Ultimately, the results are not too surprising, but they once again paint a pretty picture of solid-state storage.

Neither the HDD or SSD used in testing are that important, as any mobile HDD is going to offer similar performance as this one, and the same applies to the SSD. That said, the HDD is appropriate for testing as it came out of the PS4 Pro. The SSD is Corsair’s Neutron XT, a drive spec’d at ~500MB/s reads and writes. Standard fare for the most part.

To generate these results, I benchmarked each load scenario ten times over, and chose the best three to display here. Benchmarking a console is a bit harder than a PC, simply based on the lack of OS tweaking ability. There’s no way to detect a rogue process that’s running, so some runs offered more variance than I’d like. Fortunately, the best three were pretty stable on either I/O solution:

The gains seen last year when I tested the original Destiny have pretty much been carried over here. Using an SSD, every single load is going to be quicker, and quite substantially. If 10 seconds here or there doesn’t sound like much, just consider how many of those load screens you see in a given night. It adds up.

Moving to an SSD with the original Destiny revealed a nice speed-up when opening the inventory screen, and while that sounds beyond minor, it was definitely noticeable in use. In Destiny 2, the gain is not quite as notable, but any gain is appreciated.

I had a ton of questions last year about Xbox One SSD performance, and I’ve heard it again multiple times since posting that video last week. It’s something I’d like to work on once other projects are done – it just won’t be done with Destiny 2 since I don’t have the game on that platform. Similarly, it may be fun to do the same testing with the PC version of the game, after it drops on October 24 (I may be counting down the days…)