3DMark, the well-known benchmark used to measure the performance of graphics cards, has been updated to include a storage benchmark. It uses real world workloads that assess the storage capabilities of a system more accurately than would be the case if the tests were simple synthetic tests.
The new benchmark is designed to accurately measure and compare all kinds of storage devices, all the way from PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives to SATA drives and even good old mechanical hard drives. The tests include measuring the load times of several popular games including Battlefield V, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Overwatch. There’s also a test of recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch, along with a game saving measurement and a file copy test.
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SSD performance is an underrated part of the gaming experience. It’s not just loading times, but things like level transitions, saving and minimising in-game asset popups, not to mention all the random things the OS is doing in the background that could detract from your game. so a benchmark like this is very much welcome.
We gave the benchmark a run on a 12th Gen i9-12900K system equipped with a PCIe 4.0 Adata XPG Gammix S70 2TB drive. A score of 2410 looks to be a good score, but that’s with a high end PCIe 4.0 drive. A rusty spinner won’t look so good. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your storage, it’s worth checking out our top gaming SSD picks.
Note that the test requires a fairly hefty 30GB of space to run, though the data is deleted at the end of the benchmark run. The Storage Benchmark DLC is available now for USD $2.99 (AU $4.50) on Steam or via the UL Benchmarks website.