Hi, There!
This week I have bought a WDGreen 1tb NVME to install it within a PCIe Adapter. My motherboard is old, so I needed to mod the bios to make the new disk visible as boot device. Everything worked flawless.
Same processor, same gpu (RX560), same ram, same Zorin versions but WOW my Proton games are running so smooth even on demanding games like Spider-Man! Despite loading times, wich was expected to improve.
So I was wondering, does Proton translation need disk i/o to do its job?? Or have i changed something else without a notice (or haven't)?
I used to store my system on a SATA SSD.
This benchmark was taken through the old SSD installation
SATA SSD is slower than nVME, which may explain what you are seeing.
Yes! Understood.
Do you know if Proton translation of windows apps takes advantage of a higher speed disk? I mean, to do the drawing and processing graphics?
PROTON versions due indeed take up storage space. Here's screenshots for example.
This is the reason why in modern day gaming, people should really be using 1TB and above storage drives. It takes a lot of files in PROTON packs to make Windows games run on Linux.
In regards to speed, NVME SSD wins out over SATA SSD any day.
This drive is connected externally too, using a Thunderbolt 20Gbps port.
I give you kudos on getting that SSD drive to work on an outdated MOBO, awesome job! 
1 Like
Generally speaking, any software will take advantage of a higher speed disk unless the CPU is so overwhelmed that it can't make requests fast enough (that would be a VERY unusual state). Disk access is generally done via API calls that the operating system handles, so the software doesn't need specific support for faster hardware. (There may be a slight exception for Windows' DirectStorage API, but even then that's still asking the operating system to handle it; it's just asking it via a new API.)
Basically, the game is going to make requests for things as it needs them, and slowdowns occur when the computer's hardware can't keep up. If you're seeing big improvements in performance on the exact same hardware (other than the NVMe), then the game (via Proton) was already asking for assets that it couldn't get as fast as it was trying to. A performance improvement in replacing the NVMe implies that your old SSD was the part of the computer holding you back the most, which can make perfect sense if the game needs a lot of high resolution textures, especially if your video card has low VRAM.
I just looked it up. The RX560 has 4 GB of VRAM. Their recommended GPUs on the oldest Spider-man game I see on Steam have 6 GB VRAM or 8 GB VRAM. So it's entirely plausible to me that it was requesting texture data faster than your old SSD could provide.
Edit: To directly answer the question you asked in your topic, "Do Proton/WINE use a lot of disk I/O," the answer is that it's the GAME that uses a lot of disk I/O; Proton is just converting the Windows API calls into Linux calls. If you used Proton to run something old, you'd see much less disk activity.
2 Likes
