• thayer@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    No, the average user will never know the difference. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the current performance impact is for hardware encryption, but it’s likely around 1-4% depending on the platform (I use LUKS under Linux).

    For gamers, it’s likely a 1-5 FPS loss, depending on your hardware, which is negligible in my experience. I play mostly first and third person shooter-style games at 1440p/120hz, targeting 60-90 FPS, and there’s no noticeable impact (Ryzen 5600 / RX 6800XT).

    • ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 months ago

      If it has to go to disk for immediate loading of assets while playing a video game you’re losing more than 1-5 fps

      • refalo@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        Maybe, but not every frame while you’re playing. No game is loading gigs of data every frame. That would be the only way most encryption algorithms would slow you down.

        • ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org
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          6 months ago

          Yeah was thinking about that (edited to add immediate) – games are certainly background loading nowadays but the stuff needed is intended to be in ram by the time it’s needed, afaik.

      • thayer@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        Yeah, I’m sure there are a lot of variables there. I can only say that in my experience, I noticed zero impact to gaming performance when I started encrypting everything about 10 years ago. No stuttering or noticeable frame loss. It was a seamless experience and brings real peace of mind knowing that our financial info, photos, and other sensitive files are safely locked away.

        • ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org
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          6 months ago

          For sure I’m just saying i’d guess that’s because at play time you’re loading everything into ram. For bulk loading I would encryption perf follows the general use case.

          (Tldr encryption shouldn’t matter for games)

    • refalo@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      For gamers, it’s likely a 1-5 FPS loss

      I highly doubt it… would love to see some hard data on that. Most algorithms used for disk encryption these days are already faster than RAM, and most games are not reading gigabytes/sec from the disk every frame during gameplay for this to ever matter.