Sorry
I remember the days of having to upgrade constantly on the pc side. Not only that but there was much more you had to upgrade. CPU/MOBO/Ram of course that's as it always is. There were co processors at one point which gave way to graphics cards and sound cards and then optical storage and heck you'd have to upgrade your modem ! Damn I remember paying big bucks for a hardware 56k modem. Remember that ? There were some 56k modems that off loaded alot of work to the cpu so you'd often get worse performance but the more expensive modems would use less of the cpu and you'd get better connections. I remember having to buy a true cd rom because it used 2 lasers and got much faster read speeds. The good old expensive days.
Ram is cheap enough that most people running an 16 gig system can simply buy another 16 gigs for a $100-$200 bucks. I don't think if you have 32gigs of ram with a 16 gig graphics card that you really even need a 8GB/s nvme drive
that's also baring there being a different solution on pcs
Game has to get the data into ram before ram can be used for caching. That inevitably leads to either load time, lesser detail assets or popup when asset is accessed first time. It can also lead to needing more time for developer/artists to create game to implement more/smarter caching/minimize load time/minimize popup. Game sizes will grow and something like 32GB is not enough to hold full game like gta next in ram. i.e. streaming is needed,... I for one would like to get away from the elevator rides and whatnots used to mask load times(mass effect).
Having fast ssd and utilizing it is a Good Thing no matter what platform is being used. Platform exclusives will likely drive ssd hard, cross platform will take time to catch up due to lowest common denominator. DirectStorage will help pc catch up. If anything faster ssd is even more important on highend pc which can use even higher end assets than console. Hopefully bottle neck will be install size and there hw decompression will help some. Hopefully unreal5 like technology will go long ways to solve the engine/art creation side to be more economical allowing the bottle neck to transfer into install size/streaming speed.
Hopefully we will never again see atrocity of gtav load time or mass effect elevator. At worst ssd's would lead to multithreaded IO and faster load time. Don't use single cpu core crunch data for minutes like gtav loading does.
Edit. Latest game that drove me nuts with loading times was half life alyx. God dang it's distracting to hit load screen in vr. Also some textures in there were not so high quality, vr would really benefit from something like unreal5. i.e. allow hopping around, seeing large scale and then stick your face into an amazingly detailed objects. All while working without load times using streaming,...
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