That'll be how many titles in the end? Especially if Sony now has one eye on PC for all titles? Also how much of a visual difference would those better assets be? Enough of a game changer to warrant the notably-higher investment in the IO?On multiplatform titles that might be the case, yet faster I/O can still yield use of larger, higher quality textures on PS5 which the I/O enables that. But for Sony first party studios, or any other developer not concerned with XBS, they can go nuts.
It's an important starting point though. And, as I just said, Sony's interest in PC sales may affect how much they push their hardware too. A look at R&C will show the limitations (or lack thereof) of the PC and how big a market cross-plat titles can go with PS5 IO.I'm not sure the PC Ratchet & Clank analysis will do much for this. R&C:RA is a first generation Insomniac title using the SSD and we know from DF's experiment using slower SSD drives in PS5 that this particular game is not pushing the I/O hard. Their next game, or the game after? That will be the test. As as I said above, consoles are expected to last 6-7 years or more and that is a lot of time for needs and technical demands to change drastically.
That all said, the history of features on consoles is a pretty discouraging precedent, with many features failing to manifest meaningfully for the console even into later titles. Whether XB360's "smart eDRAM" where the MSAA got dropped when games moved away from forward rendering, or the PSP's Bezier hardware, or VU0's massive underutilisation in PS2, too often hardware designers put in stuff that just was questionably worth it by the end of the device's generation. I'd argue that projections of what will be important over the entire generation are more often wrong than right.