Hmm imo, They address different things. SSD supports a high I/O rate which enables you to have access to a large catalog of assets. It’s solves the problem of immediacy. If you have really slow I/O your buffering is larger, and the larger it is the more data you need to buffer in random locations. A lot of it wasted. However SSD doesn’t let you render more on screen at once. As you’re limited to 16GB of space. Once filled the I/O must stream textures out to put textures in.
Having more VRAM let’s you actually render more on screen at once. Because you can have more in VRAM. But if you have slow I/O you’ll need to ultimately use some of that spade for buffering depending on how slow that I/O is.
All in All, having super fast I/O coupled with a huge amount of VRAM would net some gnarly results in asset fidelity.
I apologize as i can't find the slide , but during the ps5 ssd presentation from gdc they showed how many duplicate textures and data they could remove from the game because of the ssd and it went down from like 80gigs to 10gigs. On the pc if you have enough ram you'd be able to load all of spiderman into your system ram. You would have no loading time at all. You could double the data set from Spiderman the game to 20gigs and still have left over ram if you have a 32gig ($150usd) ram set up. So instead of streaming from ps5 ssd which gives you what 8 gigs of compressed data transfer rates ? Single channel ddr 3200 ram gives you 25.6GB/s bandwidth and dual channel is 51.2GB.
So if you have a game that exceeds the ram in your system you will then have to hit your hard drive in your pc. So on a pc you'd have graphics ram (4-16gigs?) - main system ram(16 to 128gigs) - hard drive. On console you have main ram 16gigs to ssd 825 to 1tb .
Lets not forget that while currently the ssd's in a pc are slower it doesn't mean it will stay that way. But even still you'd be fetching data from a 3-6GB/s ssd
And then there was DDR5
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1591...sed-setting-the-stage-for-ddr56400-and-beyond
The pc is an ever changing platform and its hard to judge it against a fixed platform.