Yeah but people associate PCIe gen overall performance. Stuff like Optane or Enterprise drives and varying controllers on either generation (there are some very shitty PCIe4 NVMe out there getting beaten up easily by most standard Gen3 drives).
because it doesn’t know how to properly prefetch data because of fear the “designed” memory target will be exceeded. And if you dynamically grab small stuff from the drives all the time, because loading the entire planet (sequential read of the whole thing) or whatever will crash (or use the swap of) consoles, ancient PCs and are bad for minimum/recommended marketing reasons. The PS5 just needs fast NVMe because it doesn’t have the RAM. And same applies for PCs. Good to save some bucks on DRAM for Sony and MS, bad for everyone else.
Sure, you can’t prefetch 200Gigs of assets (some AAA titles) into 32-64Gig of memory, stuff is already compressed most of the time. But not prefetching stuff at any reasonable amount (especially if THERE IS FREE RAM) and reading from slow storage all the time is just bad practice in an age where average joe has access to 64GB DIMMs.
Just some option in the settings with “use all my RAM pls” or “make use of 8/16/32/64GB pls” would eliminate most/all storage needs and we can game even with HDDs without hiccups.
Recently bought some new Micron 7400 2TB drives…3-4 year old Micron product, were cheap (100+tax).
Hardcore SYNC 4k blocksize with Queue depth of 1, raw disk performance (not on actual filesystem).
Great NVMe NAND latencies don’t need to be expensive. And the stuff is 4 year old NAND tech.