Tldr: there is no diff
Secret tl;dr: gen4
If it’s NVMe, it’s already as fast as it needs to be.
Comparing HDD to NVMe, though… Yea, it makes a big difference! I get frequent, near constant stuttering in some open world games like Elden Ring.
Ofc not.
With so many 120+GB games gen3 SSDs speed is not the limiting factor.
On my system with raid0 dual pcie4.0 nvme drives, most of the time is spent decompressing and processing the data. There is always going to be a bottleneck somewhere, whether it is the drive, cpu, gpu etc.
Right, so I’m not a low-level PC hardware expert or anything, but:
We only got resizable BAR like a couple of years ago, and it was very much a premium enthusiast feature at the time. Are modern engines and the games built for them optimised to expect resizable BAR as a baseline yet? If not that will still be a limiting factor right?
I thought the reason resizable BAR was introduced was because we hit the limits of what the previous approach allowed regardless of the speed of the link
i.e. of course it doesn’t make a difference with games today, they’re built targeting hardware configurations that will limit the utility of extra storage bandwidth
Reiterating that I might have this entirely wrong, so I’m more than happy to be corrected here
Starfield had lots of problems, but I installed it on my slower (larger) NVME SSD first, that has like 5-700mb of read speed and it failed to load peoples’ faces and hands. On one of my faster drives (>2000mb read), had no problems. Not undermining the video but that’s the last time I saw a difference in a modern game.