Should be an overall better experience using the devices with the move to actually decent CPU’s and to SSD storage
We’ll have to see how it pans out but one gets the impression that Sony is pushing hard for the studios developing PS5 games to aggressively lean into parallelization/multithreading not just on the CPU+GPU but for data loading as well.
Regular PCs will be able to cope with the CPU+GPU part of this shift in game design and even thrive with it (so long as the PCs in question have a CPU with an adequate core count) but the data loading part has potential to be real trouble. An overwhelming majority of PC gamers are still on SATA SSDs (me included), and if games start getting architected with the expectation of the user having even half of the PS5’s advertised 5.5GB/s speeds and parallel access capabilities, SATA SSDs are gonna start crapping the bed… especially cheaper models with tiny caches and slow flash. Some of these things are going to suddenly feel like spinning rust minus the seeking noise.
If nothing else, I fully expected these next gen consoles to start driving both motherboard upgrades (to gain access to higher core count CPUs and NVMe sockets) and NVMe SSD sales a year or two from now.
I suspect exclusive titles to be the only ones to fully leverage or rely on this SSD tech.
Multiplatform games won’t. It’s just more profitable to make it more accessible. Designing it one way that works on everything makes the most sense.
The ssd in my laptop is Sata as well. Sata caps out at 300mbps. The PlayStation 5 is 5.5gbps uncompressed and 9gbps compressed. That is 15 (uncompressed) to 30 times (compressed) faster than my sata ssd