Fox2232:

3 seconds loading time not the question of NVMe being faster/slower on PC. It is question of compression used on data. In other words it is choice of game developer. Often, developer makes choice that's most fitting old HDD. That's to get maximum compression ratio regardless of decompression cost on CPU as HDD reads usually 80~120MB/s. But then this heavy compression hits CPU wall with SSD and it can't pull from HDD more than 200~250MB/s. Change compression and you suddenly can read 1000~1500MB/s from NVMe per CPU core (with one thread). Run it with SMT and get maybe to 2GB/s. Is it an problem to sacrifice entire core when game is loading? (Thread that loads data from SSD with inefficient compression uses entire core anyway as it becomes limiting factor.) Or maybe two cores to get higher throughput? It depends if you really can(need) use all 8C/16T, your gaming PC has available, for rendering while game actually load data from storage. Answer to this is no. Games are at edge where 4C/8T is not OK (can't maximize fps under all usual gaming scenarios). Sometimes 6C/6T shows reduced performance too. But 6C/12T is OK. And that summarizes current issue. Game engines often look backwards to support HDD. If they used tooling adequate for SSDs, then NVMe-s would already provide considerable boost too. If games were not dumb coded, but were bit more CPU aware, then many more workloads would have been spread across more cores. Stupid java had parallelism built in for loops long time ago. Engine Developer should just ask simple question: "Is this CPU heavy loop self iterative or can it be parallelized?" And this applies to any processing.

Maybe I misunderstand you but game loading can not solved by game code optimization alone, check this from 8:11 [youtube=7Fjn4GRw8qE] These are old XBOX games coded for the current generation that uses a slow controller and HDD, the hardware and OS is what archives those loading speeds, not the game code.

Mineria:

Besides that it is slower than GDDR6 memory and needs an additional step before hitting the GPU? And then comes additional time used loading a game into memory every time, I didn't run over any "smart" caching solution that does a real difference so far, even with smaller games it really doesn't get there. The PC and OS needs a proper controller with a co-processor for NVME and onboard GDDR6 besides OS support for it all to get these 3 seconds game loading times. Shouldn't forget that the Xbox Series X also is blazing fast, so MS would be stupid if it is not in their interest to push the technology to the PC. I'm quite sure that PC's will get there in time, question is more if they can do it via addon to existing hardware or if it needs a complete new motherboard.

DDR4 is orders of magnitude faster than any nv storage solution today, not even optane can get close to it, the GPU can tap into cpu ram and tends to do it fairly often on systems with less than 4gb vram, it has almost no impact on a 16x pcie3 bus, its not as direct as the ps5 solution but its not that bad and can be better in some ways as for the fancy hardware accelerated compression/decompression chip; we master race have spare cores for that, thanks to AMD and microsoft promised you can keep 5-6 games suspended with instant resume, if they can do that with a plebian nvme 3.0 and 16gb ram, we sure as hell can do the same/better, and that to me sounds a lot better than faster loading

Mineria:

Maybe I misunderstand you but game loading can not solved by game code optimization alone, check this from 8:11 [youtube=7Fjn4GRw8qE] These are old XBOX games coded for the current generation that uses a slow controller and HDD, the hardware and OS is what archives those loading speeds, not the game code.

You really misunderstand given situation. One is saved memory footprint (switching between games) which is just dump and load at maximum speed storage can do. And other is actual loading of assets from drive which have certain type of compression and are stored on drive with certain bandwidth.

The question is... when are we going to see a Samsung 980 EVO with a price that is within normal people budget ? Hopefully also doing 7000 MB/s in sequential transfer, even if slightly lower 4K performance than the Pro. That would be an SSD which I could probably buy. The Pro, not so much, as I expect it to cost an arm and a leg and a few kidneys too.