MHLoppy

I honestly don’t think any of this matters anymore. SSD in general is just good for gaming

As the article shows, in some games it does matter enough to be probably something where you can “feel” the difference between a SATA vs NVMe SSD. There’s no need to guess or speculate here, the article has several measurements with differences that I’d consider a non-trivial between SATA and NVMe SSD speeds:

• 10 seconds difference (~50%) in first load time of Assassin’s Creed Shadows
• 10 seconds difference (~33%) in first load time of Black Myth Wukong
• 3 seconds difference (>50%) in quick travel load time in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• 15 seconds difference (~33%) in first load time of Kingdom Come Deliverance II
• 10 seconds difference (~50%) in load into game time of The Last of Us Part II
• 8 seconds difference (~70%) in first load time of Spider-Man 2
• 5 seconds difference (~80%) in first load time of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

In several of these, the SATA SSD has performance similar to the hard drives, not to the NVMe SSDs. Of course, there are also many results where just having an SSD – regardless of what type – seems to be enough. Is it enough to justify upgrading an existing SATA SSD just for performance reasons? For most people, probably not - but it’s worth knowing what real difference there can be in real-world situations. It’s certainly nice to save a few minutes of cumulative load time every week if you play some of these types of games regularly though. (And for those with NVMe SSDs already, yeah, even in the above cases there seems to be only a trivial difference.)

I assume there will be some non-zero number of new releases making good use of DirectStorage, so if for anyone who tends to play new releases then it may matter increasingly more too, though it of course depends on what a person plays.