| KBG29 said: If games are built with NVMe in every unit, then they will take advantage of it. If not, then they are limited to the weakest compnent.
I think having the Storage built into the board, with a NVMe Expansion slot would be a great way to go. Give me 1TB of Storage with 3000MB/s Read Speed/2000MB/s Write Speed, and let me slip in an upgrade as needed. A NVMe slot is an extremely cheap addition, and would allow users to upgrade as needed, without the need for a bulky external storage unit.
Built in Storage Expansion, and Built in VR. Two less USB and Power plugs, and one less HDMI needed for PS5. That is next gen to me. |
Thats not how the whole Nvme thing works though.
Between the APU and the components on a motherboard. There are usually two bridges. North and southbridge respectively. The north bridge is usually a connection point between the APU, RAM and its supported PCiE lanes ad the south is usually connected to the Northbridge and hosts things like USB, Drives....etc basically the slower stuff.
Now the bridge on the PS4/XB1 was basically a SATA 3 bridge. This has a peak bandwidth of 600MB/s, that meant that everything on those consoles shared that bandwidth. Its why when using a SSD in PS4/XB1 you still don't get the peak SSD speeds.
With the next gen consoles we can hope or expect that the bridge they use this time around is a PCIE gen 3 4 lane equivalent bridge. That will give us around 4GB/s bandwidth for everything in the console to share. This is storage, drives, USB.....etc. With that, even when using an Nvme based o2 drive you still won't be able to max it out and will probably get at most 1GB/s of bandwidth. Which is still aout 10 times better than what we have now though.
Another thing to consider is that even if the M.2 interface they use supports Nvme SSDs (so its a PCIEx4 interface) Nvme SSDs cost significantly more than a normal SSD on an M.2 drive (and the latter will also work in such an interface). And that is a cost that hasn't shown to be a benefit so far when it comes to games because of what actually makes up game data (long story).
Its also worth mentioning that a motherboard with PCIE support will cost more to make than one without it.
Now even if we are getting the hardware for nvme M.2 drives...... the best we will absolutely get is a sata 3 SSD in that slot.
