Also, minimum specs and minimum specs are not always the same stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgfPi7hFwwM

At the end of the video, you can see some benches of Rise of the Tomb Raider where it runs at 34FPS on a GTX 460 in Ultra settings... while the minimum requirement states a 650 is needed. The 650 is about as powerful as the 460, which means in turn that the minimum requirement of this game is actually to play the game at Ultra settings with 30FPS in 1080p and not a low preset 720p with 30ish FPS.

Like I said in another thread with the same theme, I managed to run a couple games on my old Radeon HD 5770 which listed an 7770 or even R7 280 as minimum settings. They don't always mean it doesn't run at anything lower, just that you can't run them in the best settings anymore.

True, you can play a lot of games on lower than the recommended settings. Rise of the tombraider also came out on 360, so I can understand that gives it some headroom. Nobody can force anyone to upgrade their pc and it all depends on what games you're into. However, pc gamers usually upgrade when games start coming out that just don't run well anymore. That's why hardly anyone uses anything lower than a GTX660 these days. You might be able to run anything fine until something like GTA6 comes along, that doesn't, and people will be looking to upgrade asap. 

I also believe these next gen consoles will be a disaster for Nvidia who are selling their "mid-range" gpu's way to expensive. When people were upgrading for current gen they could get a GTX660 that costed $199 at launch or even a 750ti for $125. If you look now the RTX2060 is still $399. And if these next gen consoles really are on par with a RTX2080, it means the gpu will probably sit somewhere between a RTX3060 and RTX3070, which will probably cost between $400/600 or more at launch. 

It's not about the recommended settings (which are higher than the posted ones), this is playing below the minimum settings as they don't always mean much. 

But games have to be optimised for those SSD's. SSD's load faster because of the faster technology.

But the data sizes are large because  certain information is doubled, tripled, quadrupled etc so that Hard drives don't have to search through the entire file directory to load assets. This will still be the case for PC versions of games as you cannot guarantee that a PC user will have an SSD. Unless there is a HDD download version and an SSD version. 

With the new consoles you can guarantee that they will have an SSD so the file directories will be streamlined much more. Basically what I'm saying is that the same exact SSD on console should in theory load games build for next gen, faster than the same SSD in a PC. 

Yes thats why crysis was so far behind on consoles, it wasnt optimised for pc pathing

Okay, the discussion with you is pointless, if you really think that a GTX 580 from 2010 is on par with a GTX 1060.

In the linked URL they are of course comparing a Radeon RX 580 from 2017 with a GTX 1060!

I skipped a major upgrade due first to lack of money and later for AMD being too late with what I wanted, so I did minor upgrades instead, adding internal and external HDDs and upgrading the onboard HD3300 GPU with a fanless R7 250 card, now I'm quite sure that when AMD will finally release them and after the first hype period after launch, I'll be able to afford a Zen 3 APU based major upgrade, then I'll possibly add a discrete GPU later when I'll feel the APU one won't be enough anymore. Obviously, coming from an old PC with just minor upgrades, a Zen 3 APU will look superfast to me for some time.

Mechanical hard drives actually perform best when the data sizes are large and sequential.

SSD's and more specifically NAND's main advantage is actually when there are small random reads/writes as it doesn't need to spin a disk to seek, today SSD's thanks to not being limited by SATA are the best of both worlds, low access times, high throughput thanks to PCI-E.

Data on a mechanical hard drive though isn't doubled/tripled/quadrupled either, optical disks that happens because they are orders-of-magnitude slower again... And thanks to the laws of physics, have different performance characteristics depending if you are reading near the center or the outer edge of an optical disk... And often consoles were trying to stream that data from optical disks due to lack of Ram anyway, so data duplication had to be done for performance reasons.

In general, most gaming PC's these days are using an SSD for the OS... It's been that way for years... And games are dropped onto mechanical mass-storage. Aka. "Steam Drive".
From there if you load up a game, it will load it's assets into Ram and the OS will even create a cache on the SSD to accelerate those memory transactions.

I was an early adopted of SSD's before they were even cool, started off with the OCZ Vertex 2 from a decade ago, so I am well versed in their performance characteristics... Yet I am also able to run StarCitizen just fine from mechanical storage without much drama, because I have tons of Ram for caching/Ram Drive and I have an SSD for the OS with large caches.

File directories won't be changing just because you have an SSD though, SSD's are actually treated differently to mechanical storage on the PC, but file structures remain the same.. And not because of mechanical storage either.

Also... One thing we need to keep in mind is that the Xbox One Series X and the Playstation 5 might still support mechanical storage anyway, it's to early to start making assumptions on that front that it will be an entirely-SSD world when we don't have all our drives in a row.

Or it was simply because the consoles could not match the PC's CPU/Ram/GPU capabilities.

Hasn't it been confirmed that these next gen consoles come with a 1tb SSD? Surely, MS and Sony wouldn't be making such a fuss about it if it wouldn't help loading times and assets streaming. When SSD becomes baseline with next gen - game design will change with it. That's the difference compared to SSD we see now on pc where games are designed with HDD in mind. Next gen games will no longer have to hide loading screens behind closed doors and corridors and can speed up openworld gameplay. Building games with ssds in mind is a big deal and it's something we haven't quite seen before.

Just imagine a 2070 even in a console with a half decent cpu it will perform amazingly. I've a feeling next gen consoles will be special the price of entry will have many people going from pc to console. 

4k/60fps ultra @ £499 is better then 4k/60fps ultra @ £999