I get all that, and obviously in an ideal world we would all have ditched hdds a long time ago. The main benefit I'm mentioning here is that by including the nand in the gpu, you're assuring games can be created under the assumption all users will have a ultra fast ssd to run the game from and not have to design them for hdd and sata as the lowest common denominator. Can we mention the smaller download sizes due to not having to multiply assets for faster reading in slow hdds? 

On the cost side, have you seen the prices of gpus in the last few years? the additional cost would be meaningless if we look to add simple 120 / 250 gb. Just got a 1TB m.2 drive a few months back for around $100, and this was at retail. That's $25 per 250gb. How costly would it be for nvidia/amd to buy bulk? $10 to $15? What's $10 to $15 on a gpu that costs north of $500 ($1000 for a high end one)?

Like I said before, this is purely going by rumors, so obviously we'll need to wait and see. However he did make a good case for it and we can be pretty sure guaranteeing SSD as lowest common denominator will be a game changer. There's no way the pc market won't adapt and miss out on what next gen has to offer.

Graphics cards hit all sorts of price points with various capabilities.
It would be a stretch to assume that in the PC space a mid-range GPU with a built in SSD will have the same capabilities as a high-end GPU launching next year with an SSD.
PC technology doesn't stop, you don't just have a single product segment, you cannot have guaranteed performance consistency across product stacks, you just can't.

Consoles can get away with it... Because their hardware doesn't change, this is a Pro and a Con.

Again, the PC has had GPU's with built-in SSD's and for gaming it didn't bring any tangible benefits.

The Duplication of Data never really happened on the PC either, developers never got to control where shit installed, that is up to Windows. - So duplicating data was redundant. (Plus PC mechanical drives were always superior to the consoles anyway, they weren't limited to god-awful 5400rpm spinners.)

You also don't need the SSD on the GPU to guarantee that all PC's will have an ultra fast SSD, they either have, or they don't. - It's not up to developers to give a shit on how people spec their machines... Rather developers build games for a range of hardware sets and PC gamers upgrade over time to meet/keep pace with those or go without.

If you want a fast SSD, it will cost more than the bargain basement, slow, 250GB drives, memory transactions rely on parallelism, the more chips you have, the faster your SSD... Which is why larger drives are often the faster drives.

The fact it is a rumor is irrelevant.. Already provided the link to PC GPU's with built in SSD's and again... For gaming... They were redundant.
No company is going to go down that path and waste their time and money.

There is no tangible benefits of having the SSD on the GPU verses an SSD on an NVME bus... It will still need to use a PCI-E Controller to interface the SSD with the Graphics card anyway!

Don't wan't to argue this in circles, but yes, I am aware gpus had nand on them in the past, but not mainstream gaming gpus and they were extremely expensive. The price of nand is quite cheap nowadays and only going to get even cheaper, so something that didn't make sense to do it the past now might become quite affordable.

I think you're missing my main point which is, developing for PC means developing for the lowest common denominator. Until m.2 drives are ubiquitous, every game will be created under the assumption your clients are using slow ass 7200rpm hdds. Meaning, a game that is made to take advantage of nearly instant access to assets that would be rendered on the other side of the map, would allow for new game experiences that you can't afford right now. As a hypothetical, if you have a superman game that has superman flying at pretty high speeds across a map the size of a GTA5 or bigger, you could potentially go in 2 or 3 seconds from one side of the map, with a certain amount of assets loaded to the RAM, to the complete opposite side of the map and during the trip you could actually load the new assets really quickly to the RAM for rendering, without going through a loading screen (or a narrow corridor strategically placed to hide loading screens).

I'm happy to wait and see how things turn out, I just find it inconceivable that the PC market won't somehow emulate the new paradigm shift the new consoles will bring. I can't say I'll bet money on Nvida/AMD applying such a solution, but at some point certain games just won't be playable in HDDs. Maybe buying a fast M.2 drive becomes mandatory in those cases, I don't know. But at the end of the day, I did find the proposed solution quite interesting and definitely in the realm of possibility :)

btw as an aside, got my new x570 board the other day, looking forward to have an excuse to take advantage of pcie 4.0 :)

Define "affordable". - GPU's already exceed the $1,000 price point in the high end... But lets add to that cost shall we?
Regardless of how cheap NAND gets, it's still going to increase costs and the net benefit will be relatively small, if not... Non-existent and maybe even performance impacting.
The cost isn't in the just the NAND either, you need to build the PCB and traces in such a way to accommodate the NAND, build the appropriate traces, build the SSD controller and build the controller interface on the GPU to interface with, you need to build the appropriate power delivery and re-work how your cooling works and so much more.

It's not just a simple case of "whacking some NAND on a GPU" and calling it a day... And this is *just* on the hardware side of the equation, if your competitor doesn't integrate an SSD onto their GPU's and they instead include faster/larger pools of Ram and have superior performance at a lower cost? Then you loose sales/profit.

It has never made sense to do it unless you are running a professional workload that extends towards multiple Terabytes... Even then you would often get better performance by using RAID SSD's on the motherboard anyway.

There is a reason why AMD hasn't "run with the idea" since introducing it a few years back.

SSD's are slow. Large SSD's are expensive.

No developer worth their salt has built their game to accommodate for a "slow-ass 7200rpm" hard drive in the last few years.
A 7200rpm HDD has not been the lowest common denominator on PC in years. YEARS.

SSD's are the majority, not the exception in PC's, even low-end, netbooks.

You also frame your statement in such a way that there isn't any tangible benefits to an SSD unless a developer builds for it? Seems disingenuous, seems you are borrowing the narrative from Cerny's example demonstration, which doesn't show the use-case and advantages of every aspects of using an SSD.

The PC is the paradigm shift, the PC adopted SSD's long before the consoles.
The PC is always the cutting edge.
Ray Tracing? First on PC.
Tessellation? Yup. PC there too.
720P gaming? Also PC.
1080P gaming? Yep. PC.
4k? Also PC.
3D positional Audio? Of course, the PC.
3D accelerated graphics? Yep PC.
Hardware Transform and Lighting? Pioneered on PC.
Solid State Drives? PC as well.
Programmable Pixel Shaders? PC did that first too.

While people were drooling over the latest and greatest Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 titles off their optical/mechanical media, I was running SSD's.

And just like graphics, you *do* have diminishing returns every-time you double your SSD speed, the biggest benefit that SSD's brought to the table was the reduction in latency over mechanical hard drives, people often forget that.

I am not at that point where I feel my DDR4+PCI-E 3.0 is a limitation yet. Heck the old 3930K@5ghz backup rig with DDR3+PCI-3.0 still beats some mid-range rigs and that is almost 10 years old.
My next upgrade will likely be when DDR5, PCI-E 5.0 and USB 4.0 become the new thing.

Define "affordable". - GPU's already exceed the $1,000 price point in the high end... But lets add to that cost shall we?
Regardless of how cheap NAND gets, it's still going to increase costs and the net benefit will be relatively small, if not... Non-existent and maybe even performance impacting.
The cost isn't in the just the NAND either, you need to build the PCB and traces in such a way to accommodate the NAND, build the appropriate traces, build the SSD controller and build the controller interface on the GPU to interface with, you need to build the appropriate power delivery and re-work how your cooling works and so much more.

It's not just a simple case of "whacking some NAND on a GPU" and calling it a day... And this is *just* on the hardware side of the equation, if your competitor doesn't integrate an SSD onto their GPU's and they instead include faster/larger pools of Ram and have superior performance at a lower cost? Then you loose sales/profit.

It has never made sense to do it unless you are running a professional workload that extends towards multiple Terabytes... Even then you would often get better performance by using RAID SSD's on the motherboard anyway.

There is a reason why AMD hasn't "run with the idea" since introducing it a few years back.

SSD's are slow. Large SSD's are expensive.

No developer worth their salt has built their game to accommodate for a "slow-ass 7200rpm" hard drive in the last few years.
A 7200rpm HDD has not been the lowest common denominator on PC in years. YEARS.

SSD's are the majority, not the exception in PC's, even low-end, netbooks.

You also frame your statement in such a way that there isn't any tangible benefits to an SSD unless a developer builds for it? Seems disingenuous, seems you are borrowing the narrative from Cerny's example demonstration, which doesn't show the use-case and advantages of every aspects of using an SSD.

The PC is the paradigm shift, the PC adopted SSD's long before the consoles.
The PC is always the cutting edge.
Ray Tracing? First on PC.
Tessellation? Yup. PC there too.
720P gaming? Also PC.
1080P gaming? Yep. PC.
4k? Also PC.
3D positional Audio? Of course, the PC.
3D accelerated graphics? Yep PC.
Hardware Transform and Lighting? Pioneered on PC.
Solid State Drives? PC as well.
Programmable Pixel Shaders? PC did that first too.

While people were drooling over the latest and greatest Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 titles off their optical/mechanical media, I was running SSD's.

And just like graphics, you *do* have diminishing returns every-time you double your SSD speed, the biggest benefit that SSD's brought to the table was the reduction in latency over mechanical hard drives, people often forget that.

I am not at that point where I feel my DDR4+PCI-E 3.0 is a limitation yet. Heck the old 3930K@5ghz backup rig with DDR3+PCI-3.0 still beats some mid-range rigs and that is almost 10 years old.
My next upgrade will likely be when DDR5, PCI-E 5.0 and USB 4.0 become the new thing.

Define "affordable". - GPU's already exceed the $1,000 price point in the high end... But lets add to that cost shall we?
Regardless of how cheap NAND gets, it's still going to increase costs and the net benefit will be relatively small, if not... Non-existent and maybe even performance impacting.
The cost isn't in the just the NAND either, you need to build the PCB and traces in such a way to accommodate the NAND, build the appropriate traces, build the SSD controller and build the controller interface on the GPU to interface with, you need to build the appropriate power delivery and re-work how your cooling works and so much more.

It's not just a simple case of "whacking some NAND on a GPU" and calling it a day... And this is *just* on the hardware side of the equation, if your competitor doesn't integrate an SSD onto their GPU's and they instead include faster/larger pools of Ram and have superior performance at a lower cost? Then you loose sales/profit.

It has never made sense to do it unless you are running a professional workload that extends towards multiple Terabytes... Even then you would often get better performance by using RAID SSD's on the motherboard anyway.

There is a reason why AMD hasn't "run with the idea" since introducing it a few years back.

SSD's are slow. Large SSD's are expensive.

No developer worth their salt has built their game to accommodate for a "slow-ass 7200rpm" hard drive in the last few years.
A 7200rpm HDD has not been the lowest common denominator on PC in years. YEARS.

SSD's are the majority, not the exception in PC's, even low-end, netbooks.

You also frame your statement in such a way that there isn't any tangible benefits to an SSD unless a developer builds for it? Seems disingenuous, seems you are borrowing the narrative from Cerny's example demonstration, which doesn't show the use-case and advantages of every aspects of using an SSD.

The PC is the paradigm shift, the PC adopted SSD's long before the consoles.
The PC is always the cutting edge.
Ray Tracing? First on PC.
Tessellation? Yup. PC there too.
720P gaming? Also PC.
1080P gaming? Yep. PC.
4k? Also PC.
3D positional Audio? Of course, the PC.
3D accelerated graphics? Yep PC.
Hardware Transform and Lighting? Pioneered on PC.
Solid State Drives? PC as well.
Programmable Pixel Shaders? PC did that first too.

While people were drooling over the latest and greatest Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 titles off their optical/mechanical media, I was running SSD's.

And just like graphics, you *do* have diminishing returns every-time you double your SSD speed, the biggest benefit that SSD's brought to the table was the reduction in latency over mechanical hard drives, people often forget that.

I am not at that point where I feel my DDR4+PCI-E 3.0 is a limitation yet. Heck the old 3930K@5ghz backup rig with DDR3+PCI-3.0 still beats some mid-range rigs and that is almost 10 years old.
My next upgrade will likely be when DDR5, PCI-E 5.0 and USB 4.0 become the new thing.

Didn't MS and Sony already stated that they'll be able to use the SSD as virtual ram? DF did a whole video about it a while back, making comparisons to the Radeon Pro SSG. Obviously, that's a $7000 professional gpu that was never meant for gaming, but it does look like Sony and MS are using a similar approach just on a smaller scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR-uH8vSeBY

PS5 loading time will be much faster than PC with current nvme SSD.
Of course, it is incomparable with XBOX's.

Unless you're talking about the future that comparison is pointless.

I'm not entirely convinced the majority of PC gamers are not running games on hdd though, I'd need to see some surveys around that, even I have a mix if m.2 drives and hdds both on my desktop and laptop, about half my games are still running on hdds and keeping the OS and some more multiplayer focused games in the m.2s.

We have been using mechanical hard drives as "virtual ram" for a third of a century, it's nothing new or novel. Even the Original Xbox did it on it's mechanical disk.
It's just the technology that the "virtual ram" operates on has fundamentally changed, but the concept is identical.

This is the issue when people don't actually understand the technology in question and just parrot from sources (Microsoft and Sony) that have a vested interest in selling a product, it's the hype train effect.

That isn't what is pertinent to this discussion though, we are talking about the storage on the GPU's themselves.

Most PC's. You can build an SSD setup that completely dominates the Playstation 5's 5.5GB/s drive via a 16x PCI-E card/RAID, that is not a common setup though, it's an enthusiast/professional grade setup.

I am actually not able to find the thread, but I will keep looking, it had the full market breakdown of gaming rigs with SSD's and how PCI-E drive marketshare had started to beat SATA.

Allot of gamers still use mechanical drives with games installed and SSD as the OS drive. Many just use an SSD. SSD's have been cheap for years, hence why mechanical drive sales are plummeting every quarter for years.