Controversy? When it comes to gaming, a PCIe 5.0 SSD wouldn’t offer any advantages over a SATA SSD

For anyone frustrated by how slow their PC is right after booting up, a fast SSD is the first thing that comes to mind. If you follow that logic, PCIe SSDs are the highest-performing—and therefore the best at giving your machine a much-needed boost. Except that when it comes to gaming, things are clearly different. If you’ve been following our SSD reviews, you’ve probably already noticed that the differences between a good PCIe 4.0 SSD and a PCIe 5.0 SSD are hard to spot. But some have decided to dig deeper.

On paper, today’s PCIe 5.0 SSDs boast theoretical performance far superior to that of older SATA or PCIe 3.0 models. But the question we’re interested in today is whether this extra power actually improves the performance of a gaming PC. To find out, four SSDs from different generations were put to the test in eleven recent games. The Samsung 870 EVO represents the SATA III interface.The ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro uses PCIe 3.0, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G moves up to PCIe 4.0, while the Crucial T700 represents PCIe 5.0. At the time of testing, a price survey was conducted. The idea was to see whether a “high-end” latest-generation SSD was a wise investment for a gamer, at a time when soaring costs are a reality.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs vs. the Rest: A Financial Trade-off to Consider… Especially Right Now

The setup is much more interesting. The platform combines a Ryzen 7 9800X3D with a GeForce RTX 5090, paired with just 16 GB of DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM. This amount of memory was intentionally limited to force games to rely more heavily on storage. Measurements were taken directly during gameplay, with graphics settings maxed out, rather than using built-in benchmarks. HWiNFO was used to monitor SSD activity. The system ran on Windows 11 25H2 with the Nvidia 610.62 driver.

The data analysis highlights, above all, the considerable gap between the measured transfer rates and their actual impact on FPS.

Alan Wake 2 is an excellent example. In 4K, the PCIe 5.0 SSD reaches a peak of 5.1 GB/s, while the SATA drive stays around 572 MB/s. Despite nearly nine times the bandwidth, in-game performance remains identical. The maximum transfer rate of an SSD here is like the power of an engine in a car stuck in traffic: the potential is there, but the software doesn’t allow it to be fully utilized. This is largely due to how game engines operate. They primarily use random reads to transfer textures and other resources to memory, whereas the spectacular transfer rates advertised by manufacturers generally correspond to sequential reads. Modern games often work with blocks of 32 or 64 KiB, but with relatively shallow queue depths. As a result, they are rarely able to saturate the bandwidth of even the best NVMe SSDs. Microsoft specifically recommends blocks of at least 32 KiB and enough concurrent requests to effectively take advantage of DirectStorage. Forspoken demonstrates what can happen when this technology is utilized more effectively. Switching from SATA to a PCIe SSD improves its 1% lows by 22% at 1080p, 51% at 1440p, and 39% at 4K. However, there is virtually no difference between PCIe 3.0, PCIe 4.0, and PCIe 5.0. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the other exception. During transitions between portals, PCIe SSDs reduce certain sequences by about two to three seconds and improve the 1% lows by about 38% at 4K. Once these transitions are complete, the difference disappears. Even F1 25, which must continuously load track elements at high speed, peaks at 602 MB/s with the PCIe 5.0 SSD in 4K. This level remains insufficient to truly challenge a SATA SSD. Furthermore, no additional delays in texture rendering, no noticeable pop-ins, and no visual glitches caused by the SATA drive were observed in any of the eleven games.

Conclusion: Game engines, even the most recent ones, do not take full advantage of the transfer speeds of the latest generations of SSDs

In conclusion, purchasing a PCIe 5.0 SSD solely for the purpose of gaining FPS is not currently recommended. Of the eleven games tested, only Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart showed measurable differences between SATA and PCIe, and these gains depend on specific situations. Most importantly, no significant improvement was observed between the three generations of NVMe SSDs tested. A gamer who already owns a good PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 SSD therefore has virtually no reason to upgrade to PCIe 5.0 to improve their frame rate. Even SATA performs surprisingly well during gameplay. This obviously doesn’t make PCIe 5.0 useless. Its high transfer speeds can reduce certain load times, speed up transfers of large files, and provide significant benefits in professional applications. It also offers a more future-proof solution if future games make much more intensive use of DirectStorage and GPU decompression. Today, however, for a setup focused primarily on gaming, it’s better to prioritize the SSD’s capacity, price, endurance, and overall quality. A properly sized NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD is therefore a much more sensible choice. PCIe 5.0 has enormous performance headroom, but current game engines still very rarely tap into that potential.