[wltprgm]

It just means fast loading assets, so if SSD becomes RAM one day, anything interesting at all? Same goes for ray tracing, looking more realistic with control of light...

Nothing special here, no need to hype

edit:

You know what really makes a difference?

You playing an VR open world game where every single artificial intelligence NPC does thing in every possible way leading to different gameplay and outcome. And you as a character can just grab anything you want and throw at any monster that you just CREATED in that game itself

Or you can control that monster that you created in your own way, time travelling to another open world game saying hello to your friend playing in his house back and forth

Together with some AI NPC friends you made in that game, you live in that dimensional space forever as you want even after your human body dies, your conscious stays in electronic form

Referencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Art_Online:_Alicization

[hyperpallium]

"SSD as RAM" is a good way to reason about it.

It means you have a lot more RAM, e.g. thus, PS5 has 825GB of RAM. RAM in the TB, soon.

Would a couple of orders of magnitude make a difference? If software is designed with terabytes of RAM in mind?

[wtallis]

"SSD as RAM" is a bad way to think about it. What you need to realize is that the standard for games has been to treat RAM as storage, because the hard drive was too slow to use for loading data on the fly. SSDs mean games can use storage as storage, but they still have to fit the working set in RAM.

[acidbaseextract]

And that's really what the hype is about in terms of better game experiences on these new systems — we should be able to have larger working sets because you don't need to waste RAM as storage.

To get specific about what this enables, I think we will see many more indie games with great looking graphics. The combination of high res asset scans, automatic resolution scaling, automatic texture compression, generally less tight performance budgets that don't need teams to do optimization work (next gen consoles), and a financial model around tools to take advantage of all of this (Unreal + Quixel as the leader here) should make this next generation of games pretty awesome.