Eli5 why ssd on consoles is so revolutionary?

Question

I was wondering, games for the current consoles are being presented as being able to create a whole new experience of gaming because of ssd, but ssd has been on pcs for a long time and there was no such a thing as new way to experience games besides short screen loading times. While on consoles, ratchet and clank introduce new dimensions, ff XVI shows different phases of combat and more, and other games also show all kind of new experiences because of the ssd

In: 7

Answer 1

So in previous disc-based console generations, when a graphical asset was needed, the game would send a request to the underlying OS to retrieve the asset from the media then load it into RAM.. This was a slow process when compared to how fast RAM and GPUs operate.

Also, when data is stored on a rotating disk (hard drive or optical) the time it takes for the disk to spin-up, and locate the data is also a slow process. To combat the seeking, sometimes developers would craft data layouts with multiple copies of assets spread across the media so that seek times could be reduced. The multiple copies of assets also add bloat to the overall size of a game.

The current gen consoles address both the speed and bloat issues by being extremely fast (not as fast as modern RAM, but faster than hard disks, optical media, and even faster than previous types of SATA solid-state drives), and allowing the GPU to directly access assets from storage instead of passing requests through the OS. This extreme jump in storage access speed allows not only for better performance, but SSDs remove seek times from the equation which means the games no longer need multiple copies of assets which can make them smaller, if properly mastered..

Previous generation consoles could use SATA SSD’s which address access speeds, but since SSDs were not the default drive type, developers couldn’t really leverage any performance ‘tweak’ which relied on SSD speeds of the time.

Interesting to note, that the storage access method used in Xbox Series X was recently ported to Windows 10/11. It’s called DirectStorage and is supposedly being leveraged by some developers, but because there’s no guarantee of what type of drives people have in their computers, the mileage varies.