Eli5 why ssd on consoles is so revolutionary?

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The point is not the invention of SSD, which as you said, has been on PCs for years.

The point is that there are certain new types of SSD that are now so fast, and consoles are so specialized for gaming functions compared to PCs which still have to do a lot of other things, that you can build consoles in a way that the SSD basically functions as a straight, virtually infinite extension of video card RAM / normal RAM.

Among other things, this lets you have a higher number of different textures or effects on screen, or in a given area/level, than you could normally have on a PC without needing to hit a loading screen or doing more complicated pre-fetching logic, etc.

It doesn’t work *perfectly* that way, and the reality is a little more complicated. But from the perspective of an artist or designer, it basically does.

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