Normal consumer workloads are heavily biased towards 4K random performance (especially read). Sequential performance is largely inconsequential, both because it's rare (how often do you really suck in a full 20+ GB file at a single go?) and because consumer SSDs are fast enough at sequential performance that it's not really a bottleneck. 500 MB/s sustained is really fast enough for most users.
Streaming video from the internet does not use the SSD at all, and a high-quality 1080p video file is maybe 5-10 MB/s of bitrate, you can easily pull that off a spinning HDD that was manufactured 20 years ago.
Video editing at 4K or 8K is one of the few use-cases where NVMe's sequential performance does provide a big benefit... assuming you are not editing using proxies.
Optane's QD=1 random-4K performance does present an opportunity for big speedups on consumer use-cases. But Intel really has to get the prices down if they want to see consumer adoption, right now there is an obvious benefit to cheaper SATA SSDs that allow you to get more data off spinning-rust drives vs a smaller, massively expensive Optane drive (even if it is incredibly fast).
I'm a little doubtful, on the basis that it would take HDD users about three minutes to load into the game (probably 4, by the time you start doing something with all those assets). I know HDDs are slow, but 4 minutes of loading is extremely excessive by any standard.
Also, on PS3 it runs in less than 256 MB of RAM... where is it loading these assets to? Most games have RAM consumption on the order of 4-8 GB in most situations, not all of that is assets, and not all of that is read sequentially.
Planetside 2 would take 4+ minutes to fully load on the HDD before I upgraded to an SSD. Around 40 seconds on the SATA SSD. Haven't tried it on the m.2 yet.
Much less. Most gamers don't have 20GB VRAM GPUs. The game doesn't use 20GB RAM either, I think around 6-8 GB. So there's just nowhere to keep 20GB of loaded assets.
Streaming video from the internet does not use the SSD at all, and a high-quality 1080p video file is maybe 5-10 MB/s of bitrate, you can easily pull that off a spinning HDD that was manufactured 20 years ago.
Video editing at 4K or 8K is one of the few use-cases where NVMe's sequential performance does provide a big benefit... assuming you are not editing using proxies.
Optane's QD=1 random-4K performance does present an opportunity for big speedups on consumer use-cases. But Intel really has to get the prices down if they want to see consumer adoption, right now there is an obvious benefit to cheaper SATA SSDs that allow you to get more data off spinning-rust drives vs a smaller, massively expensive Optane drive (even if it is incredibly fast).