that’s not really true or accurate — USB3 is basically as fast as SATA and still dramatically faster for random reads/writes
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There was some blog or forum back in the day though that did tests and found out that an SSD made no noticeable performance boost on a PS4 but did on a PS4 Pro.
I’ll try to find it.
EDIT: Apparently the PS4 used an internal SATA 2 to USB adapter, so it couldn’t get anywhere near close to USB 3.1 speeds.
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SATA II would be 3gbit, USB3 would be 5gbit, and SATA III would be 6bit. a 5400rpm spinning drive is more like 1gbit for linear read/writes only, whereas any SSD can easily saturate SATA III. so it’s still at least a 3x speedup especially for OS nav which would use random read/writes more than games would
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The difference between a spinning drive and a SATA III drive is less than the difference than a SATA III drive and the 4x4 nvme drive in a PS5. I guess I shouldn’t have used such a vague metric as “tolerable”, but I guess here we are.
If you’re playing console games in 2025 I just don’t see any reason not to PS5 other than money. Backwards compatability and >10x faster load times is just bonkers.
only for linear disk access!!! playing a game entails relatively linear disk access so this is less relevant than the distinction would be for a PC, but imo one of the worst parts of having an older console normally is the UI interactions and task switching, where this does make a big difference
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I mean yeah this is basically always true of hardware upgrades? Money is a big fucking reason
May as well get a Cray supercomputer, the only reason not to is money
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I’m pretty sure exclusives were important bc of the lack of back compat?
That’s why Nintendo handhelds really really tried to maintain at least one generation of back compat even if the game cartridge was different, right?
Yeah but like… if money was no object… you would just get every new console, because… why not. It’s not like buying the new one deletes the old one.
That time I kicked Natasha in the face and she got mad at me. She was my first video game crush and I didn’t mean to!
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Yeah I mean but also I think we’re talking about different things.
Exclusives used to mean something bc getting into a next gen console meant losing out on your last gen stuff - so you needed that game reason to move forward. The PS5 makes your already existing (and great) PS4 library a much, much better experience. So exclusives don’t seem to matter as much.
Maybe I’m just ssd pilled but I just can’t wait around for things to load. MHWorld on PS5 just convinced me that it’s just… yeah. Just better for what is essentially an insignificant amount for a hobby I spend like hundreds of hours on already.
Depends on your definition of tolerable, but when I bought Bloodborne on launch day, most PS4s experienced 30-second load times between levels, but my PS4 modded with a basic SSD had ~10-15 second load times.
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The PS5 is basically a PS4 pro
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Now that we’re in a All Games Are Downloaded From The Internet era it would be nice if you could just open up a game you haven’t downloaded that’s in your library, and look at your stats in the game from the last time you played. Achievements are functionally used for that purpose, but they’re such a a poorly implemented hack even at the best of times.
And on that chain of thought, it would really be nice if games could have tool to hand craft and deliver save files to friends and followers. The only reason this won’t be done at a system level is because those damn hacky rusted achievements have monetary value now, and save files are sacrosanct.
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If I could download particular saves, I would have played through so many more games by now.
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steam actually does have the backend to record statistics like this because of how the leaderboards and achievement counters work. i wish i could think of any of them of the top of my head but i’ve played some steam games with bizarrely detailed statistics you can only see in steam achievement manager
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the Counter-Strike games have a custom stats page like that, not sure I own any others that do
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Yeah, tf2, dods and css do too and those pages are public facing. I’m pretty sure that stuff is there because Valve used it but I don’t really see many other devs do it or if they do it’s on the backend only
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something is so scary about xbox’s new philosophy of being everything and nothing at once. the true identity, the unique beauty of xbox was its hardware being hackable and allowing weird shit to just fly under the radar. the xbox indie game arcade is one of the most insane cathedrals ever built by games. the xbox was never about being a headset wearing gamer. its about Xbox Media Player, bloody checkers, Avatar Boogie 2, smilebit games, retroarch and mugen on series s|x dev mode
now the future of xbox is Nothing. theres nothing to jam. timothee chalamets earliest creative outlet was customizing 360 controllers. phil Spencer would have him killed for that now. The xbox does not exist
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it could be scary but actually xbox is trying to help the bargain gamers out there. dont even worry about selling that thing for a switch 2, theres no xbox 
heck, a steam deck is an xbox 
. Btw, your console is now worth $100 more to resell and we have fired every person we had make content for it
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