Hardware-accelerated IO in consoles coming to PC
The prevalence and performance of SSDs There's been a lot of hype around SSDs for nearly a decade now, touting anything from 10x to 100x the read and write speeds as seen on the spinning rust hard drives of old. SSDs have become nearly ubiquitous on the modern PC for several reasons including tighter boot and load times, an improvement in overall system responsiveness, and an increasing reduction in cost. However, the real-world performance improvements we see from SSDs over their Hard Drive counterparts is often nowhere near what is expected. Not only do almost all even recent AAA titles run fine off a Hard Drive, games rarely load more than twice as fast when we install them on an SSD. Even more concerning is the often imperceptible difference installing an extremely fast -- and far more expensive -- NVMe SSD makes. But why is this? Why do games take so long to load even when our storage can clearly make up the difference. Note: If you're already well versed in HDD a...