Tom's Hardware tested SSDs from SATA to PCIe 5.0 in 11 games - the difference turned out to be much smaller than expected

Tom’s Hardware conducted a set of tests across 11 recent games to see whether SSD speed actually moves the needle in real-world play. The hardware used: GeForce RTX 5090, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and 16 GB DDR5-6000. Drives ranged from SATA through PCIe 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0. All titles were run at max settings and SSD activity was watched with HWiNFO.

The headline result felt counterintuitive: swapping a SATA drive for a much faster NVMe usually didn’t change performance in any meaningful way, and differences between PCIe gens were negligible in most cases.

Only two games showed clear gains: Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Forspoken in particular improved 1% lows when moving to any PCIe SSD — about +22% at 1080p, +51% at 1440p, and +39% at 4K.

Many streaming-heavy games still didn’t lean on the latest SSD bandwidth. Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, Spider-Man 2, DOOM: The Dark Ages, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, 007 First Light, and F1 25 rarely had the drives acting as a bottleneck. Notably, DOOM: The Dark Ages — despite an official NVMe requirement — showed no practical performance gap between SATA and PCIe in these tests.

One useful takeaway: sequential read specs that vendors advertise are poor proxies for in-game behavior. Modern titles tend to use random reads at low queue depths (i.e., rnd reads @ low QD), so PCIe 4.0/5.0 bandwidth often sits unused.

Visually, testers didn’t spot extra pop‑in, texture streaming glitches, or other artifacts when using SATA vs NVMe across the 11 games.

So: for most current titles a SATA SSD can still deliver performance close to pricier NVMe options. There are exceptions (Forspoken being the clearest), but jumping from one NVMe gen to the next — e.g., PCIe 4.0 → PCIe 5.0 — brought almost no perceptible benefit in this set of tests. If you’re buying purely for gaming, weigh the spec sheet against what actually improves gameplay — your mileage may vary.