Published testing consistently finds Gen5 close to indistinguishable from Gen4 in actual game load times - The Verge measured gaps of 0.44 to 1.06 seconds across five games, and a Forspoken DirectStorage benchmark reported by Tom's Hardware found the real jump sits between Gen3 and Gen4, not Gen4 and Gen5. Gen5 carries documented costs of its own: more heat (measured), and on many boards, a lane-sharing hit to your graphics slot (documented by ASUS). This page states what was measured and what the money actually buys at each generation, live.
Updated · measurements cited from publications dated 2023-2024, checked 16 September 2026
Game load times (seconds): CS:GO - 35.46s on a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro (Gen4) vs 35.02s on a 2TB Crucial T700 (Gen5), a 0.44-second gap. Cyberpunk 2077 - 35.00s on the 980 Pro vs 33.94s on a 2TB Seagate FireCuda 540 (Gen5), a 1.06-second gap. Gears 5 showed the largest gap (56.89s vs 52.67-52.9s); Returnal and CS:GO were within a second either way.
Test rig: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, MSI MEG X670E ACE, 32GB DDR5-6000. Five games tested (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Cyberpunk 2077, Gears 5, Returnal, CS:GO) across a Gen4 Samsung 980 Pro and two Gen5 drives (Crucial T700, Seagate FireCuda 540). The Verge's own conclusion: "I saw this play out clearly in game loading times, where it was difficult to spot an improvement with the Gen 5 drives... in games like Returnal, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Cyberpunk 2077, the results were practically identical."
Read the source →"Why PC gamers shouldn't waste money on a PCIe 5.0 SSD" - citing The Verge's own game-load testing (see above) as its evidence for gaming, while noting Gen5's real advantage sits in sequential-throughput-bound tasks, not game loading.
PCWorld's own framing piece, built on The Verge's independently-conducted game-load data (PCWorld credits it directly: "a test carried out by our friends over at The Verge") rather than PCWorld's own bench.
Read the source →"It looks like the difference between PCIe Gen3 and PCIe Gen5 drives may not be that significant with DirectStorage, according to load times from a built-in Forspoken benchmark." The full Gen3-to-Gen5 gap across the benchmark totalled roughly three seconds; Gen4-vs-Gen5 specifically showed no meaningful difference.
Reporting on a Forspoken (a game with a built-in DirectStorage benchmark) test by YouTube channel Compusemble, comparing a PCIe Gen3 Adata XPG SX8200 Pro against a Gen5 Phison E26-based reference SSD. Corroborated independently the same week by Guru3d, HotHardware and NotebookCheck, all describing the same underlying benchmark and reaching the same conclusion: the Gen3-to-Gen4 step matters far more than Gen4-to-Gen5 for this specific DirectStorage title.
Read the source →Put together, these three sources describe the same shape from three different angles: a general five-game test (The Verge), a synthesis piece built on that same data (PCWorld), and a DirectStorage-specific benchmark in a title built to exercise fast storage (Tom's Hardware, reporting on Forspoken). All three land on the same conclusion using their own numbers - the Gen3-to-Gen4 jump is where load-time improvement actually lives, and Gen4-to- Gen5 does not repeat it.
What a fixed budget buys as capacity, split by generation, computed from today's cheapest in-stock $/GB - a price fact, not a performance argument.
| Budget | Gen4 buys | Gen5 buys |
|---|---|---|
| $100 | ~909GB | ~571GB |
| $150 | ~1.4TB | ~857GB |
| $200 | ~1.8TB | ~1.1TB |
| $300 | ~2.7TB | ~1.7TB |
At every budget tier, Gen4 buys meaningfully more capacity for the same money - the gap the cited testing above says does not show up in your loading screens.
Two documented costs sit on the other side of the ledger, neither of them a performance claim of ours:
Heat. Ars Technica, citing Tom's Hardware's own power measurements, reported a Gen5 drive averaging 6.74W during a sustained copy test against 3.97-4.87W for the Gen4 drives measured alongside it - published, attributed figures, not ours. Tom's Hardware separately measured a Gen5 drive throttling hard without a heatsink. See our thermals page for the full cited picture and the live fitted-vs-bare heatsink cost.
Lane sharing. ASUS's own support documentation states that certain CPU-attached M.2 slots on current boards share bandwidth with the primary graphics slot - populating the Gen5 M.2 slot on the ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO, ASUS's own named example, drops the PCIe 5.0 x16 graphics slot to x8. This is not universal to every board, and it is not ours to answer for your specific motherboard: the board manual is the authority on which of its M.2 slots share lanes with which PCIe slot. Check it before assuming a Gen5 upgrade is free.
Following the sources rather than the newer label: for game loading specifically, the cited testing does not show a Gen5 advantage large enough to offset its price premium, its documented extra heat, or a possible lane-sharing cost on your specific board. The cheaper Gen4 tier is, on this evidence, frequently the better buy for a gaming build - and the same-money trade above shows exactly what that premium costs in capacity terms today.
That is not a blanket case against Gen5. The sources cited above frame its real advantage precisely: sustained sequential throughput and large asset libraries - big, continuous transfers rather than the load screens a gaming session actually waits through. A buyer moving huge creative-work files or maintaining an enormous, frequently-reshuffled game library is closer to the workload these sources describe Gen5 actually helping. A buyer asking only "will my games load faster" is, per the same sources, better served by the cheaper tier.
| Drive | Gen | Capacity | Cache | Price | $/GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fikwot FX910 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD for PS5&PC | Gen4 | 1TB | DRAM | $152.99 | $0.153 | Buy Now |
| Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 1TB | Gen5 | 1TB | DRAM | $229.76 | $0.230 | Buy Now |
| Drive | Gen | Capacity | Cache | Price | $/GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corsair MP600 CORE XT 2TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD | Gen4 | 2TB | DRAM | $219.50 | $0.110 | Buy Now |
| Crucial P510 PCIe Gen5 NVMe 2TB SSD | Gen5 | 2TB | DRAM | $369.95 | $0.185 | Buy Now |
| Drive | Gen | Capacity | Cache | Price | $/GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fikwot FX910 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD for PS5&PC | Gen4 | 4TB | DRAM | $476.98 | $0.119 | Buy Now |
| WD WD_Black SN8100 4TB NVMe SSD | Gen5 | 4TB | DRAM | $699.99 | $0.175 | Buy Now |
| Drive | Gen | Capacity | Cache | Price | $/GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WD WD_Black SN850X 8TB NVMe SSD with Heatsink | Gen4 | 8TB | DRAM | $1337.65 | $0.167 | Buy Now |
| Samsung SSD 9100 PRO w/Heatsink 8TB | Gen5 | 8TB | DRAM | $1928.00 | $0.241 | Buy Now |
Thermals and heatsink economics · DirectStorage, what it actually requires · How much capacity you actually need · Back to the gaming SSD hub
In sequential-throughput maker specs, yes - Gen5 drives are rated well above Gen4 (both figures are maker claims, not our measurement). In actual game load times, published independent testing finds the two generations close to indistinguishable. See the cited measurements above - this page states what was measured, not a speed ranking of ours.
On many current motherboards, yes, if the Gen5 M.2 slot shares lanes with the primary graphics slot. ASUS's own support documentation states plainly that populating certain CPU-attached M.2 slots drops the PCIe 5.0 x16 graphics slot to x8 electrical, using the ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO as its own example. Your board's own manual - not this page - is the final authority on which of its M.2 slots share lanes with which PCIe slot; check it before you buy either component with an assumption about the other.
No, per the cited testing. Tom's Hardware's reporting on a Forspoken DirectStorage benchmark found the full gap between Gen3 and Gen5 totalled roughly three seconds across the whole benchmark, with Gen4 and Gen5 essentially tied. See our DirectStorage page for Microsoft's own documented requirements, which name NVMe storage broadly rather than a specific PCIe generation.
Published testing says yes, measurably. Ars Technica, citing Tom's Hardware's own power measurements, reported a Gen5 drive averaging 6.74W during a sustained copy test against 3.97-4.87W for the Gen4 drives tested alongside it. See our thermals page for the full cited picture, including documented throttling behavior without adequate cooling.
The cited sources name a real use case: sustained sequential work and large asset libraries, not game loading. The Verge's testing found essentially no game-load advantage; the value case for Gen5 in the sources we cite is about big, sustained transfers - asset-heavy creative work, very large file operations - not the load screens a typical gaming session actually waits through.
Following the numbers rather than the newer label: for game loading specifically, the cited testing does not show a Gen5 advantage large enough to justify its price premium in most builds. The live same-money trade below shows what that premium actually costs in capacity terms today - often a full generation of capacity headroom, for a load-time difference the sources measured in fractions of a second.