Not for gaming specifically, per every published measurement we could cite. The Verge's own five-game test found gaps of 0.44 to 1.06 seconds against a Gen4 drive, several titles showing no measurable difference at all - which is why PCWorld built an entire piece around the same data titled "why PC gamers shouldn't waste money on a PCIe 5.0 SSD." Gen5 also carries documented costs of its own: measurably more heat, and on many boards, a lane-sharing hit to your graphics slot.
The Verge's own tested figures (five games, a Gen4 Samsung 980 Pro against two Gen5 drives): Counter-Strike showed a 0.44-second gap, Cyberpunk 2077 a 1.06-second gap, and several titles were, in The Verge's own words, "practically identical." A Forspoken DirectStorage benchmark - the title built specifically to exercise fast storage - reported by Tom's Hardware found the real jump sits between Gen3 and Gen4, not Gen4 and Gen5.
Against that, Gen5's documented costs: Ars Technica, citing Tom's Hardware's own power measurements, reported a Gen5 drive averaging 6.74W against 3.97-4.87W for Gen4 drives tested alongside it. Tom's Hardware separately measured a Gen5 drive throttling to roughly a third of its heatsinked write speed without adequate cooling. See our full cited case at /gaming-ssd/gen4-vs-gen5.
Not nobody. The sources cited above frame Gen5's 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 library is closer to the workload these sources describe Gen5 actually helping.
That distinction matters because it is not the same question as "will my games load faster." Sustained throughput is what matters when a single operation runs long enough for the drive to settle into its steady-state write behavior - copying hundreds of gigabytes of raw footage, compiling a large codebase repeatedly, or maintaining a library that gets reshuffled weekly rather than installed once and played for months. A typical gaming session's storage demand looks nothing like that: a load screen is a short, bursty read, over in seconds regardless of which generation serves it, which is exactly why the cited game-load testing above found so little daylight between the two generations.
The Gen5 premium is not abstract - our own gaming SSD hub computes it live, capacity by capacity, as a same-money trade: at every budget tier we track, the cheapest Gen4 option currently buys meaningfully more capacity than the cheapest Gen5 option for the same money. That is a price fact, not a performance argument, and it sits on the other side of the ledger from the documented costs above (extra heat, possible lane sharing) that Gen5 carries on top of the sticker price.
Put the two together and the case tightens rather than loosens: a buyer paying more for Gen5, then losing capacity headroom to that premium, then potentially losing graphics-card bandwidth to lane sharing, is paying three separate costs for a load-time difference the cited testing measured in fractions of a second.
This is a verdict about gaming specifically, built on the testing available as of this page's freshness date - not a permanent statement about the technology. If a future game genuinely saturates a Gen4 drive's bandwidth ceiling in a way current titles don't, or if a new round of published testing finds a larger gap than the sources cited here measured, that would be new evidence this page would need to account for. We are not aware of either as of writing, which is why the verdict above is NO rather than IT DEPENDS - but the honest caveat belongs on the page rather than left implicit.
What would not change the verdict: a manufacturer's own marketing claim about Gen5's gaming benefits, published without independent testing behind it. That is precisely the category of claim this page exists to check against actual measurement rather than repeat.
This verdict is scoped to gaming specifically, and deliberately says nothing about whether Gen5 is worth it for a non-gaming workload - content creation, large-scale file management, or any sustained-throughput task the cited sources above associate with Gen5's real strength. A build that mixes gaming with heavy video work or asset-library management is answering a different, broader question than this page covers, and the verdict above should not be read as advice against Gen5 in that broader context - only against buying it specifically because you expect it to change how your games load.
We also aren't answering whether Gen5 is a reasonable choice for future-proofing a build against titles that don't exist yet. That's a forecast, and this page doesn't make one - it answers what the evidence available today actually shows, for the games available today. If that changes, this page changes with it.
Sorted by $/GB, cheapest first. No speed column - see the doctrine note on the gaming SSD hub.
| 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 |
| Fikwot FX910 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD for PS5&PC | Gen4 | 4TB | DRAM | $476.98 | $0.119 | Buy Now |
| Vansuny 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD,M2 2280 PCIe 4.0 Internal Solid State Drive | Gen4 | 2TB | DRAM | $248.39 | $0.124 | Buy Now |
| BUFFALO External SSD 2TB | - | 2TB | DRAM | $249.99 | $0.125 | Buy Now |
| Fikwot FX660 4TB M.2 SSD | Gen4 | 4TB | DRAM | $509.99 | $0.127 | Buy Now |
| WD Blue SN5100 2TB NVMe SSD | Gen4 | 2TB | DRAM | $256.01 | $0.128 | Buy Now |
| fanxiang S660 PCIe 4.0 4TB NVMe M.2 SSD for PS5 with Heatsink | Gen4 | 4TB | DRAM | $529.99 | $0.132 | Buy Now |
| fanxiang 4TB NVMe SSD PCIe Gen 4 Gaming SSD for PS5 | Gen4 | 4TB | DRAM | $529.99 | $0.132 | Buy Now |
| Samsung SSD 990 EVO Plus 4TB | Gen4 | 4TB | - | $529.99 | $0.132 | Buy Now |
| Fikwot FX910 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD for PS5&PC | Gen4 | 2TB | DRAM | $269.99 | $0.135 | Buy Now |
| Crucial P310 2280 4TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe Gaming PS5 SSD with Heatsink | Gen4 | 4TB | DRAM | $544.00 | $0.136 | Buy Now |
| Fikwot FN990 4TB NVMe SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4x4 with RGB Heatsink | Gen4 | 4TB | DRAM | $549.99 | $0.137 | Buy Now |
On this evidence, the cheaper Gen4 tier at the capacity your library needs - see the live same-money trade on our gaming SSD hub for what the Gen5 premium costs in capacity terms today.
No - it means it is not the lever that moves game-load times, per every source we could cite. Gen5's real, documented strength sits in sustained throughput work, which is a different buyer question than "will my games load faster."
On many current boards, yes, if the Gen5 M.2 slot is CPU-attached - ASUS's own documentation confirms this for a named example board. Your board's own manual is the authority; see /gaming-ssd/gen4-vs-gen5 for the citation.
Not per the one DirectStorage-specific benchmark we could cite - see /gaming-ssd/directstorage for the full picture, including what Microsoft's own documentation actually requires (it does not state a PCIe-generation minimum).
The published power and throttling measurements we cite are specific to Gen5 - see our thermals page for the full picture, including the live fitted-vs-bare heatsink price comparison.
Streaming and content-creation work that runs alongside gaming - large video capture, asset-heavy modding libraries reshuffled often - sits closer to the sustained-throughput workload the cited sources describe Gen5 actually helping, as distinct from game loading itself.