PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been around since 2023, and today, it seems like almost everybody wants to upgrade just to improve their loading times a little bit. It makes sense when you see that the advertised speeds are twice as fast as those of older Gen 4 drives. That kind of jump should translate into noticeably faster loading times and snappier performance in open-world games, but that’s not how it actually plays out. In reality, the gains from raw throughput hit a wall much sooner than most people realize.