To be fair, it's not that different from the days of CD drives. I've just had a look at my boxed copy of Discworld Noire says it needs an 8x CD drive (required, not recommended). Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 2 says it needs a 2x CD drive (required, not recommended)

Would these games run on a 1x (Grand Prix 2) or a 4x (Discworld Noire)? Yes.

Were the loading times and (e.g.) video and sound streaming in the games also garbage below the "required" CD drive? Also yes.

Oh modern Windows must absolutely be run off of an SSD. Only a masochist would run Windows 10/11 off of an HDD.
Yes, I get that some people may be unable to afford an SSD, but then those people probably can't afford the game itself either.

If it's a desktop, you can probably fit like 6+ drives in there, so an SSD would be an addition, not a replacement to the HDD anyway.

Oh, maybe I should clarify how I found 1TB HDD and SSD prices.
I was lazy and checked two shops only, one in Germany, I think that was Mindfactory.de, and one in Finland, Verkkokauppa.com.
I disregarded open boxes, used drives and refurbished models.

Not surprised if the price situation is different in other shops. I should not have made such a broad sweeping statement without exstensive research.

SSD prices, best storage space/£€$ sizes seem to be 1-2TB and then tiiiiny SSDs where some shops still have those in stock. Hard disks you want at least 2TB for the price per GB to be decent.

I see nothing wrong with having an SSD and an HDD and you put the OS and the games that benefit the most from it on the SSD.

New games have always pushed us to upgrade our PCs. An upgrade that costs as much as a game is nothing compared to the eye watering prices of graphics cards, processors and motherboards. You the player be the judge whether the performance on an HDD is acceptable or not. Everyone who is not rich so better learn to live with limitations. I would also love a new GPU but turn my settings down and live with what I have.

It's surprising to me that there even are users who launch new AAA games from HDDs, or wonder about the fact that SSD is required. What's next? Complaints that game stutters like crazy when loaded from usb2.0 thumbstick? I can't even imagine how it feels like to run an OS like win10/11 with messy updates on the HDD. Has to be very unresponsive and sluggish. Last time I had windows on a hdd was with XPsp3 and that was a while ago.

In the world of hardcore flight simulators like DCS, SSDs are a requirement for like a decade now due to how the terrain and huge textures are streamed on the fly and the bandwidth and the seek-time of HDDs simply isn't enough anymore. It caused huge stutters, long load time or annoying pop-ins in the best case scenario, missing/corrupt textures and crashes in the worst case.

For budget oriented users, find a reasonably priced ssd even if it is not by far the largest/fastest drive out there, install your new mainstream game and enjoy. When you are done with it, uninstall and install the next thing. Keep oldies/backups on your hdd. Easily the best price:performance upgrade you can do, other than debloating your os.

Same here, at first I was like "wtf, really?" even though I've been using ssd to run my games for a few years now, alongside my hdd to store other stuff.

But people here in this thread make sense. I kinda understand now why companies would slap ssd requirement on their newer games.

THIS.

Always good to have a big HDD with tons of space, whether external or internal. One can always shift games onto those to the Non-SSD's for storage, when done w/ a game.

Need to reinstall, then send it back to the SSD's if need be...if you wanna replay a game or you bought DLC's for it or something.

If you got internal-style HDD's like me and no more space inside of the PC itself - well, you can always hook 'em up to a USB-based hard drive dock like a Syba Dock.

Of course, SSD's are great for speed purposes for loads, loading textures in games quicker, and even archiving - so if a SSD's on sale for a good price and it's got 1TB or more....yeah, get one.

One can never have enough HDD's and/or SSD's, IMHO.

If a game takes a while to install and start and new chapters take long to start, that is not so bad but stuttering when you move around in games with large open maps, ugh.

I agree with you. That's why it's not bad to have SSD, and HDD for gaming. Just curious what game are you talking about? I had that issue with few games. Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem was one of them.

Stuttering while moving around? RuneScape (huge map) comes to mind but there was another too but I just cannot seem to remember the title now.

64 GB RAM? Wow... this is same as my current PC!

The speed of a CD drive was pretty much fixed, so it was easy to be measured.

SSDs on the other hand got a pretty huge range of performance, so the term SSD is not a huge limitation... as long as you can get the worst SSD available (even cheap if you use a bad performing SSD).

Modern games are tuned in a way that they may stream data from the SSD a lot, kinda the way consoles are working. This way RAM can be used the most effective way possible and it can save up on RAM. If the storage is way to slow it can result into stuttering and sometimes even freeze as the game engine, waiting for the required data, is kinda becoming "corrupted".

However, there is some games storing as much of data inside the available RAM as possible, this way the game is not bound to the SSDs streaming capabilities so much and the RAM is even faster than the SSD. In theory, if a system got 64 GB or even more of RAM almost the entire game can basically be streamed directly from RAM which should create the fastest loading times. However, the fastest SSDs nowadays, with compression included (comparable to how a PS5 is working) are extremely fast and not much slower than a "RAM drive", if used properly. A lot of RAM can be very expensive, so it is not a cheap approach and not the focus for mainstream-systems.

Almost no one except the crazy and old school ones are buying HDDs lower than 5 TB anymore. If people want to archive data and are not cheap: 20 TB and more is the new "HDD-Standard". Because a 20 TB HDD got the same price comparable to a PCIE 4.0 SSD with 4 TB, so the HDD got 5 times more space for the same price.

However, if it comes to speed for editing or gaming, the HDDs are nowadays a thing of the past and gone. A HDD is nowadays usually used for archiving huge amount of data (simply backup), so the new role is usually "data-center", not work or game drive.

Time means money, no one can afford to lose time... so in business more speed means more money, so even a high price is worth it, The most valuable thing we have is not money, its our precious and limited time.

To a gamer, it may not matter that much "losing time"; but the bad peformance (stuttering, freezing) may still hurt the gaming experience, at least for most of the gamers, You will always find someone even having joy in term the PC is about to explode... who knows; as long as he can save up his precious money doing so. No offense to those simply unable to afford it, but.... in my mind some small and bad performing SSDs are nowadays almost for free. Simply get a weak performing SSD in the 1-2 TB range for 50-100 USD, and you are good to go. The archive using Setups can be stored on a HDD; just the installs should be stored on the SSD.

Considering the speed, the currently best performing data-center-HDD, Toshiba MG 10, got about 1-3 MB/s random 4k file read (there is not any HDD exceeding it) which can not really become improved by using RAID because in a RAID setup the latency will increase. However, as long as the latency is sufficient for the task (simply IOPS in a simplified manner) it can increase the bandwidth with a good margin. Usually it will affect the sequential and huge file performance a good deal, yet, it will still struggle a lot with small files. As a data-center the issue is not huge because the files should be shaped in a way (for example Setup files) that will not shatter the data in way to much small pieces, thus allowing for a steady and good HDD performance as a way of backup.

However, even huge sequential file read is about 20 times faster on a good performing PCIE 4.0 SSD; no RAID that can practically or realistically be build for a "usual consumer" will come close to that. Maybe somewhere in a tech-labor it might exist but it will not be any cheaper than the best PCIE 5.0 SSD including the required platform.

Yea, the direct storage thing going on in Forspoken is quite amazing.

And of course..... 64 mb's :p talking about SHOGUN eh... '99 release date i believe. There was literally no need to go all librarian on the innocent here!!

So, he had 1000x lesser RAM? The advancement is truly crazy.

But i am not sure if we make the same advancement the next 25 years anymore because we are now kinda slowly reaching some technical challenges which are hard to tackle. Even the reliability has decreased as far as i can experience. Nowadays, 5 year can already be the limit when it comes to many of the chips, beyond that they may degrade to much and slowly become unstable. The structures are simply almost to small and the heat very hard to be removed on such a small die. So we have the biggest challenges ever, but at least a supreme performance compared to the good old days.

Maybe we may not even experience the step up from 64 bit to 128 bit anymore because the addressable RAM on 64 bit should be 16 Exabyte, which is about 1 million times the amount of 16 TB; and 16 TB is still 1000x more than the RAM we got today on "consumer systems".. some crazy number crunching here.

If i look at the 128 bit possibilities, it just gets insane and even a math freak may freak out trying to calculate it.

https:/---/www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5LHeYu0JK4

Indeed, technically the current 64 bit OS are limited to around 24 TB (server purpose, home users no need to worry, Windows 10/11 PRO only can address 2 TB) although for "server use" they may even have some special solution allowing for even more. Still, i think no OS currently is able to address the full 64 bit limit and it will stay like this for a veeeery long time.

Although i am almost sure, if some of the worlds most greedy people got the same amount of coins a 128 bit OS is able to address inside a RAM, they may still spell out that they are "to poor" and have to save up on tax bills; because greed will rarely ever stop.

Sounds like lazy ass optimization. You put all the textures in the same general location so it doesn't have to look far for them, it shouldn't be an issue. An option to pre-cache the textures in memory would take the problem away, assuming they aren't tens of gigabytes in size, which they may be in today's age of ever-expanding game-sizes for absolutely no good reason.

It's been said as computers got better and faster, companies corporations and game devs will take lazier and lazier routes. Why optimize textures and music files to fit on a DVD or two? Nah we can just say it's a 60Gb+ game and call it good!