That portal transition effect likely hides the load screen - it's still there, nearly half a second, it's just shorter. This is comparable to current load times with an SSD on PC!
Until all (or most) PCs are equiped with high performance NVMe SSDs, those kind of features won't be possible other than on consoles.
Also, the PS5's architecture is optimized end-to-end for faster loading times, it's more than just faster storage.
No one is going to design gameplay for a special hardware constraint unless the gameplay can degrade to lowest common denominator. Which of course, makes needing the special hardware optional.
There are few exceptions to this rule. Some platforms pay for exclusivity, effectively covering lost revenue from other platform streams. And Nintendo alone makes a profit on hardware, so they can produce platform exclusives to drive addtl revenue from hardware sales.
Special SSD pipelines, while PC gamers are still using 7200rpm HDDs, are about as appetizing to game devs as waggle controls or Kinect sensor games.
The new consoles include these SSDs not to make something possible now, but to remain relevant in ten years time when PCs may have caught up.
This is the game industry's equivalent of supporting IE 11.
I’m impressed with the tech but it seems like the end goal was to keep console manufacturing costs down. Now it’s being sold as a gameplay-enabling feature and reason to upgrade. The upgrade only looks impressive because the PS4 by now is so old.
Relying on cheap SSD storage instead of expensive RAM, and relieving CPU effort via the storage streaming chip is a cool trick. But that tech alone enables absolutely zero gameplay experiences.
It hasn’t been proven to us whether or not a typical gaming PC’s increased memory just overcomes the need for this tech. If I have a PC with 32GB of RAM and my GPU has 8GB of its own RAM I’m not convinced that a PS5 with 16GB of shared RAM will do anything that the PC setup can’t.
Desktop computers eclipsed the performance of current consoles gen consoles so long ago that I am still suspect: my prediction is that a decent mid-range gaming computer is completely capable of playing any PS5 game.
Finally the gamer gets low/no loading which is nice to have.
But also it becomes much easier for Game Developers.
I'm still looking forward to it, after all, it is an huge improvement to current gen, independently of how long it took and how old the ps4 is.
And i'm not 100% sure if this doesn't affect PC Gaming. After all Direct Storage will hopefully fix small SSD Issues you also have on PC right now.
Takes a little imagination, but when you look at the ingenuity of something like F-Zero on SNES (2.5d graphics), it’s pretty clear that your typical tech really can used in amazing ways.
Obviously its graphical detail is nowhere what was shown here, but the precedent exists, and the only thing that would be different is the geomotry and texture res.