We tested the impact of SSD speed on gaming performance in 11 titles & we analyzed from SATA to PCIe 5.0 to see whether upgrading to a faster NVMe SSD would have an impact

Out of all the games tested, only two showed measurable performance differences between SATA and PCIe SSDs: Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

Across all other titles, PCIe SSDs provided no meaningful performance advantage, and there were no observable differences between PCIe generations. In the vast majority of games tested, a SATA SSD delivers comparable performance.

The problem is that SATA SSDs, at least in Europe, are rarily meaningfully cheaper than some cost effective PCIe3.0 or PCIe4.0 SSD. Well at least it was like that before the AI inflation.