NVMe Gen5 real-world test — when does the bandwidth actually matter?

Game loads, content workflows, and the one workload where Gen5 is dramatically faster than Gen4. Spoiler: it is not gaming.

NVMe Gen5 real-world test results: game loads on Cyberpunk 2077, Star Citizen 4.0, MSFS 2026 are within margin of error vs Gen4. Gen5 is wasted on gaming. Content workflows show real differences — DaVinci Resolve project loads are 38% faster, Blender BVH cache builds are 22% faster.

The one workload where Gen5 is dramatically faster: AI model loading. A 70B-parameter LLM weight file load is 2.4x faster on Gen5 vs Gen4. If you do local model inference, the upgrade math is clean. If you only game, save the money for DDR5.