From what i read they throttle down pretty hard on their read/write specs. With that said its still better option over a Sata SSD.
Personally im waiting for PCIe 4.0 m.2 slots to become standardized before upgrading.
Irrelevant to gamers. When Linus looked into this with testing, for example, the throttling was observed only after half the drive was full, and after ~5-6min of sustained usage in his HD Tune
write synthetic. The same truth showed up in an actual disk transfer job. Game loads aren't protracted write/rendering jobs with the data being written for those periods of time. It's a temporary read job that takes a few minutes at most. In between loads the drive has time to rebuild the cache.
You'll see dilettantes all over the web parrot negativity at these SSDs when they didn't take time to inspect or understand anything beyond the title of the video, "Erhmagerd, SSD technology is getting worse!" One of the most aggravating examples for me have been users who smear DRAM-less drives while insisting they have terrible endurance when, from practical point of view, those endurance ratings on the drives they slander are beyond a 3-year warranty window if they were writing some 36GB of information every day, for example. That's a fresh game installation every day for three years. These drives also have cache that is rebuilt in between the short, temporary game loads.
Nobody has benefited more than Samsung. They've commanded stupid premiums by virtue of the fact thousands of customers are paying up to buy their drives when these are the users who need those drives. Long, long gone are the days when the Samsung 850 EVO and Samsung 860 EVO were winning bang-for-your-buck value metrics. Nice while it lasted, but frankly, today's NVMe-class SSD prices are much nicer, so I'm happy to make that trade.
Soon, we're going to be asking about smartphones...
No kidding. Heck, we're already there. The Apple A12X Bionic chip in the latest iPad Pros is scoring 49.5fps on the GFX Aztec High Tier Offscreen Benchmark. Meanwhile, the Tegra X1 in the NVIDIA Shield (the same chip that runs the Nintendo Switch) is scoring 6.1fps. It's a massacre. Even in their older benchmarks the Apple chip is nearly 4x as fast. In 3DMark's top benchmark for mobile it scores 13,224 while the NVIDIA Shield usually notches just above 4,000:
I have high hopes for the Apple Arcade. I truly hope it revolutionizes mobile gaming in a good way, and this sets a new benchmark that Google is forced to struggle to meet.
Obviously these things are powerful enough, now, and with a focus on gaming, it's undeniable what a value that phones like the Xiaomi phones offer in markets where they are available for those focused on gaming performance. It's just a matter now of bridging the gap between inputs because touchscreen is so limited. Once moms realize they don't have to buy an Xbox or Playstation, but can just pick up a $40 Apple controller at Wal-Mart, and tell their kid, "Plug your iPhone/iPad into the TV", the only significant advantage the console makers will have is the exclusive libraries they can afford to purchase & wall off. Nintendo is fine because they make all their own stuff. Microsoft is the most vulnerable, but Sony is the most threatened.
