I think that is all with DS enabled and you just see the difference between various storage types - not sure they are showing a With and Without DS benchmark there.
Agreed, although not smoke and mirrors it's not far off from that either. It's always that "up to" claim that becomes suspect because as we all know the user's PC hardware specs and configuration will play the largest role in the final numbers. Consoles, in some ways, have an advantage with the mostly locked-in hardware, drives withstanding, which means you can mostly count their numbers as a static reference. Just about anything else could be all over the map.
I count myself fortunate to have so many different PCs in the house to play and test things with but I'm on the verge of a total 5800X3D desktop approach. Sigh, I'm noticing significant CPU bottlenecks with my 3700X, a CPU I love and it's not that old, but seeing a 10-20 FPS difference at 5120x1400 compared to the 5800X3D rig that's using a nearly identical setup at 4K. Prices have really dropped and I can afford to swap it out but I've always enjoyed being able to look at numbers for my 3 different rigs. However, the 5800X3D is that good, at least for those looking for perf/price metrics at 4K with modern features while still getting the most of AM4. I'm sidetracking my own thread here but it's been on my mind a lot since digging into Hogwarts and noticing that Witcher 3 Enhanced wasn't the only title bringing down my 3700X rig.
Back on topic, sort of, the 3700X does seem to provide near-identical load times with games on Gen4 but I don't have Forspoken (unless its free, Epic-lol, I'm not likely to try it otherwise) so I can't speak for that. The 3700X Gen4 is a little slower (vs 5800X3D) but barely noticeable but since they don't have the same brand/model drives that too could be a contributing factor.
Meanwhile, I've done some game loading testing with SATA III drives vs NVMe Gen4, and again barely noticeable and I don't have technical screenshots to prove, but I can tell they are slower as well. The HDD drive differences are very noticeable, even with larger drives that have larger caches. I will say that with the 3700X rig, I took a hybrid approach in multiple ways in that it has a 2 TB SATA III SSD and 6 TB HDD, along with Gen3 and Gen 4 NVMe drives. This was, in part, to stretch my legs with the H7 Flow since that's my smallest build yet and it was replacing my previous 4930K HTPC setup. However, moving forward it's likely to be my last such build since the prices for NVMe drives keep dropping, and I love the simplicity of having drives on the motherboard, and I expect DS to eventually become more utilized.
