Ahead of the PlayStation 5 console launch, we've often heard praises for the PS5 SSD and the whole storage solution designed by system architect Mark Cerny. It wasn't just Sony promoting their upcoming product; the acknowledgments came from all kinds of developers and industry leaders.

　　It's been two years and a half since Sony's console made it to the market, but the PS5 SSD is still a hot topic when discussing the improvements players will see in upcoming games. For example, Tekken 8 producer Katsuhiro Harada namedropped it in a recent interview published in the latest issue of PLAY magazine.

　　We have a few goals, actually, of what we want to achieve, but one of the major ones is to feel like, ‘I’m glad that I bought that new generation of hardware because this Tekken is just so awesome and so brand-new.

　　If you have a lot of money, you’re rich, for example, and you can buy a high-end PC, then you can make the graphics look as pretty as you want. But to have a standardised console that anyone can access for a reasonable price, I guess you could say, to achieve the current level of graphics is really

　　quite an evolution. The PS5 SSD is probably even the biggest thing that’s gonna evolve the player experience in the game.

　　Harada didn't elaborate on why that was the case, but it's pretty obvious what he was getting at. With the lightning quick load times enabled by the PS5 SSD, starting a rematch in Tekken 8 after a resounding loss should be much faster, slightly lessening the pain of defeat.

　　Of course, that should be the case even on Xbox Series S and X, which are also equipped with an SSD. It's slower than the PS5 SSD, but in most games, the difference in load times is minimal.

　　As for the PC version, it depends on whether Bandai Namco opts to take advantage of Microsoft's DirectStorage API for Tekken 8. While Microsoft has already released several updates to the API, there's still only one game that supports it, Forspoken by Luminous Productions. Diablo IV dataminers found references to DirectStorage support in the beta, but Blizzard remained mum about it.

　　Tekken 8, powered by Unreal Engine 5, doesn't have a release date yet. Still, marketing has been ramping up, and Kai Powell was able to try the game for Wccftech at a recent press event.