Do I need a PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming?

Across the reviewers we read, the consensus is no — current games rarely saturate even PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, and load-time differences between a good Gen4 drive and a Gen5 drive are typically negligible. Gen5 makes sense mainly for heavy content-creation workloads, large-file transfers, or 'I want the best' builds. For pure gaming, a strong Gen4 drive like the WD SN850X or Samsung 990 PRO is the better value.