Main memory is an important thing to have fast, though. The faster (and lower-wallclock-latency) it is, the less time your system spends waiting around when it needs to swap things in and out of it. It's my understanding that programs that need to be fast (like many video games) take pains to preemptively load data into RAM from disk, and (when appropriate for the program) from main RAM into VRAM. If main RAM's transfer speed was equal to or greater than VRAM's, and it access latency was a small fraction of a frame render time, (presumably) some of that preloading complexity could go away.
> I guess with massive hardware RAID they could be faster...
This section of the comment is for folks who haven't been paying attention to how fast storage has gotten: It's nowhere near 1TB per second, but...
I have four 4TB SATA-attached Crucial MX500s set up in LVM2 RAID 0. This array is a bit faster than a 10gbit link. (That is, I get 1.5GByte/s transfer rate off of the thing.) Even a single non-garbage U.2-attached (or (barf) M.2-attached) device can saturate a 10Gbit link.
Main memory is an important thing to have fast, though. The faster (and lower-wallclock-latency) it is, the less time your system spends waiting around when it needs to swap things in and out of it. It's my understanding that programs that need to be fast (like many video games) take pains to preemptively load data into RAM from disk, and (when appropriate for the program) from main RAM into VRAM. If main RAM's transfer speed was equal to or greater than VRAM's, and it access latency was a small fraction of a frame render time, (presumably) some of that preloading complexity could go away.
> I guess with massive hardware RAID they could be faster...
This section of the comment is for folks who haven't been paying attention to how fast storage has gotten: It's nowhere near 1TB per second, but...
I have four 4TB SATA-attached Crucial MX500s set up in LVM2 RAID 0. This array is a bit faster than a 10gbit link. (That is, I get 1.5GByte/s transfer rate off of the thing.) Even a single non-garbage U.2-attached (or (barf) M.2-attached) device can saturate a 10Gbit link.