While that's the case, it doesn't point to better looking assets. That's the point I was trying to make. The limit for looking better is going to be the GPU - not the SSD + decompression.
Furthermore, the main CPU limitation is in the building of the BVH in the RT code. If they had built a different path to building their BVH with some Nvidia specific code to offload to the RT cores, I'm sure that would diminish the FPS hit. So I'm more inclined to believe that because of their specific code for the PS5 SKU and it not being completely portable to the PC is the cause of the CPU limit. In other words, had they prepared for writing code to the PC GPUs, they could have used the bandwidth in another way that wouldn't cause a dip below 60FPS.
Playing the game more in all of it's glory, I can see the advances in Insomniac's graphics engine. It's definitely doing a lot of things right. Their PBR shaders are second to none - implementing velvet shader (which is quite complex) was a big surprise. Their hair shader in the game has 3 specular lobes unlike most games and it looks great. The texture + normal map detail is sharp and clear. The game is definitely a next-gen game. The only gripe I have is in the SSS skin. But this problem is with every single game out there. They just can't solve the indirect lighting on skin and have to revert to using ambient lighting which destroys the look on the skin.
