NTMBK
Lifer
Texture loads you mean how long it takes a level to load? I'd say that it's almost entirely reliant on the SSD's speed even with PCI-E 2.0 8X or lower which is still miles ahead of consumer SSDs in terms of speed and it cannot be saturated by SSDs barring some ultra-fast PCI-E solutions that utilize many controllers and cost in the thousands of dollars.
I was more meaning time taken to see full res texture- I'll often see very low res textures, improving through several levels of quality until it finally reaches high quality as the texture streams in. As you point out though it could be down to disc performance, I have a terrible old hard drive connected by SATA 1.0 🙂 I was assuming the texture would be in main memory, but of course it's doubtful most games would fit all of their texture caches into my tiny 4GB...
(God, I really need a new PC...)