So quick to put down
The answer is yes it is faster, see Anandtech.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11953/the-intel-optane-ssd-900p-review
As spotted a couple of days ago, Intel has announced a smaller Optane drive – the 900P. Optane is Intel's brandname for its 3D XPoint solid state technology which, with its <10µs latency, is faster than flash but slower than main memory. Intel is positioning it as a persistent memory cache between DRAM and NAND. It follows on …
There's been a number of articles on this - initial load times are shorter but in-game performance tends to be perfectly acceptable on a hard drive.
The Optane is extremely fast, so it's odd to highlight an area where it doesn't have a commanding lead over other technologies.
As an avid gamer I'd say it's dependent on the game. Games which stream in content to RAM as you play such as Star Citizen will benefit from this as it generates smoother gameplay. Those which typically front load like Fallout 4, GTA V etc won't.
It's more complicated than yes/no though as much of this is dependent on how much RAM the computer has, less RAM, you'll likely benefit more from an SSD than otherwise.