I don’t know anything about the origin of the new use of ‘cap’. No one was saying ‘based’ in proto-internet culture before Lil B’s music videos around 2010-2011. This guy blew up quick and he used the word in his nickname. It was his version of BRRRR for Gucci, FLOCKA, etc. That’s just a fact.

It absolutely was repopularised by Lil B, I was there for it. My understanding at the time was that it was a reclamation of the word from an original slang meaning of being strung out on crack. Lil B was celebrated ironically by the 4channers that later propagated the right wing appropriation of the term. I always interpreted that to refer to being strung out on ‘the red pill’ i.e. being unapologetically fascist.

Kinda sorta required if you want to stream assets from storage, an approach taken by many modern games. Might not be absolutely necessary depending on your setup / game settings. BG3 also said SSD required but there’s a “Slow HDD Mode” in the settings anyway, which I believe just shifts more of the streaming burden to RAM/VRAM. If you played on a HDD without enabling it, I guess you’d expect to see inconsistent pop-in as individual assets try to stream in faster than your storage can read. But playing with it enabled might also cause performance drop if your RAM/VRAM was already close to full utilization with the setting disabled