Hardware Unboxed video shows us what we already know - PC gaming is going to deal with I/O bottlenecks for a while.

Maple · Oct 11, 2020

fulltimepanda said:
These aren't hardware bottlenecks lmao.

Not for any given individual, but it is when you look at the PC gaming community collectively. As mentioned in the OP, adoption of the NVME PCIE 3.0+ SSDs on PC is going to take time. Years. Same with RTX cards for RTX I/O decompression.

Just because the hardware exists doesn't mean there isn't a limitation - if an extreme minority of PC players are using that hardware, then the hardware becomes a limitation at a larger scale.

The next-gen consoles won't have this issue - 35+ million PS5s + Series X|S consoles will be sold by the end of next year alone, and every single one of them will have ultra fast NVME storage solutions. There's no guarantee that even half of active PC gamers 3 years from now will be utilizing PCIE 3.0+ NVME SSDs for games.

Deleted member 8468 · Oct 11, 2020

Nvidia has a solution. Also, none of the games you listed were designed to take advantage of faster SSDs, as 90%+ of the players are either on console, or have a mechanical drive.

Introducing NVIDIA RTX IO: GPU-Accelerated Storage Technology For The Next Generation of Games

Load instantaneously, experience vast worlds with endless views and rich detail, and further improve gameplay by leveraging the power of GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards and NVIDIA RTX IO.

www.nvidia.com

SpitShine · Oct 11, 2020

I don't think you know what "IO bottleneck" means, dude.

Issen · Oct 11, 2020

If the I/O bottlenecks present in PCs didn't allow for improvements beyond a certain point when using SSDs, you wouldn't see improvements in synthetic benchmarks either. They run on the same hardware, on the same OS and using the same file system APIs.

There are bottlenecks, but they aren't the cause of these results.

Kthulhu · Oct 11, 2020

Maple said:
And then they have to not only raise the minimum requirement of their game to a SATA SSD, but all the way up to a NVME PCIE 3.0+ SSD. Along with a RTX card for RTX I/O. Is that even realistic within the next 5 years? What percentage of PC gamers will have a NVME PCIE SSD and a RTX based GPU three years from now?

Probably a lot considering most new mobos come with a NVMe slot and most nvidia GPUs have RT cores.

Tagyhag · Oct 11, 2020

I think a lot of people are going to be shocked in 2-3 years when PC games will still be looking and running better than on consoles and people are going to say to themselves "But muh SSD, but muh I/O".

We do this song and dance every time.

"But muh GDDR5"

"But muh The Cell"

"But muh Emotion Engine"

Hope people notice a pattern here.

caff!!! · Oct 11, 2020

The point of the video is that current games aren't built to fully use drives faster than SATA SSDs, not that it has an I/O limitation. If anything, it is a sign that SATA SSDs are good enough as a baseline for years to come and 4.0 PCIe nvme drives are complete overkill until games can actually use said bandwidth.

alphacat · Oct 11, 2020

jmga said:
Your argument is fallacious, moving from a SATA SSD to a NVME SSD giving marginal loading time improvements probably means the bottleneck is the CPU, not the I/O like you claim.

do we know if this is really the cause?

fulltimepanda · Oct 11, 2020

Maple said:
Not for any given individual, but it is when you look at the PC gaming community collectively. As mentioned in the OP, adoption of the NVME PCIE 3.0+ SSDs on PC is going to take time. Years. Same with RTX cards for RTX I/O.

Just because the hardware exists doesn't mean there isn't a limitation - if an extreme minority of PC players are using that hardware, then the hardware becomes a limitation at a larger scale.

The next-gen consoles won't have this issue - 35+ million PS5s + Series X|S consoles will be sold by the end of next year alone, and every single one of them will have ultra fast NVME storage solutions. There's no guarantee that even half of active PC gamers 3 years from now will be utilizing PCIE 3.0+ NVME SSDs for games.

There is always going to be varied hardware amongst PC gamers, some people just can't afford the latest and greatest.

This hasn't held back top end games in the past and it never will.

mugurumakensei · Oct 11, 2020

demhax said:
do we know if this is really the cause?

Yes, in a way. MS has openly said the existing file APIs are slow in accessing large amounts of data from SSDs. It's why they developed DirectStorage for XSX and, sometime next year ( likely latter half for public release ), PC.

wild_one · Oct 11, 2020

Wasn't there someone that managed to put a whole game in VRAM, only to have a negligible impact in performance? Don't look at the top line number, what matters is how well a given drive can deal with random access. Unless the data is laid out to take advantage of that sequential speed (and therefore take up that much more space), no game will take advantage of that speed.

martincrimson87 · Oct 11, 2020

Pc gamers will be just fine. Our PC's weren't as supercharged as the ps4 and every thing turned all right in the end.

nogoodnamesleft · Oct 11, 2020

Pc had a good run

Menx64 · Oct 11, 2020

Wonder why people make this threads without checking the steam hardware survey. PC elitism is not the norm. Most people still use mechanical drives... Also this is a software issue at the end of the day.

Beth Cyra · Oct 11, 2020

Are we really going to have to wait till PS5/XSX are our till people stop this absurd idea that Consoles will be superior to PCs for longer than maybe a few nanoseconds in the grand scheme of things?

We've gone through this cycle every time since the PS2...PC's will always catch and pass the consoles almost immediately.

Maple · Oct 11, 2020

fulltimepanda said:
There is always going to be varied hardware amongst PC gamers, some people just can't afford the latest and greatest.

This hasn't held back top end games in the past and it never will.

True, but we've also never really seen this kind of revolutionary change in a single transition to a new generation before either.

The 360/PS3 --> PS4/XO transition didn't bring about any real significant changes at all. Slight CPU performance increase. Better GPUs, but graphics engines are highly scalable. Same HDDs.

Bobbyleejones · Oct 11, 2020

I thought direct storage was coming to PC. That was one Ms's talking points

jotun? · Oct 11, 2020

Part of it is that loading a game involves more than just pulling data from disk. There's also a heavy CPU load from decompression, compiling shaders, etc.

dgrdsv · Oct 11, 2020

At present PCs load games which are made for console storage - meaning slow ass laptop level HDDs.

This in turn means that the devs don't care much about what or how they do with the data loaded as on consoles the HDD is always the main limiting factor. On PC with a fast NVMe SSD (or even SATA one as the benchmark shows) this bottleneck is transferred to something else - it's ST CPU performance usually, sometimes PCIE and/or RAM bandwidth. One of great things about next gen is that the console storage bottleneck will be solved and devs will start to actually care about other I/O bottlenecks now. This will be to the benefit of PC too which won't be using their SSDs as "fast 4500rpm low power HDDs" anymore and will start looking at them as, well, NVMe SSDs.

marzoo said:
Yeah, no wonder nvidia plans to launch a 20gb 3080 in december. 10gb is not enough for the next 2 years.

Games decompress data into RAM, not VRAM, and when DirectStorage will change this the result will be similar to consoles - faster streaming means smaller V/RAM buffers, not bigger.
So yeah, 10GB will be enough for the next 2 years. In fact, with RTX I/O being used they may be enough for even more than that.

Phokal · Oct 11, 2020

OP is right but that is why Direct Storage and RTX is getting built to address this. But that stuff will be new, require good nvme or expensive Gpu cards, and for games to be designed around them (like ratchet and clank) would require them as minimum spec. It'll be interesting to see who does that in the next 2+ years. Meanwhile, the new consoles are out in 4 weeks and tech demo videos indicate ratchet and demon's souls are both early games that are already using the tech now.

Shyotl · Oct 11, 2020

Issen said:
If the I/O bottlenecks present in PCs didn't allow for improvements beyond a certain point when using SSDs, you wouldn't see improvements in synthetic benchmarks either. They run on the same hardware, on the same OS and using the same file system APIs.

There are bottlenecks, but they aren't the cause of these results.

But they aren't running a game at the same time. These synthetic benchmarks are going to 100% peg your cpu by spawning thousands of threads at once. This would tank any pc game's performance if streaming. The tools also don't do any processing of the data, at all. Additionally, MS has specifically mentioned decompression concerns as part of their DirectStorage API, which is beyond the scope of these synthetic benchmarks. I mean, you technically aren't wrong, the bottleneck could be elsewhere (and probably is), but that's because its actually a damned complex thing, and bottlenecks can shift around.

The point of the API is to make utilizing the underlying hardware easier as well, along with guiding developers using the API to design their software to be more optimal (a good API should be making it hard to leave the fastpath, on a design basis). It will also standardize how a lot of games handle file I/O for graphics, which lends vendors more chance to optimize their implementations and also guide the API specifications to translate better to what they think will be most efficient on their hardware. I would love for Khronos Group to make something similar.

JudgmentJay · Oct 11, 2020

Tagyhag said:
I think a lot of people are going to be shocked in 2-3 years when PC games will still be looking and running better than on consoles and people are going to say to themselves "But muh SSD, but muh I/O".

We do this song and dance every time.

"But muh GDDR5"

"But muh The Cell"

"But muh Emotion Engine"

Hope people notice a pattern here.

2-3 years? The very first next-gen multiplat will look and run better on PC. And spoiler alert: it'll be pretty close as far as loading times are concerned as well. I predict all next-gen platforms will be within 10 seconds of each other.

Outside of console wars I really don't understand the concern here. For the last few generations load times on PC have been a fraction of what they are on consoles, but I haven't see anybody throwing a fit about it. I mean there are games that load 30-60+ seconds slower on console, but now suddenly a 5-10 second difference is a huge deal? I don't get it.

Deleted member 15395 · Oct 11, 2020

I can live with higher load times than consoles so long as games arent stuttering all over the place.

thomas_cale · Oct 11, 2020

Shiba said:
Sure but it's pretty true this gen. PS5's SSD is already proving to be a lot better than any PC's. Hopefully when full next gen games come around there will be hardware that will help lower the gap between PC and PS5/XSX.

Good thing not everything is about the storage right?
And how do you just confidently say same as last gen lmao

Euler007 · Oct 11, 2020

Can the Nvidia solution be tested now that the cards are in the wild.

Bonfires Down · Oct 11, 2020

The loading time for RDR2 is almost the exact same as on the Series X so it's safe to say that the primary issue is the way software has been designed.

Tagyhag · Oct 11, 2020

JudgmentJay said:
2-3 years? The very first next-gen multiplat will look and run better on PC. And spoiler alert: it'll be pretty close as far as loading times are concerned as well. I predict all next-gen platforms will be within 10 seconds of each other.

Outside of console wars I really don't understand the concern here. For the last few generations load times on PC have been a fraction of what they are on consoles, but I haven't see anybody throwing a fit about it. I mean there are games that load 30-60+ seconds slower on console, but now suddenly a 5-10 second difference is a huge deal? I don't get it.

Sure but I say 2-3 years because by then cross-gen gaming shouldn't be a thing by then and people will have no more excuses.

Well, actually that's not true, I'm sure we'll hear "Well it's only performing better on PC's because it all had to be held back for the lower requirements".

Issen · Oct 11, 2020

Shyotl said:
But they aren't running a game at the same time. These synthetic benchmarks are going to 100% peg your cpu by spawning thousands of threads at once. This would tank any pc game's performance if streaming. The tools also don't do any processing of the data, at all. Additionally, MS has specifically mentioned decompression concerns as part of their DirectStorage API, which is beyond the scope of these synthetic benchmarks. I mean, you technically aren't wrong, the bottleneck could be elsewhere (and probably is), but that's because its actually a damned complex thing, and bottlenecks can shift around.

The point of the API is to make utilizing the underlying hardware easier as well, along with guiding developers using the API to design their software to be more optimal (a good API should be making it hard to leave the fastpath, on a design basis).

Everything you said here is simultaneously correct and also not relevant for the test case presented here (loading screens). Like I said, there are bottlenecks present but they are largely not to blame for loading screen performance in games designed for SATA drives.

Talus · Oct 11, 2020

TheZynster said:
your HZD video is private

My bad. Thanks for the heads up. Should be fixed now.

samred · Oct 11, 2020

Exposure said:
what specifically makes you sure this is a problem on the hardware side and not something due to how the software's designed

thread, right here.

so long as the software in question is designed around current-gen I/O limitations, those games will spend their opening loading scenes xferring assets to sit in a giant RAM page file, then optimizing for lower-speed systems for all other data calls. building games around faster I/O by default is possible on PC, and this would, among other things, include games that instantly load while grabbing assets on the fly through that faster default expectation. like, the point isn't that opening loading scenes could be run faster; it's that the things they'd be loading would be inefficient with faster baseline I/O, so, the game would simply not frontload all of them.

Deleted member 15973 · Oct 11, 2020

We won't see next gen game design until 5-7 years in

Deleted member 15973 · Oct 11, 2020

georaldc said:
I thought this was true with every start of a new console gen, except the Xbox One/PS4 one

I think 8GB GDDR5 ram was also something not on pc

Shyotl · Oct 11, 2020

Issen said:
Everything you said here is simultaneously correct and also not relevant for the test case presented here (loading screens). Like I said, there are bottlenecks present but they are largely not to blame for loading screen performance in games designed for SATA drives.

Loading screens are still going to be CPU constrained. Potentially shifting ANY processing away from the CPU is reducing a bottleneck. This includes decoding/decompressing, and gpu upload. I guess I don't see the point you're trying to make. Yes, the existing i/o is fast when literally not doing anything else. These APIs are trying to reduce the 'anything else'.

Theswweet · Oct 11, 2020

iboshow said:
I think 8GB GDDR5 ram was also something not on pc

IIRC AMD cards (R9 290/290x) with 8GB GDDR5 were either announced or released shortly after the consoles.

Issen · Oct 11, 2020

Shyotl said:
Loading screens are still going to be CPU constrained. Potentially shifting ANY processing away from the CPU is reducing a bottleneck. This includes decoding/decompressing.

My point being there's no way they're going to be CPU constrained enough to show practically no difference with significantly faster drives, which is what we're seeing here.

Theswweet said:
IIRC AMD cards (R9 290/290x) with 8GB GDDR5 were either announced or released shortly after the consoles.

And a false equivalence anyways since not only can a PS4 not allocate 8GB of video memory, it has to use that same pool for both CPU-oriented tasks AND the OS.

Horp · Oct 11, 2020

Get 128GB RAM. Load everything. Done.

Deleted member 15973 · Oct 11, 2020

Theswweet said:
IIRC AMD cards (R9 290/290x) with 8GB GDDR5 were either announced or released shortly after the consoles.

It was still something ahead of PC which is what was asked even if it was a couple months.

Issen · Oct 11, 2020

iboshow said:
It was still something ahead of PC which is what was asked even if it was a couple months.

A PS4 does not have 8GB of video memory either.

Dolce · Oct 11, 2020

Maple said:
I want nothing more than to see the next-gen consoles push the requirements for PCs sky high, because that means more revolutionary experiences for everyone. I just fear that the PC is going to lag behind for a while in this regard.

As long as the prices stay low. I'm still using an HDD on my PC and only upgraded to a 1050 ti because my last GPU broke. My i5 6600k I'd like to last another 3-5 years before upgrading.

dgrdsv · Oct 11, 2020

DirectStorage is coming to PC - DirectX Developer Blog

Earlier this year, Microsoft showed the world how the Xbox Series X, with its portfolio of technology innovations, will introduce a new era of no-compromise gameplay. Alongside the actual console announcements, we unveiled the Xbox Velocity Architecture, a key part of how the Xbox Series X will...

devblogs.microsoft.com

Something that OP and some people here should read.

Euler007 said:
Can the Nvidia solution be tested now that the cards are in the wild.

No because a) it requires DirectStorage which will be released only in 21H1 and b) you need a benchmark, i.e. a game using this solution to test it.

Yudoken · Oct 11, 2020

I'm very interested to see how the utilization bottleneck works out on consoles with their SSD's. Right now every SSD (doesn't matter if m.2 pcie gen 4 or 3).

As of right now matter how ''fast'' they're promising their speeds are it doesn't really matter much because those speeds will not be achieved in real world applications.
I doubt they've solved this and I'm pretty sure good gen 3 will be good enough for pc's.

Source:

Enable subtitles for english subs, Igor is one of the most reputable hardware insider there is.

With all being said consoles are still not out yet and we haven't even really seen new next gen games running on the systems. And as far as I know only Sony will release a game like Demons which only will run on their next gen platform and is only designed around the PS5 specs (which is very important aspect).
Any other game (xplatform) will have to run on the worst platform too which often means it has to run on the original Xbone or PS4.

When they're out we might see better independent benchmarks especially when the next gen optimized games are released on both ng consoles and pc.

Don't get me wrong, good m.2 SSD's are a massive improvement and consoles holded back gaming with their old hdds (and cpu).
But I'm very skeptical about the shown speeds (same as gen 4 ssd's for pc).

Officially on pc we won't have the direct storage software update but we know at least Nvidia gpu's with Turing and up and gen 3 SSD's will be supported.

Kuosi · Oct 11, 2020

I can live waiting 1-2 seconds longer for a game to load if it comes to that, I thougt this would be about something regarding how the games run but eh.

Deleted member 15973 · Oct 11, 2020

Issen said:
A PS4 does not have 8GB of video memory either.

The PS4 has 8 GDDR5 video memory. If you mean that it doesn't use them all for games then I don't think games at the time had 5.5gb vram. I remember that most GPUs at the time was 2gb vram. The point was that the 8GB GDDR5 ram was something that wowed.

DHC-Shannow · Oct 11, 2020

He goes quite in depth on the issues and unknowns.

And we haven't actually seen the XBox velocity architecture in action yet as all the back compat stuff doesn't use it.

Alvis · Oct 11, 2020

Honest question: Are we really expecting there to be a big difference in practice between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 SSDs in gaming?

I'm debating whether to get an i7 10700k or a Ryzen 5800X for my new build. Both are 8c/16t. The i7 is much cheaper and will grant me almost the same performance (probably more in some scenarios), but I lose PCIe 4.0. But I already have a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO anyways, which is PCIe 3.0... is PCIe 4.0 really that big of a deal? :/

Deleted member 50374 · Oct 11, 2020

Alvis said:
Honest question: Are we really expecting there to be a big difference in practice between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 SSDs in gaming?

I'm debating whether to get an i7 10700k or a Ryzen 5800X for my new build. Both are 8c/16t. The i7 is much cheaper and will grant me almost the same performance (probably more in some scenarios), but I lose PCIe 4.0. But I already have a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO anyways, which is PCIe 3.0... is PCIe 4.0 really that big of a deal? :/

By the time it will become relevant - and I very well believe that it will be only relevant in loading times - you might as well just rebuild your PC entirely, I'll say at least 2023-2024.

FelixFFM · Oct 11, 2020

It's a misconception that loading in games is just a matter of I/O. Just look at your CPU load while a level is loading.

Deleted member 16908 · Oct 11, 2020

Alvis said:
Honest question: Are we really expecting there to be a big difference in practice between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 SSDs in gaming?

I'm debating whether to get an i7 10700k or a Ryzen 5800X for my new build. Both are 8c/16t. The i7 is much cheaper and will grant me almost the same performance (probably more in some scenarios), but I lose PCIe 4.0. But I already have a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO anyways, which is PCIe 3.0... is PCIe 4.0 really that big of a deal? :/

Go Ryzen.

Alvis · Oct 11, 2020

themuzzotheory said:
By the time it will become relevant - and I very well believe that it will be only relevant in loading times - you might as well just rebuild your PC entirely, I'll say at least 2023-2024.

That's what I was thinking as well.

Robinson said:
Go Ryzen.

Could you elaborate a bit?

Deleted member 15973 · Oct 11, 2020

If we go back to Cerny talk, the SSD wasn't added to the PS5 for loading times. It's going to benefit other stuff such as asset loading, asset quality, game design. We won't see these benefits until a few years into the generation and won't see big changes for 5-7 years.

Hardware Unboxed video shows us what we already know - PC gaming is going to deal with I/O bottlenecks for a while.

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