Not that I can quote publicly, no.
This comes from the information I got from a couple of friends working as programmers for Splash Damage.
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Next-gen PS5 and next Xbox speculation launch thread |OT6| - Mostly Fan Noise and Hot Air
- Thread starter Mecha Meister
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Not that I can quote publicly, no.
This comes from the information I got from a couple of friends working as programmers for Splash Damage.
I am not talking about data center SSD. I am saying no one really knows what the speeds on these consoles are. All speculation. You and I have been on many versions of this topic to know how so many guesses, educated or not ended up.
And most of these when put through some basic reasoning seem farfetched to the extreme.
NVMe tuned file systems and IO can eclipse the hell out of sata. But nothing in the consumer space is written to take advantage of it because of legacy IO.
Block sizes are the determining factor which Part 2 of the tests show you. They reduce latency on access and read. Parallelism can be simulated quite good by the number of threads and queues handling the reading. A data core provider is just the same excluded in its own core/fixed function in HW. Differences even with a console will not look much different under the same circumstances (FAT not in memory, similar data block sizes, same IOPS specs) when we take into account all those tests were made on a 8C/16T system and the load was minimal for those tests.
Edit: However the main difference to console will be that the customizing there will involve in-memory FAT and maybe direct DMA between the shared main memory and the SSD.
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I cant look it up right now, but NVMe has a lot of potentially useful ways game systems can benefit, the ones you said are just a few (DMA baby!!!, deeper/ooo queues, etc etc
I did not say game systems do not benefit from such capabilities, I just wanted to express a PC can pull off a lot of that too even without the need of having customized HW. So tests there are not useless. However it should be made clear that those results from my tests are indicators and not hard facts.
I hope MS takes the lead on making a branding/certification on SSDs that are performant enough to use the tech that will benefit nextbox in PCs
Never played NMS so can't comment. I'm just thinking more NOT doing what Elite: Dangerous does.
Next year is going to be crazy. They'll dump everything across a few quarters.
I don't think Sony reinvented Solid State Storage paradigms like some here. They probably enabled a couple of cool customizations to speed things up in a controlled console environment and MS has probably done the same. Any low cost update you can make to consoles to eek out more performance is a huge win.
I wonder if we will start to see external ssd's being sold with the same spec as the ps5/scarlett internal ssds
So ppl can expand there storage but still have the custom ssd's benifits.
So ppl can expand there storage but still have the custom ssd's benifits.
My secret hope is they all have thunderbolt3, but I am not sure about amd support for it... and with pcie4, it may not be fast enough... time will tell
I think it will simply be efficient and smart communication between the ram and ssd.
So it may be better then pc because it may be better then pci express and existing ram pc setups, it's just one of the benifits of console, they will be able to do a more custom approach between the ram and ssd.
Scarlett will do somthing similar because it to will use the advantage of being a console.
Going by those patents, they didn't really. What they did is propose a bunch of optimizations that, when taken together and tuned for a very specific purpose, vastly outperforms off-the-shelf stuff.
But that's to be expected, general purpose will never perform as well in a specific scenario as something purpose built for that scenario. You're trading performance for flexibility. Consoles don't need that flexibility, so it's a smart move to make.
Yes but even if the game are done for SSD, the filesystem will be a handicap and will slow down what you will do with your application.
You need to have the full software stack to be optimized for SSD if you want to push it to the max...
Like in this study on linux comparing normal SSD to high performance SSD tuning the I/O software stack on linux... And I can find much more paper. This one is a bit old 2011...
Again everything here has been done in datacenter. Some of the customizations of Sony are different because in datacenter writing speed is as important as reading speed.
And this is an old paper but since SSD exists tuning the filesystem and the OS is done for specific needs. consumer PC need to be versatile and to have good performance on HDD. The OS and all the component are made to run good with HDD first... For maximising SSD speed you need to have the os, the filesystem tuned for it and use parallel I/O... On the two next-generation console where SSD will be the base of the system, it will be like this...
SSD are underused on consumer and gaming PC not on PC server tuned for it... Out of tuning the system for asymmetric load and write speed, out of having a secondary CPU dedicated to the management of the SSD and some SRAM there is nothing new...
EDIT: Create a filesystem tuned for SSD is not an invention of Sony. It is existing on PC and Linux since long time but it is not used in consumer PC where you need to have the system running on HDD...
Parrallel I/O run slower on HDD for example...
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Somthing like that would probably be needed I don't think usb 3's 625MB/s will be enough.
However thunderbolt3 is a intel/apple thing, I don't think Sony or MS would use it.
If branded externals were the only way (which Sony and ms will be happy about making money on them) they will probably use a custom connector.
The important thing is how they will used it. Like how they used an outdated crappy APU to do awesome stuff with it.
Yes, these are just benifits of it being a console.
Thunderbolt3 is now USB4, and is/has been completely open
That's good.
We should see it in next gens then?
Seeing how it's like 8x faster the usb3
Its not just the speed thats the gravy, its that stuff can connect just like its on the pcie bus!
And, who knows, havent seen USB4 from intel or amd at this point
After watching the Control RT video from Digital Foundry, I'm really hoping we get something with RT capability on par with the 2060S (or higher). I think Control looks great will all the added RT effects, can't wait to see how next gen consoles handle this.
I think we will see a ps5 announcement event in Feb, and a scarlett one a month or 2 after.
I don't see why they would want to change it up.
I don't see why they would want to change it up.
They really are saving up for next year.
February can't come soon enough.
Using rendering software? No. But that'snot the problem. Making a design that doesn't look like senseless garbage, based off dev kits over a year before release? Yeah, unquestionably.
but also............ you don't need to be skilled in something to have taste. That's one of the oldest fallacies there is. You can critique an actor's performance without an MA in Classical Theatre. You can call a band bad even if you haven't played to a crowded concert hall.
Taste, imagination, and critical thinking is all it takes to say that render makes no sense.
But this isn't simple at all. Many won't know how to figure out if their SSD meets this minimum speed, and that's not even getting into the problem of used or low-quality SSDs not meeting their stated speeds. It has to actually be simple, which means either requiring "an SSD" (which forces them to develop around some pretty low speeds) or "an NVMe SSD" (which is rather pricey and restrictive). This isn't like with GPUs (as you can turn the graphics down to ridiculous degrees on PC) or CPUs (virtually nothing in the PC space is as weak as the Jaguars, and even if your CPU actually was you could still play a game at 10-20fps).
It's very different, because no game requires RTX to work, while these games will actually require certain SSD speeds for their basic design (or, alternatively, they won't, which comes right back to the issue I was talking about).
Thank you for the link, and yeah, I got your test results mixed up with a video I was watching, which actually did claim an NVMe doesn't add too much for games. Apologies.
No need for an apology! There is so much different information out there, it is easy to forget where you have read or seen it. Of course today you cannot see the real benefits in games because those games are not made with SSD in mind, means the throughput requirements are catered to HDDs. Reason I did the tests on different scenarios of access patterns and file system parameters and not with games and a stop watch!
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PS5's Zen 2 CPU Is "A Huge Step Up", Will Reduce Development Time "Significantly" – Lost Wing Developer
"It will be a huge step up," he said. "It gets rid of so many restrictions with how many calculations we can do on the fly, we have so many ideas which are very hard, or even impossible to implement in the current generation of consoles. Also it actually reduces development time significantly as less time needs to be spent on optimisation."
Hmm,PC brute-forcing coming to consoles? ;)
"It will be a huge step up," he said. "It gets rid of so many restrictions with how many calculations we can do on the fly, we have so many ideas which are very hard, or even impossible to implement in the current generation of consoles. Also it actually reduces development time significantly as less time needs to be spent on optimisation."
Hmm,PC brute-forcing coming to consoles? ;)
All I say is this is a typical Gamingbolt article. I avoid those ...
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Off-topic:
Sylens is a bitch ...
Precisely. The whole idea of games that are designed around those speeds is what's making me wonder about this - especially if the Sony patent really does show what they're using and its even better for games than the best NVMes. Going from a HDD standard to an SSD standard will be huge on its own, at least. I was expecting basic SATA speeds until the Wired article, and I was happy with that.
If they do that Sony isn't going to say much of anything for specifics
It will be sunshine and rainbows until they find how to push its limits and they're back to optimizing.
It will be interesting to see how this influences PC gaming (console ports) regarding CPU,considering next gen base will be 8 core Zen2.
Colbert ,i think your (8 core?) Zen+ will get very sweaty next gen :)
They don't have to reinvent anything. They just have to play to their strengths of solely being a console manufacturer in the gaming spec. Eg, Ryzen 3 has 24 PCIe lanes Usually a NVMe drive takes up 4 of those lanes. And an NVMe controller reads/write data to those 4 lanes. Nothing stops sony from taking up 8 lanes exclusively for their SSD and thus doubling the bandwidth. Or the could use 2 SSD controllers on their PCB making heir SSD act like a RAID drive and again, doubling the bandwidth.
Point is, what ever they do will become the PS standard and every dev building for it will be guaranteed that kinda performance. That can't happen on PCs cause devs will have to at the very least conform to a PC with a PCIe4 drive at best. Devs can't build on PC with the assumption that PC gamers will have SSD drive in RAID or have them on a riser using 8 PCIe lanes as opposed to 4.
MS will probably fall somewhere in between, as they have t ensure that their games can work just fine n a PC. Or they go with a similar approach to sony and have code that changes the way their game runs depending on what platform its running.
The Zen 2 CPU in the console is not the same as the PC part. The lanes are coming from the IO die (IOD) which is probably absent in the console SOC. So we do not even know how they implement high speed SSDs.
I don't see any platform warring. I see people about a great feature and I see a user questioning if developers will even take advantage of the feature.
That's not platform warring.
If you can't stand people talking and comparing speeds, probably best to not set foot in a speculation thread that primarily revolves around technical specifications.
To bring it back to the original discussion, and your first paragraph, whilst I have zero knowledge of game development I don't see why it would be anything other than 'it just works' (again assuming one single storage pool) - I don't know why it would be something that a developer would have to specifically 'enable' or make use of above and beyond their standard method of loading things in.
People can shove an SSD (albeit not on the same level as forthcoming consoles) in their console right now and it just works and loads things faster (but not too much benefit given the other bottlenecks), developers don't have to make special considerations in the code for it.
The only things would be cross-platform experiences to cope with disparities and game design decisions (swing speed in Spider-Man for example) but these are design decisions, compared to just loading a level in general for example.
Perhaps someone with experience can chime in.
User Warned: Platform warring
A lot of people's PC's are going to be sweaty. I can't wait to see the salt from the elitist segment of the PC crowd, it'll be entertaining.
While I am not a PC elitist my CPU never will be sweaty because it lives in a swimming pool ;)
Lol. Nah I never thought you were, but plenty of our fellow PC brethren are. It'll be nice to see them knocked down a few pegs. ;)
Obviously the APUs in the consoles will also have a I/O portion. Just like how chips in the pre chiplet era had their I/O portion too. The only real argument will b that the consoles APU will have nowhere near 24 PCIe lanes. I am guessing half that at the most or even a third. Consoles don't need that many, and even if they had only 8? Thats 8 times ore than the I/O part of the chip had in the current gen consoles who were even only using a sata bus as opposed to a PCIe bus.
Laziness! (joke)
It will just shift the goalposts higher and the same limits will apply this time next gen.
I think you're overthinking this. Again we;re talking about PC, the platform with potentially infinite possible hardware configurations. It's not a fixed platform and so devs don't have to concern themselves with whether PC users are buying used SSDs or cheap ones with low performance. PC gaming is never simple. You can buy a graphics card with the right paper specs to play the latest games and still run into software and driver issues for some games. That's not the responsibility of the game developer. It's up to the user to figure it out, and they do because they're routinely used to it.
If you're not able to figure out whether your SSD meets the minimum spec. of a game, then you really shouldn't be gaming on PC period. If you get it wrong and buy underspecc'd hardware, the game runs slower than it should... I mean, that's PC gaming in a nutshell. There's nothing out of the ordinary here.
Folks trying to downplay any benefit of SSDs at all, because some others in the thread are speculating that Sony's SSD will likely have better performance than MS's solution?... I don't see how it can be any more transparent.
It's noise. People should be concerning themselves with the fact that SSD will be the new baseline, not getting offended that some think one company's solution will be better than the other.
This was never a complaint made by me. Not sure where you're getting this from.
If the SSD solution has some clever setup with additional RAM and dedicated ARM core for IO management of the SSD, then it's likely to be managed by the API. However, the platform holder will almost assuredly grant devs access to control it manually if they want to. That's generally how most things are done on consoles.
So it's not that devs need to "enable" it. Rather they're given an option to take control to optimise for their own specific use case.
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