Next gen SSD is the single biggest performance jump ever from generation to generation

Decarb · May 12, 2020

Voodoopeople said:
If you only have one line on the spec sheet that's better then the competition, of course you focus on that. "Fastest console and legendary 1st party" should see Sony through OK, marketing wise.

I'm not really interested in loading times. I barely notice the difference between my SSD and HDD anyway. But I AM interested in how 1st party design around the one major advantage they've been given.

I appreciate the effort to turn this into console wars, but this applies to both consoles since both have incredibly fast SSD. In fact if one of them still stuck to spinning drives, you'd still see old gen loading and level design from 90% of the 3rd party games, which is thankfully not the case.

Hermii · May 12, 2020

Windows-PC said:
I can fully understand that faster loading times in these situations are great, and I understand that you are probably really exited about this, rightfully!

But s I said earlier, I play video games now for over 30 years now, and loading times were never be a problem for me. And as I'm aware of, no one complained about long loading times the last 7 years during the PlayStation 4 and XBox One generation.

With every new generation of consoles there was only one important thing for me and I have the feeling for everyone else too, and that was more compute power the better. And this will at least for me never change :)

Where have you been? Loading times complaints are common.

Deleted member 43 · May 12, 2020

Windows-PC said:
This! It's alarming how many people take everything what random developers say on the internet as a gospel just because it fits their narrative or personal taste.

Someone told me here on ResetEra that Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch will be announced and released, and I'm still waiting :'(

So I believe everything when I see it, until then I'm curious about everything what I read on a Forum.

What narrative is that?

zeuanimals · May 12, 2020

Betelgeuse said:
Bolded for truth.

Your and others' input is a breath of fresh air amidst unfounded pessimism and myopia around SSDs. I bookmarked an earlier post of yours and have been quoting it off and on for this reason - hope that's OK.

Mind quoting it?

Hybrid Rainbow · May 12, 2020

Windows-PC said:
This! It's alarming how many people take everything what random developers say on the internet as a gospel just because it fits their narrative or personal taste.

Someone told me here on ResetEra that Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch will be announced and released, and I'm still waiting :'(

So I believe everything when I see it, until then I'm curious about everything what I read on a Forum.

Whet narrative are you referring to? Speak up now.

Vitamin_B_Complex · May 12, 2020

Great post OP.
I also want to stress what this means for RAM management. I think it was Cerny that claimed right now, you RAM pool is filled with data for the next 30 seconds of gameplay. Imagine how much junk this is. For example in Red Dead 2 when you are in a house and your horse is outside, your horse is still kept in RAM because the HDD would not be able to load the horse fast enough if you decided to leave immediately. But with an SSD, if you know that it takes the player at least 3 seconds to exit the building you can just unload everything you don't need outside. RAM will be used much more for the current scene instead of being a cache for "what might be" situations.

So not only are we getting 14ish Gigs of fast RAM, this modest jump on paper is much much greater thanks to SSDs. The SSDs and CPUs are the next gen jump. I am certain the PS4 could output much more stunning games if it had a similar SSD to the next gen systems.

JasoNsider said:
I wish I could put a giant banner on the top of the forum that reads "it's not about load times"

Drives today are predominantly streaming. Load screens are only a small portion of their use. The faster you can stream, the richer the world. If you can stream in fast enough, design itself can even change. PS5 drive is legit so fast we are opening doors on design that we still don't know exactly where it could take us.

The fact that many game don't even have loading times after the initial one if you don't die should be telling people just that. Why would Naughty Dog ask for an SSD if their games don't have loading times except when you die and even then nothing traumatic. It was never about loading times, it's just the most logical thing that most people understand which sadly downplays what these SSDs can really do.

-Le Monde- · May 12, 2020

CommodoreKong said:
Having played through Alyx VR can be close. The game felt fresh in a way I hadn't felt in a very long time while also feeling like they just scratched the surface of what was possible. It will probably be years before another AAA VR game on the scale of Alyx come out though.

RE8 is coming out next year.

Lukas Taves · May 12, 2020

You are measuring practical speeds for ps4 ssd and comparing to theoretical maximum speeds for ps5.

In practice the ps4 hdd peak performance is at slightly over 100MB/s. Dunno how the theoretical max though. (https://www.storagereview.com/review/hitachi-travelstar-z5k500-review-hts545050a7e380)

zeuanimals · May 12, 2020

BadWolf said:
Looking at your avatar, GR3 would be amazing with this tech.

Bruh... Bruhhhhhh. I wanna kick a red orb flying at the speed of sound. Please let this happen Sony.

Vitamin_B_Complex · May 12, 2020

vivftp said:
How much would a 500GB SATA SSD have cost them back in 2013? Are we talking tens of dollars difference compared to the HDD, or hundreds? Plus I suppose there would be the whole I/O of the console that would have to be designed to properly take advantage of those speeds, I wonder how much more that might cost.

I wonder how games would look and play like of both current gen consoles had like 10-20 gigs of a SSD scratch pad.

JasoNsider · May 12, 2020

People talking about third party games needing to design around lowest common denominator hardware aren't necessarily wrong, per se, but I just feel they're focusing on a different set of goal posts than a lot of others are (including myself). This is subjective, but I play games (and make them) to experience the boundaries of our medium. It's exciting to see new things! Having a blazing fast SSD standard/guaranteed in every box means we're on a new frontier. I personally choose to focus on the positive - those who design for it are breaking new ground. Yes, those who design around mechanical drives can't take the same liberties, but many studios will finally be able to design around a new paradigm starting today. My imagination is going wild with possibilities in a way it did for other classic breakthrough hardware ("Using discs instead of a cartridge? What could we possibly load with that?")

Once again, all the warring and arguing makes me a little sad. I guess that's just how it goes, but I'm going to continue focusing on the exciting parts!

Thatguy · May 12, 2020

More detail, bigger environments, faster load times. I hope it means new gameplay elements somehow too.

Joule · May 12, 2020

JasoNsider said:
People talking about third party games needing to design around lowest common denominator hardware aren't necessarily wrong, per se, but I just feel they're focusing on a different set of goal posts than a lot of others are (including myself). This is subjective, but I play games (and make them) to experience the boundaries of our medium. It's exciting to see new things! Having a blazing fast SSD standard/guaranteed in every box means we're on a new frontier. I personally choose to focus on the positive - those who design for it are breaking new ground. Yes, those who design around mechanical drives can't take the same liberties, but many studios will finally be able to design around a new paradigm starting today. My imagination is going wild with possibilities in a way it did for other classic breakthrough hardware ("Using discs instead of a cartridge? What could we possibly load with that?")

Once again, all the warring and arguing makes me a little sad. I guess that's just how it goes, but I'm going to continue focusing on the exciting parts!

What entails is unknown and that's the exciting part. I think devs and designers are gonna do cool shit with an SSD

zeuanimals · May 12, 2020

-Le Monde- said:
RE8 is coming out next year.

I really doubt RE8 is gonna be as interactive as Half Life: Alyx. It's being made for normal, TV/monitor gaming too.

Michaelandavinci · May 12, 2020

Flash said:
People are overestimating what an SSD with that type of speed will do for gaming. Either way you slice it developers (3rd party in particular) will not solely develop games for SSD users in mind. SSDs with 4-6 gb/s have existed on PCs for years now. Nothing significant has changed. It will be a significant boost to console smoothness for specific tasks and obv loading screens but as far as changing the landscape of gaming, it won't. If the OP thinks improved loading times is THEE "biggest performance jumps" ever then we are fundamentally working with different definitions here. I guess it's relative. Find it a bit comical people are losing their shit over those types of speeds though.

When I think about "performance leaps" I am looking at improved frame rates at similar to improved resolutions in games I am already playing or looking forward to play. Loading screens and OS smoothness isn't in the same galaxy.

lol. You should read more about the technical aspects of game development if you don't believe that a fast SSD will change game development in a big way in the next decade.

nib95 · May 12, 2020

Lukas Taves said:
You are measuring practical speeds for ps4 ssd and comparing to theoretical maximum speeds for ps5.

In practice the ps4 hdd peak performance is at slightly over 100MB/s. Dunno how the theoretical max though. (https://www.storagereview.com/review/hitachi-travelstar-z5k500-review-hts545050a7e380)

Sony's own slide suggests the PS5's SSD will get "at least" 5GB/s. But bear in mind that with compression the PS5's SSD has a theoretical peak of 22GB/s and 9GB/s typical.

Further to that, the PS4's mechanical drive has to contend with seek times (2-50 milliseconds) that the PS5's SSD doesn't.

So in real world terms the PS5's SSD throughput is probably going be greater comparative to the PS4's than just the raw data transfer speeds suggest.

I believe Sony's own PS5 to PS4 load times comparison had the PS4 transferring 1GB of data in 20 seconds, whilst the PS5 would do 2GB in 0.27 seconds (or 1GB in 0.135 seconds), that would put the PS5's SSD at 148x faster, which is more than the difference quoted in the OP.

Falchion · May 12, 2020

People keep saying it's going to be a complete gamechanger so I can't wait to experience it myself.

Michaelandavinci · May 12, 2020

Flash said:
Sign me up for this camp as well :)

The camp with zero knowledge on how game development actually works ?

Windows-PC said:
This! It's alarming how many people take everything what random developers say on the internet as a gospel just because it fits their narrative or personal taste.

Someone told me here on ResetEra that Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch will be announced and released, and I'm still waiting :'(

So I believe everything when I see it, until then I'm curious about everything what I read on a Forum.

I completely agree with you that we all should not listen to some random developers on some random gaming forum but with Mark Cerny as the mastermind behind the PS5 architecture who is also a top expert in the industry and god knows how many pHD he has in computer science. In the process of developing the PS5, Cerny and his team travel the world to get developers input on Sony next console and all of them asked for a fast SSD. Now you could says Cerny was wrong to focus a large portion of his presentation on the SSD during the PS5 deep dive but surely you are not going to tell me all the top developers around the world who requested a faster SSD for next gen console as their top priority to better game development are wrong as well?

behOemoth · May 12, 2020

The later years of the 360 showed that it was mandatory for GTA V to be installed on a HDD or USB Stick + you shouldn't install the play disc on the HDD as the disc drive was additionally used for streaming data.
Some PS3 games like Killzone 3 also used the data streaming of the HDD + Disc to save as much RAM as possible.

jroc74 · May 12, 2020

behOemoth said:
The later years of the 360 showed that it was mandatory for GTA V to be installed on a HDD or USB Stick + you shouldn't install the play disc on the HDD as the disc drive was additionally used for streaming data.
Some PS3 games like Killzone 3 also used the data streaming of the HDD + Disc to save as much RAM as possible.

Exactly.

This is one reason why GTA V was better on PS3 initially. Probably better overall.

JasoNsider said:
People talking about third party games needing to design around lowest common denominator hardware aren't necessarily wrong, per se, but I just feel they're focusing on a different set of goal posts than a lot of others are (including myself). This is subjective, but I play games (and make them) to experience the boundaries of our medium. It's exciting to see new things! Having a blazing fast SSD standard/guaranteed in every box means we're on a new frontier. I personally choose to focus on the positive - those who design for it are breaking new ground. Yes, those who design around mechanical drives can't take the same liberties, but many studios will finally be able to design around a new paradigm starting today. My imagination is going wild with possibilities in a way it did for other classic breakthrough hardware ("Using discs instead of a cartridge? What could we possibly load with that?")

Once again, all the warring and arguing makes me a little sad. I guess that's just how it goes, but I'm going to continue focusing on the exciting parts!

Again, thank you for your insight.

Yeah, the move from cartridge to disc is a perfect example.

Mr_F_Snowman · May 12, 2020

Will it translate to anything meaningful overall though in the majority of games besides the obvious load times? We've seen a fair few titles now revealed for next gen and zero of them seem to be harnessing the SSD speeds to really do anything gameplay wise - you'd think they would latch on to any marketing opportunity available to them and shout it from the rooftops if it was the case but as usual the emphasis is on visuals and res / framerate.

Did any of the dev interview sections of the Xbox event mention the SSD at all impacting game design or gameplay (genuine question as didn't watch those sections)?

Lukas Taves · May 12, 2020

nib95 said:
Sony's own slide suggests the PS5's SSD will get "at least" 5GB/s. But bear in mind that with compression the PS5's SSD has a theoretical peak of 22GB/s and 9GB/s typical.

Further to that, the PS4's mechanical drive has to contend with seek times (2-50 milliseconds) that the PS5's SSD doesn't.

So in real world terms the PS5's SSD throughput is probably going be greater comparative to the PS4's than just the raw data transfer speeds suggest.

I believe Sony's own PS5 to PS4 load times comparison had the PS4 transferring 1GB of data in 20 seconds, whilst the PS5 would do 2GB in 0.27 seconds (or 1GB in 0.135 seconds), that would put the PS5's SSD at 148x faster, which is more than the difference quoted in the OP.

At least 5GB/s was the target max for the SSD. It doesn't mean that the ssd never ever loads anything below that number.

And I don't think the 22GB/s is quoted as a peak ssd throuput it's quoted as the peak amount of data the hardware block can decompress and you want it to be higher than your actual throuput so you are never bound by it.

I think the only real world performance comparison we have was the Spiderman demo which showed the ps5 ssd loading 10x faster. But apparently it was a slower ssd I reckon. Do we have any other real world data?

nib95 · May 12, 2020

Lukas Taves said:
At least 5GB/s was the target max for the SSD. It doesn't mean that the ssd never ever loads anything below that number.

And I don't think the 22GB/s is quoted as a peak ssd throuput it's quoted as the peak amount of data the hardware block can decompress and you want it to be higher than your actual throuput so you are never bound by it.

I think the only real world performance comparison we have was the Spiderman demo which showed the ps5 ssd loading 10x faster. But apparently it was a slower ssd I reckon. Do we have any other real world data?

I assumed the load time comparison figures Sony gave were based on real time examples, because mathematically it doesn't line up otherwise. 1GB over 20 seconds works out to 50 MB/s, and 2GB over 0.27 seconds to 7.41 GB/s. Not sure how Sony arrived at those load time figures, but those are the ones they gave.

Betelgeuse · May 12, 2020

zeuanimals said:
Mind quoting it?

No problem:

JasoNsider said:
What John is saying sounds pretty right to me! I don't want to down play GPU power, but I promise everybody that you will be absolutely blown away by visuals on both consoles. However, the SSDs are the big difference when coming into this gen. We're not talking about "load times" in the classic sense. That's an antiquated way of thinking about data coming from your hard drive. For the last 10+ years we've been streaming worlds on the fly. The problem is that our assets are absolutely huge now, as are our draw distances, and our hard drives can't keep up. It means that as you move through the world we're trying to detect and even predict what assets need loading. Tons of constraints get put into place due to this streaming speed.

An ultra fast drive like the one in PS5 means you could be load in the highest level LOD asset for your models way further than you could before and make worlds any way you want without worry of it streaming in fast enough. The PS5 drive is so fast I imagine you could load up entire neighborhoods in a city with all of their maps at super high resolution in a blink of an eye. It's exciting. People don't realize that this will also affect visuals in a big way. If we can stream in bigger worlds and stream in the highest detail texture maps available, it will just look so much better.

I think the Xbox drive is also good! The PS5 drive is just "dream level" architecture though.

NaDannMaGoGo · May 12, 2020

Windows-PC said:
I really don't want to be the bad guy, but I can't get exited because of faster loading times. Maybe it's because I never had a problem with the length of loading times. I don't care if I have to wait 35 or 2 Seconds.

I care about compute power, that what put pixels as much and fast as possible on the screen.

But everyone has his own taste I guess :)

How is that even possible? How could one not care about loading taking a whole half minute longer? I straight up wouldn't be able to enjoy e.g. all souls games at all if every death meant I had to wait that long. And then best, every bonfire use and whatever, too. I despise the 3-5s that Pokemon battles take to load and prevent you from starting the actual battle.

That's just so much time you can do nothing in the game. And before any leisurely pace claims and "just taking a sip of tea" come. You can have all that whenever you actually want to, too, especially with any game that allows you to pause, which are the vast majority of them.

Time spent on loading equals the player's time wasted. And boy can they add up in games. If they were gone 100%, I wouldn't shed a tear.

dock · May 12, 2020

I currently play all my steam games off a microsd card. We all have our priorities.

SSDs will be useful though.

Ploid 6.0 · May 12, 2020

I can't wait, I so look forward to seeing games trickle down to PC so I can build my new system and shop for my new PCIe 4 or higher SSD. I'm so ready. Do your thing Sony.

jroc74 · May 12, 2020

NaDannMaGoGo said:
How is that even possible? How could one not care about loading taking a whole half minute longer? I straight up wouldn't be able to enjoy e.g. all souls games at all if every death meant I had to wait that long. And then best, every bonfire use and whatever, too. I despise the 3-5s that Pokemon battles take to load and prevent you from starting the actual battle.

That's just so much time you can do nothing in the game. And before any leisurely pace claims and "just taking a sip of tea" come. You can have all that whenever you actually want to, too, especially with any game that allows you to pause, which are the vast majority of them.

Time spent on loading equals the player's time wasted. And boy can they add up in games. If they were gone 100%, I wouldn't shed a tear.

Yeah, knowing whats on the horizon I look back at what I didnt think annoyed me and realized it did, I just tolerated it. Now? It annoys me to no end. Playing the Sims 4 on PS4 is frustrating. If Sony, MS wasnt launching next gen consoles this year and didnt have BC I would seriously be looking at putting an SSD in my PS4 and external for my One S.

I also had a PS3, and installation times became a headache real quick early on last gen.That actually got better this gen.

I'm also excited about something new. We've seen gpus and cpus get more powerful each gen, more ram get added. SSD feels like brand new territory.

zeuanimals · May 12, 2020

jroc74 said:
Yeah, knowing whats on the horizon I look back at what I didnt think annoyed me and realized it did, I just tolerated it. Now? It annoys me to no end. Playing the Sims 4 on PS4 is frustrating. If Sony, MS wasnt launching next gen consoles this year and didnt have BC I would seriously be looking at putting an SSD in my PS4 and external for my One S.

I also had a PS3, and installation times became a headache real quick early on last gen.That actually got better this gen.

I'm also excited about something new. We've seen gpus and cpus get more powerful each gen, more ram get added. SSD feels like brand new territory.

Holy shit. The dream can survive on next gen. The Sims 5 is definitely gonna be open world and there's gonna be no loading. The CPUs are also extremely beefy this time around so they could really crank up the number of AIs and stuff. It's gonna be the definitive Sims game.

Datajoy · May 12, 2020

PS5 SSD in particular seems particularly incredible. Can't wait to see what their mid-gen first party games look like.

ss_lemonade · May 12, 2020

Flash said:
People are overestimating what an SSD with that type of speed will do for gaming. Either way you slice it developers (3rd party in particular) will not solely develop games for SSD users in mind. SSDs with 4-6 gb/s have existed on PCs for years now. Nothing significant has changed. It will be a significant boost to console smoothness for specific tasks and obv loading screens but as far as changing the landscape of gaming, it won't. If the OP thinks improved loading times is THEE "biggest performance jumps" ever then we are fundamentally working with different definitions here. I guess it's relative. Find it a bit comical people are losing their shit over those types of speeds though.

When I think about "performance leaps" I am looking at improved frame rates at similar to improved resolutions in games I am already playing or looking forward to play. Loading screens and OS smoothness isn't in the same galaxy.

I have a Corsair MP600 that is just shy of hitting 5gbps read speeds during benchmarks, but didn't that just come out late last year and such speeds are only attainable with PCIE 4 SSDs?

zeuanimals · May 12, 2020

Does anybody think development time could be shaved for many games? Sure, devs would probably feel encouraged to push the hardware and see what they can really do if they're not having to spend all of their time making sure everything they need is fitting into RAM and that they're efficiently streaming the game in and out. But devs on a budget likely won't push for the craziest stuff and they're still gonna be able to create without hassle. I can see these games being cranked out much faster without a drop in quality.

And do you guys think badly optimized games are mostly gonna be a thing of the past? Not having to worry about how you're managing your RAM too much can lead to devs quickly maxing it out due to RAM management being much less of a priority. But they can still load in and out assets within a second. As long as they're not totally incompetent and can realize that maybe they should slow down a bit, I don't think we're gonna get too many games that have serious issues (unless they're trying to crank up something like RT).

Datajoy said:
PS5 SSD in particular seems particularly incredible. Can't wait to see what their mid-gen first party games look like.

It's crazy thinking that the first games made for SSDs are likely gonna pale in comparison to games made for them years down the line. It's just the beginning of a new paradigm shift in game design and I can't wait to see where devs find their limits and how they're gonna create new work arounds to push their games even further.

Of course it's not gonna be as big a jump as 2D to 3D, but it's gonna break down the walls that have shackled devs for over a decade.

NeoandGeo · May 12, 2020

JasoNsider said:
I wish I could put a giant banner on the top of the forum that reads "it's not about load times"

Drives today are predominantly streaming. Load screens are only a small portion of their use. The faster you can stream, the richer the world. If you can stream in fast enough, design itself can even change. PS5 drive is legit so fast we are opening doors on design that we still don't know exactly where it could take us.

Richer worlds brought to you at 27-30 FPS.

Windows-PC · May 12, 2020

NaDannMaGoGo said:
How is that even possible? How could one not care about loading taking a whole half minute longer? I straight up wouldn't be able to enjoy e.g. all souls games at all if every death meant I had to wait that long. And then best, every bonfire use and whatever, too. I despise the 3-5s that Pokemon battles take to load and prevent you from starting the actual battle.

That's just so much time you can do nothing in the game. And before any leisurely pace claims and "just taking a sip of tea" come. You can have all that whenever you actually want to, too, especially with any game that allows you to pause, which are the vast majority of them.

Time spent on loading equals the player's time wasted. And boy can they add up in games. If they were gone 100%, I wouldn't shed a tear.

Then how could you enjoy any game of the last 15+ years? Because loading times are thing since the PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn.

LookAtMeGo · May 12, 2020

I've actually stopped playing a few games due to load times. Odyssey and Outer Worlds come to mind. My Witcher 3 replay as well. I'm honestly so sick and tired of loading screens. Its become my biggest pet peeve as of late. That and the slow ass menus on the base PS4. Sometimes playing Warzone, I get an invite to a party chat in game and it literally takes over a minute to get it open and join the party and get back into the game.

Saying goodbye to these things is the thing that excites me more than anything going into next gen.

Deleted member 6582 · May 12, 2020

Imagine what gaming could be like with direct memory mapped media.

Chettlar · May 12, 2020

Windows-PC said:
Then how could you enjoy any game of the last 15+ years? Because loading times are thing since the PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn.

Why do I see this kind of argument all the time? It's silly. Someone can be annoyed with something and still enjoy a game despite it.

NaDannMaGoGo · May 13, 2020

Windows-PC said:
Then how could you enjoy any game of the last 15+ years? Because loading times are thing since the PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn.

In the last 15+ years I've not played many games that have loading times like that which occur all too frequently. Primarily playing on PC and Nintendo handhelds. And whenever it was the case, I hate those loading times.

More so, whether one has to endure them to enjoy an otherwise good game is one thing, to claim that one really doesn't care whether s.th. loads for 35s or 2s is something else. You really wouldn't appreciate those massive load time reductions? I straight up don't believe people who make such a claim.

Windows-PC · May 13, 2020

NaDannMaGoGo said:
In the last 15+ years I've not played many games that have loading times like that which occur all too frequently. Primarily playing on PC and Nintendo handhelds. And whenever it was the case, I hate those loading times.

More so, whether one has to endure them to enjoy an otherwise good game is one thing, to claim that one really doesn't care whether s.th. loads for 35s or 2s is something else. You really wouldn't appreciate those massive load time reductions? I straight up don't believe people who make such a claim.

I would absolutely lie if I would say that I don't appreciate the fast loading times in the next generation consoles ;)

But as I said before, loading times were never a thing that bothered me. I mean you had to accept these loading times anyway if you wanted to game on any console for the last 15+ years that used CD's as a medium in order to have fun while gaming. You get used to loading times after 15+ years, trust me ;)

low-G · May 13, 2020

zeuanimals said:
Does anybody think development time could be shaved for many games? Sure, devs would probably feel encouraged to push the hardware and see what they can really do if they're not having to spend all of their time making sure everything they need is fitting into RAM and that they're efficiently streaming the game in and out. But devs on a budget likely won't push for the craziest stuff and they're still gonna be able to create without hassle. I can see these games being cranked out much faster without a drop in quality.

And do you guys think badly optimized games are mostly gonna be a thing of the past? Not having to worry about how you're managing your RAM too much can lead to devs quickly maxing it out due to RAM management being much less of a priority. But they can still load in and out assets within a second. As long as they're not totally incompetent and can realize that maybe they should slow down a bit, I don't think we're gonna get too many games that have serious issues (unless they're trying to crank up something like RT).

It's crazy thinking that the first games made for SSDs are likely gonna pale in comparison to games made for them years down the line. It's just the beginning of a new paradigm shift in game design and I can't wait to see where devs find their limits and how they're gonna create new work arounds to push their games even further.

Of course it's not gonna be as big a jump as 2D to 3D, but it's gonna break down the walls that have shackled devs for over a decade.

SSD is still < 1/100th memory bandwidth and much higher latency so they still have to worry about RAM.

Kittens McMittens · May 13, 2020

Windows-PC said:
I would absolutely lie if I would say that I don't appreciate the fast loading times in the next generation consoles ;)

But as I said before, loading times were never a thing that bothered me. I mean you had to accept these loading times anyway if you wanted to game on any console for the last 15+ years that used CD's as a medium in order to have fun while gaming. You get used to loading times after 15+ years, trust me ;)

Honestly, I've never really put up with optical loading times. I modded my OG Xbox and Wii so I could read games from the HDD or SD card. It was actually kind of annoying in that sense when PS3 came along and games started requiring the HDD.

360 even had official support for HDD install after a while, which was usually a big improvement because 360 games also had to support reading from the optical drive.

Now we're at the tail end of this gen, loading times can be really bad. D2 can take several minutes to load into some activities. They sometimes have network issues that exacerbate it so it happens even on PC, but ignoring those cases you usually load in much faster with the SSD on pc than compared even to usb3 SSD on console.

nikasun :D · May 13, 2020

I wonder if any dev will include a "Loading..." screen and after about 2 seconds they say "Just kidding..."

dep9000 · May 13, 2020

I'm interested in what can be done with it. I'm still a skeptic

zeuanimals · May 13, 2020

low-G said:
SSD is still < 1/100th memory bandwidth and much higher latency so they still have to worry about RAM.

Of course, but it's much less of a burden on their shoulders if they can load new assets into RAM in under a second. It's like going from muskets to assault rifles.

RdN · May 13, 2020

Anyone who has ever put a SSD on an "older" computer that was equipped with an HDD will be able to tell you, without any hesitation, that the results can feel almost like magic. The boost in performance, even with and older CPU/GPU are absurd! That's exactly what I expect from next gen, specially taking into consideration that both Xbox One and PS4 have terribly slow HDDs.

Next gen SSD is the single biggest performance jump ever from generation to generation

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