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Odd take: PS5 SSD is exciting, but we should be focused more on the XSX SSD
- Thread starter melodiousmowl
- Start date
Yeah I think the simplicity in understanding Sonys raw speed accomplishment has lead to MS' claim sort of being overlooked.
But they are talking about 2x-3x gains in SSD and RAM utilization by only loading pertinent portions of a asset instead of only loading.
On paper, it sounds like they can counter Sony's raw speed by being more efficient with the load they carry.
Pretty sure he is slanted towards xbox but I do think Sony 1st party devs will make full use of the ssd benefits. For those games, it'll be a game changer.
Because of the comments from third party devs Jason Schrier has been relaying?
Nah, MS first party will most definitely take advantage of the SSD, even on crossgen games. Not terms of fundamental gameplay design - that will need to be identical across hardware - but load times, fast travel times, draw distances and LoDs will definitely benefit. All of these things are naturally scalable with hardware. It'll be the job of 1st party devs to show the QoL benefits of upgrading.
And no 3rd parties arent required to be cross gen.
"On paper, it sounds like they can counter Sony's raw speed by being more efficient with the load they carry."
look like it is.
I don't know who this Dealer guy is but the fact that you hang out in the Misterxmedia forums makes it hard for me to watch this video while expecting the guy to be objective and unbiased. Having said that I will take a look.
Edit: So he's going with the argument that the SSD speed wont matter because of the lowest common denominator in this case he uses the example of Pc's and current gen consoles with HDD's. Thing is though that eventually even third party games will more likely than not drop HDD support and require PC gamers to upgrade to SSDs. So that point is kind of moot.
And while I can see plenty of third party games that will not make full use of Sony's SSD to influence their game design, there will be other areas where the faster SSD will prove helpful. Like streaming in assets, lod etc. Besides that it seems to take alot of work out of the hands of developers so that's always a good thing. They will be able to put more of their attention elsewhere.
Finally I expect Sony's first party to make a real showing of what the SSD is capable of.
There is no reason to downplay the SSD. At the same time people will need to keep their expectations in check for a while when it comes to third party games. It will result in faster loading times, faster asset streaming and less pop in but besides that the game will not be any different from XsX to the PS5.
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Seemed like DX12 Ultimate features - but thats not to say sony doesnt have the ability to implement it, so.... (unless it relies on some hardware to do the trick, that is)
Yep, this.
No third party developer would shape its game in a way that could benefit only PS5 while there is AT LEAST a so good PC marketplace.
This is, uhh, a take. I'm not going to finish the video because he's pulling numbers out of his ass, but his main point is that the PS5 SSD is too fast, claiming that "99.9% of people" on PC won't ever have drives that fast so developers will never make games for it because the audience is non-existent.
I still don't understand why people on the PC side (not all, just to make that clear) are so against upgrading their storage.
I'm pretty sure i have already read that Sony as similar software. Which isn't surprising since it's just that, software. Having efficiënt software helps but it won't close a 130% gap. Especially not when the competition has similar software.
Yeah it makes little sense. Eventually games will require new hardware. It's been done plenty of times in the past. The easiest example is games requiring higher version of Direct X to run.
Games will be made and those unwilling to upgrade their hardware will be left behind. Simple as that.
I think that Cerny actual talked about something like this when he said they can make it up to 20+ gigs of data. At the end of the day none of these features stop smart programming. it only helps them.
I think is more DX12U features.
And seeing how he speaks I think it's more a tech created by MS for Velocity Architecture.
After maybe Sony at its equivalent and that would really put a considerable advance for data streaming asset to the XSX but i really doubt it seen how MS seems to put it forward
Sounds amazing in theory. I wonder how much more difficult it will be for devs to use. The thing with Sony's approach is it's simple: it's so damn fast, they don't have to think about efficiencies.
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Oh, yeah, thats probably correct for the most partI'm sorry, I mean no load screens.
Yes and sony approach will also benefit for faster Loading times with ultra fast Raw speed. But really smart approach from MS too.
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How many lanes of PCIe is the SSD or the decompressor in the ps5 using? 8GB/s is the normal limit on pcie4
I don't think that's true at all. Everyone I know who builds their own PCs would recommend an SSD.
The issue had been previously M.2 drives weren't worth the price difference because most games weren't designed to take advantage of the extra speed, and often had the exact same performance as a typical SSD. Once newer games take advantage of these drive speeds (largely in part to them being in the new consoles) folks will definitely be all about getting the fastest drives available.
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We still have the decompression issue - and with console games expecting to have 7 or 8 cores, that leaves PC games not a ton of CPU headroom to do decompression of so much data.
The decompressor and other IO hardware lives on the main die, which is connected to the flash controller over 4 lanes of pcie4 - enough for the 5.5GB/s coming in from the SSD. The decompressor is not on the SSD side, i.e. that connection doesn't have to support upward of 22GB/s of decompressed data flowing out.
I've seen it, and I just beat the game once. Move faster bruv.
use the master cycle zero and enter a town.
it would freeze my game every time.
Most games will only need a SATA SSD going forward, and will "scale" in the options menu of games just like any other PC game setting, if you have faster NVMe SSD drives.
Very few games need to load large blocks of info beyond SATA SSD speed to make enough of a loading time difference to the gamer, plus the costs of optimizing it with a new "code" or different data usage configuration.
(Using "loading time" as a catch-all phrase here for any type of data reads that makes a gamer wait to do something)
Very few games need to load large blocks of info beyond SATA SSD speed to make enough of a loading time difference to the gamer, plus the costs of optimizing it with a new "code" or different data usage configuration.
(Using "loading time" as a catch-all phrase here for any type of data reads that makes a gamer wait to do something)
Xbox Series X Raw SSD Power is over 2x faster than SSD and M.2 NVME in Game Loading Speed.
This is without even taking into account all the unique features of Velocity Architecture.
This is for those who think the fastest off the shelf NVME will match the speed of console SSDs.
Unmodified State of Decay 2
Xbox Series X (9 seconds)
PC SSD ( 20 seconds)
The difference between SSD and M.2 NVME in tests are less than 1 second.
This is without even taking into account all the unique features of Velocity Architecture.
This is for those who think the fastest off the shelf NVME will match the speed of console SSDs.
Unmodified State of Decay 2
Xbox Series X (9 seconds)
PC SSD ( 20 seconds)
The difference between SSD and M.2 NVME in tests are less than 1 second.
The math when saying TF don't make a difference and there isn't much in it is roundly repeated but in real world terms I'm pretty sure that you're right. The load times will be marginal at best.
Thank you for that, hopefully this won't be an issue when it's time for a new pc.
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the big reasons are: no tuning for ssd, and the cpu limit on decompression - ie it doesn't matter if you have 2gb a second available if your copy can only work on 500mb/s
People acting like SSD couldn't become a minimum requirement on PC, like higher ram did this gen.
Force people to upgrade. It's time. It isn't 10 years ago when you'd be paying hundreds for a 64gb SSD, you can get 1TB for 100$. Ganted slower than what's in these consoles, but faster than HD.
Force people to upgrade. It's time. It isn't 10 years ago when you'd be paying hundreds for a 64gb SSD, you can get 1TB for 100$. Ganted slower than what's in these consoles, but faster than HD.
You might as well say no load times, because it's probably gonna feel that way.
I'm sure there will be cool tech demo shit that 1st party studios can pull. It'll be fun to see how it translates into the big titles that everyone buys, especially as we know that game loads are going to be almost killed dead by the multi game resumes on Xbox, you could in theory only ever need to do a long load (which is where any perceived difference would be ) once
The gap between the XSX SSD and the PS5 SSD is tiny in comparison to the gap between the XSX and a 5400RPM mechanical HDD. It's not going to be a bottleneck to game design.
The odd one out and lowest common denominator is going to be PC gaming. If a developer wants a good PC version for the majority of the userbase then they're not going to be able to take advantage of the SSDs in these consoles. Nothing short of a PCIE 4.0 NVME drive is going to be enough to keep up with a XSX and they are far from common in gaming rigs, and many that are installed will be used as boot drives with most games installed to slower SSDs or even mechanical HDDs.
VR is the only thing keeping me invested in a gaming rig at this point, if Microsoft were to embrace VR (and specifically Oculus headsets) then the Series X could save me from upgrading my PC for a long time. Adding the cost of a 1TB PCIE 4.0 SSD to any PC that wants to play multi platform games is just pushing the price of PC gaming outside of what I'm prepared to pay.
The odd one out and lowest common denominator is going to be PC gaming. If a developer wants a good PC version for the majority of the userbase then they're not going to be able to take advantage of the SSDs in these consoles. Nothing short of a PCIE 4.0 NVME drive is going to be enough to keep up with a XSX and they are far from common in gaming rigs, and many that are installed will be used as boot drives with most games installed to slower SSDs or even mechanical HDDs.
VR is the only thing keeping me invested in a gaming rig at this point, if Microsoft were to embrace VR (and specifically Oculus headsets) then the Series X could save me from upgrading my PC for a long time. Adding the cost of a 1TB PCIE 4.0 SSD to any PC that wants to play multi platform games is just pushing the price of PC gaming outside of what I'm prepared to pay.
The issue isn't so much PC users having an SSD altogether, the issue is having a high end PCIE 3/4 NVME drive that's big enough to store most of your games. I've got a cheap 256GB SATA SSD and it's a fantastic boot drive but the majority of my games are still stored on an old mechanical hard drive. Even if I was using that SSD for games, it's still nowhere near fast enough to keep up with the XSX drive. It's going to be a long transition before your average PC gamer has a 1TB PCIE 4 NVME drive.
If I was upgrading my PC in preparation for playing games based around the SSDs in these consoles, I sure as hell wouldn't be buying a $100 1TB SATA SSD.
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Insofar as game design is concerned, what is less concerning is PS5's SSD bandwidth advantage and much more the bandwidth constrained current gen systems which will feature cross gen titles from both MS's FP and TP.
It will be interesting to see whether developers will adopt the Nintendo Switch approach which entailed porting certain performance taxing current gen games and altering their level design to alleviate the issues.
It will be interesting to see whether developers will adopt the Nintendo Switch approach which entailed porting certain performance taxing current gen games and altering their level design to alleviate the issues.
I mean, what's a perceived difference...
Assuming for a moment, that both support swapping between multiple suspended game states.
If I'm swapping from an active game to a suspended session of another game on XSX, that may be
(Time to write out the current game state to ssd) + ~3 seconds (time to fill 13.5GB, to restore a ram-full game state from the ssd assuming 2:1 compression)
On PS5 under the same compression assumptions and ram utilisation assumption it may be
(Time to write out the current game state to ssd) + ~1.5 seconds state restore time
This is maybe a simplification - maybe you can do fancy things so there's overlaps between reads and writes when RAM becomes 'safe' to fill with new data.
But I think we're probably not in the threshold of 'instantaneous', at least in the general case, for games whose state uses all of RAM i.e. not in the realm of diminishing returns.
Not a big deal for many people I'm sure, but depending on the write speeds for each drive, this process could be quite noticeably faster on PS5 than XSX if it's a case of several seconds vs half that, rather than '0.1 seconds vs 0.05 seconds'.
The only one I can remember atm is Wolfenstein the new colossus. I recall DF's analysis showing parts of levels being slightly altered so that render and memory budgets could be brought inline with what Switch's HW could handle whilst running at steady 30fps.
That's the one I do remember and the example I do remember was putting a big obstacle to block a vista at one point.
It's a really good point, the biggest saving is going to come from skipping logos and such, not the loading/vs resuming
Yes! That's the one. You've good memory.
So yea, I do wonder if current gen renditions of next gen games will feature design elements like those or introduce the prevalent "Squeeze through here please" interactive loading screens.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they talk about the UI letting you skip all the intro stuff and go directly to the game? I assumed you hit the button and it starts loading your save/putting you in multiplayer session instead of a suspend/resume style solution. Not that it wouldn't work (PSP Go of all things had something like that).
That's true, they did, although they wouldn't necessarily be mutually exclusive ideas. But, yeah, short-cutting into a save or a multiplayer match, with splashscreen bypasses as described in one of the Wired articles, that might serve much the same purpose as resuming a suspended game.
Another example I can cite is MK11, well particularly that Crypt thing with its N64 level fog, but I don't thank too many resources were put into that part of the port anyway. They also simplified... the character select screen.
Other than these examples, I can't recall such cutbacks. For all the visual compromises, Witcher 3 on Switch is straight up full fat Witcher 3 as far as I'm aware, complete with stuff the trees swaying hard in storms. This hasn't been too common even with Switch ports, so far at least.
DOOM Eternal will be interesting to see. Panic Button is doing that and the early levels have gigantic demons frolicking in the background as decorations from what have I seen. Will they remove or obscure things like that in some way?