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VG24/7: Developers making Xbox Series X games will learn to address PS5’s SSD advantage, says ex-Xbox lead
- Thread starter chris 1515
- Start date
i expect better textures, or more detailed character models. maybe even better draw distance. basically everything that is vram bound might be better on the ps5.
would it be meaningful? hard to say because like resolution, high rest textures and better draw distance is hard to see unless you are zooming in all the way.
I can't wait to see the difference also. I sure hope we don't get the lazy devs line.
I wonder 5 years down the line and games finally take 1 minute long to load even on ps5 will we really notice the difference. I'm assuming this because I'm expecting games to be more ambitious and maybe the familiar of the tech won't lead to that much of an increase though
Where would all of that data be going?
Yeah, pretty much every advantage that XSX could have had has all been sucked up now apparently. Resolution differences will be imperceptible and everything else (textures, LoD, draw distance, asset quality, etc) will be better on PS5. What a time.
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Never. Even taking just the raw bandwidth number alone, it would take the PS5 under three seconds to fill its entire pool of RAM.
Specs not advertised (ignoring TF, SSD and external bandwidths) , but extrapolated from RDNA1, the weighting goes to:
Texture fillrate is XSX
Pixel fillrate is PS5
Geometry rate is PS5
Culling rate is PS5
Rasterisation is PS5
Cache internal bandwidth is PS5
Framebuffer bandwidth is XSX
AI with ML is XSX
Raytracing is XSX
They are both powerful and close in performance, with different strengths and weaknesses.
Texture fillrate is XSX
Pixel fillrate is PS5
Geometry rate is PS5
Culling rate is PS5
Rasterisation is PS5
Cache internal bandwidth is PS5
Framebuffer bandwidth is XSX
AI with ML is XSX
Raytracing is XSX
They are both powerful and close in performance, with different strengths and weaknesses.
A brief respite of common sense from all the rabid console warring in this thread pushing an erroneous narrative brandishing the XSX as antiquated tech.
Thank you, Thomas.
I just don't think it will go from amazing textures and no pop in to muddy textures and noticeable pop in. We will have to wait and see but if it's just let's say ultra setting textures down to high than I don't think most will notice imo
Lol I have no idea, but it's fair to say a more ambitious game will even make the ps5 SSD And IO not good enough to load things in seconds?
Well the PS5's whole RAM allotment can be filled in seconds so I'm not sure anything can increase that.
I think both the XSX and the PS5 have the potential to leverage their respective skill sets in ways that will be noticeable and I think it's great that those skill sets don't entirely overlap. One of my worries this gen was that the two boxes would be too similar and it seems like they might end up pretty different in some interesting ways. I think the diversity is good for everyone involved.
For me, the main pain points I have been having with games over the last few years are load times and pop in. They just really bug me. These problems will both be greatly lessened by both consoles, but the PS5 has the potential to eliminate them entirely in many games. That really excites me.
It's probably meant for first party. If they're the only ones who can push it hard, that would be a big performance advantage for their own games.
The ps4 has had a streak of graphically intensive games that sold very well and attracted buyers. The fast ssd might primarily be for first party since they are now very big on that front.
Also vr, tho. That and the 3d sound.
The ps4 has had a streak of graphically intensive games that sold very well and attracted buyers. The fast ssd might primarily be for first party since they are now very big on that front.
Also vr, tho. That and the 3d sound.
It's a fast SSD, it's just not as fast as the PS5's. That being said the Series X overall is a more powerful system, but the differences with the systems are not as big as the Xbox One and PS4 at the start of this generation. Both of these systems are beasts though, and no doubt Sony first party will take great advantage of the the PS4's hardware solutions.
The XSX has an SSD and it's a very good SSD. MS did a lot of work to optimize how it moves textures to make it very good at that task. Which makes sense, because textures are the main thing you want to be able to move around quickly.
The PS5 just has a super-bonkers-over-the-top-SSD. Instead of optimizing it for textures, they just sort of optimized it for everything. Sony did a ton of custom work in the whole IO stack and ended up with something that is around twice as fast as what the XSX has. It's not just faster in pure transfer speed either, it is should have less latency and is structured in such a way that the speed of the SSD is very easy for devs to exploit.
The XSX SSD is roughly 50 times faster than the storage in the XBO and PS4. The PS5 is closer to 100x faster. Time will tell how much that difference really means.
the same way devs learn to mitigate apparent areas where something lags, other devs will better learn to exploit areas that are a strength ...
I'll tell you what the LOD and assets in games on my PC are not limited by my SSD. You realize the GPU/CPU still has to process this stuff. Also if you break it down to 16ms for a 60fps game you are talking about 5MBs so about 80MBs which isn't much asset or texture wise so stuff won't instantly load in like that. I'm getting both consoles but I'm not getting my hopes up anything gaming wise is going to really change. Basically PCs struggle with current games 60fps at 4K and don't even get started with ray tracing, I think Minecraft runs ok on top end cards.
I'll just stop you here. The assets and LOD in games on your PC are not limited by your SSD because the games you're playing were not designed with SSD in mind as the lowest common denominator. Instead, the games you're playing were designed around 5200rpm mechanical drives with seek times.
Try playing Star Citizen (a game designed around a minimum baseline of a SATA SSD, not NVMe SSD) with a traditional HDD and get back to me. Hell, I'll save you the effort, it'll basically be unplayable, with constant stuttering, freezing, pauses, tanked frame rates etc.
Stop thinking about what SSD's can offer only through the prism of current gen games. Next gen games will be beholden to entirely different standards, at least when we pass the cross-gen period anyway.
I can't wait to see multiplatform games. Could make for some genuinely interesting non-clearcut differences. Some things may be better on PS5, while others better on Series X. And then Lockhart will add yet another dynamic (but I am guessing that system's differences will probably usually come down to resolution and maybe texture quality and LOD).
That's how multiplatform development works, developers have neither the time nor the budget to design their game differently for every platform.
So the next gen battle will be framerates and resolution AND level of detail ?
Just another thing for the boffins at digital foundry to educate me on I guess
I tried to say the same thing (especially for third party / multiplatform titles, therefore the majority of games).
That said:
PS5, next-gen only, exclusive First Party games (created with that particular SSD, and that particular I/O capabilities in mind) will for sure add further innovations visible to gamers down the line, not possible on other platforms. It will be great to see how they will translate to actual gameplay advantages.
I guess one thing I've been wondering this entire time is if MS did do an assessment and determined that their SSD speeds would be sufficient for next-generation engines? Do we know the general point of sufficiency on SSD speeds to achieve seamlessness? Is it at the speeds of the PS5's SSD? Or will the XSX's SSD be sufficient to meet those needs?
Of course, "more is always better" here - so the PS5 SSD will undoubetdly be easier to use in many ways for deverlopers - but will the XSX hold anything back? Or, rather, will users on the XSX really have lesser experiences?
I guess time will only tell - but I'm very curious to see how all of this plays out in real world terms.
Okay, but rendering time is still a hard limitation and I somehow doubt every developer is going to be adopting a Nanite-like system right away (especially if, as speculated, the high-res assets absolutely balloon install sizes beyond reason).
I'm not so certain LOD pop-in is going away.
I mean inferior hardware will always hold back superior hardware if a game is developed for both. It's very likely that multiplatform titles will be developed with the lower SSD in mind so that they run on both consoles. Sony first party is where we'll see these seamless gaming experiences.
I suspect the differences in real games won't be as dramatic as many are expecting. Agreed.
What if the engine doesn't necessitate those SSD speeds, though? I guess I'm wondering why are we assuming that engines will all of sudden require 9gb/s speeds when they're been working off of glacial HDD mb/s speeds for the last generation?
I agree things will be interesting for first party games - but even then, I imagine it'll take a bit of time into the generation before the i/o is really being pushed to its limits.
d
Please, watch this video, it will explain why communication (IO) is more important than Tflops when it comes to online rendering :
Please, watch this video, it will explain why communication (IO) is more important than Tflops when it comes to online rendering :
It was the ps360 gen cell referencing that threw the conversation into unproductive territory, it wasn't a good analogy in terms of harnessing potential of an individual next gen platform in the context of 3rd party game production because, as far as we've been made aware, neither system has this kind of esoteric hardware that requires this*. Cell wasn't just sat there waiting to be helpful, it took ridiculously talented specialists plenty of time to tame that beast.
Nobody is suggesting 3rd party game/level design will be in any way enhanced on ps5 over xsx due to ssd and i/o speeds, that's simply going against the whole 3rd party production line process. But inherent benefits of faster data acces and i/o will be there to be taken advantage of by multi-platform engines in terms of obvious things such as draw distance and texture pop-in, and more so in an ongoing capacity as engines are retooled to leverage scaleable asset access rather than traditional multiple LOD levels etc.
*Actually ps5 does, it has cell-like modified CU architecture in its audio processing system that is not dedicated just to that, can be . Remains to be seen whtether this is something that is leveraged down the line by devs who want to rinse the last drops of potential out of the hardware... it'd be cool to think the few people still around with a decade-old ninja-like command over Cell could have their day once again.
It's not a requirement, but if it's there, then better quality assets can be loaded and used in the game time critical fraction of a second it takes in which the game world changes.
I'd be surprised if anyone used the Tempest engine ALU for other things besides audio. Compared to SPUs, it is equivalent to 4 of them (each SPU ~ 25.6 GFlops, Tempest ~ 100 GFlops). When you consider Zen 2 CPU has 8 cores, and each core has an AVX vector unit, each capable of 112 GFlops each (32 Flops per cycle x 3.5 GHz).
It's amazing reading this thread that people seem to fail to comprehend what Thomas was saying.
- PS5 1st party will make full use of IO and create levels designed to showcase this
- 3rd party will use the available IO bandwidth for better load times, texture streaming, whatever scalability the engine offers etc. But they won't change the fundamental nature of the game to take advantage of a single platform. Just as the XSX version will use engine scaling to benefit from its GPU and RAM bandwidth advantage.
The way things are being broken down you'd think MS are putting a mechanical drive in there with zero software efficiencies behind it. /s
Just bring on the games already, so we can make actual tangible comparisons. 11th can't come soon enough!
Will it make Xbox versions of game characters younger and smoother without less wrinkles and bumps?
I don't think it's that simple, things that are easy to take advantage of(not PS3 SPUs), developers will just use. Like how a lot of developers took advantage of 360 unified RAM pool knowing the PS3 port will suffer for it. If it's in front of you and it could make your life easier "now", a lot of people will just take advantage of it, and in classic "fuck them" human nature fashion, this is even more true when the other console port is being handled by another team(again, like what happened with PS360).
I mentioned this before bith console specs was announced but I asked if LOD would be improved with next gen and was told basically no. What I mean is when your walking along in say a game like gta5 and you can see a circle around you change the detail as you walk, I'm saying this because I hope LOD the right thing for what I'm describing.
So anyway with both consoles have great SSDs does this mean that the stupid circle I see in games wont be visible because it's so far away. This really bothered me this gen, are both consoles going to be able to change this or was what someone answered me ages ago still true that I would still be able to see that transition of detail.
So anyway with both consoles have great SSDs does this mean that the stupid circle I see in games wont be visible because it's so far away. This really bothered me this gen, are both consoles going to be able to change this or was what someone answered me ages ago still true that I would still be able to see that transition of detail.
Haven't this always been part of what they did?
How is it any different now?
What thuway mentioned has always been part of what DF and others similar to them looked at.
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It's funny how people expect less details and worst LOD on XSX because its SSD is slower...
Remember that its SSD will be 70-80 times faster than current gen HDDs with almost inexistant access time (compared to 10-20 ms on 2.5" HDDs), their's no way LOD and pop-in will be affected by a "slower" SSD than the PS5...
You're setting your expectations way too high, maybe only the first loading time will be slower by a second instead of two on PS5, that's all.
Even on PC slower NVMe drives are not fully exploited by games and the system unless copying tons of data, which optimized games don't do.
(I know those consoles architectures will use the SSD more efficiently but still, games won't need to load dozens of GB to load a map).
Streaming data in a open world rely a lot on CPU, sometimes more than storage, the more data to process, the more CPU it will use.
On XSX we already have somewhat of an example of what it's capable to do, when switching Xbox One X games on the fly with Forza Motorsport 7 and others. It loads it from a copy of the RAM on the SSD, but remember that it has to write the current game's RAM data on the SSD before loading it (to save the current game state), it only take a few seconds to switch from game to game (using up to 9GB of RAM).
Remember that its SSD will be 70-80 times faster than current gen HDDs with almost inexistant access time (compared to 10-20 ms on 2.5" HDDs), their's no way LOD and pop-in will be affected by a "slower" SSD than the PS5...
You're setting your expectations way too high, maybe only the first loading time will be slower by a second instead of two on PS5, that's all.
Even on PC slower NVMe drives are not fully exploited by games and the system unless copying tons of data, which optimized games don't do.
(I know those consoles architectures will use the SSD more efficiently but still, games won't need to load dozens of GB to load a map).
Streaming data in a open world rely a lot on CPU, sometimes more than storage, the more data to process, the more CPU it will use.
On XSX we already have somewhat of an example of what it's capable to do, when switching Xbox One X games on the fly with Forza Motorsport 7 and others. It loads it from a copy of the RAM on the SSD, but remember that it has to write the current game's RAM data on the SSD before loading it (to save the current game state), it only take a few seconds to switch from game to game (using up to 9GB of RAM).
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