Compression is a big deal for next gen as well. Not only it's what's helping the PS5 achieve 9GB/s of bandwidth (paired with custom hardware specialized in decompressing data), it will also help keep the storage footprint of said assets more in control. We shouldn't expect, necessarily, a growth in data size proportional to current gen, because next-gen is also coming with improved compression.
Yeah dedicated hardware decompression will help. But that's by a factor of 2 or four.
The SSD is 100x's faster than last gen. And stuff like the UE5 demo's detail REQUIRING the PS5 SSD (hinting that XSX SSD isn't fast enough) is just insane. That means it requires greater than ~40x's faster than last gen (XSX speed roughly). Even taking into account compression that's a huge storage jump if you sustain that kind of requirement for long. Requiring the XSX speeds is as well, let alone PS5.
The data I'm quoting is the compressed size either way... 5.5gb second of data drawn from disk that is compressed. So while it helps, it doesn't really change anything I said. Compression will allow you to shrink games, but doesn't really mean that sustaining 5.5gb/second is reasonable.
In regards file size you won't have to clone as much data and spread it around the hdd.
I always think forests could be a good example how the SSD helps with file size. Instead of having 5 different tree models repeated 40 times each on the Hdd, you only need the 5 models in one location.
Lets say each tree is 1mb in size, instead of using up 200mb of space you only need 5mb. Where it gets interesting is that you could still use 200mb of the budget on tress but this time you could have 200 individual tree models. That's way more than enough to make any game have the most convincing and real looking forests ever.
Im not sure if this is possible on next gen, but why not have 'warehouse' of materials on ssd, like a pallet of bricks. Each brick is individual, each brick can be randomly placed in a wall on the fly.
If you break stuff down like that then maybe, just maybe, file sizes won't be 1tb in size. If the ssd is fast enough to just pull in random data like bricks and assign them in place we potentially are looking at a new ways that games will be designed.
I read that data duplication is around 20% of current gen games sizes; I almost mentioned that in that post but it was already so long winded.
Compression.. removal of asset duplication all help with game file sizes. All these things help, but I still don't see how they can lead to being able to leverage 100x's the speed of last gen consistently in any manner... those things don't change the insane data speed and what that means for the amount of data used to draw a scene.
Cerny talking about it taking .27 seconds to "turn your head" and being able to load 1.5GB+ in that time frame... I mean that sounds amazing... but if you are loading 1.5GB+ when the player turns their head... that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's not realistic to do that often until we all have 10 gigabit internet and multi-terabyte SSD.
It's insanely future proofed tech that will see awesome IMMEDIATE advantages... but level of detail can't go TOO FAR right now due to disk storage.
