-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
What if PS5's SSD only eliminates loading times on PS4 games, and not next-gen titles?
- Thread starter Deeke
- Start date
You know what he means. He's not wrong. The point of the SSD is that.
This. The SSD removes the disk from being the bottleneck but there will be bottlenecks.
What if mandatory Intel CPU lockdown patch cripples SSDs in Windows PCs until a completely new CPU architecture rolls out? What then OP? What then?
I think you should be scared. Go hide under the bedclothes for a couple of years before we can be sure that we're safe.
I think you should be scared. Go hide under the bedclothes for a couple of years before we can be sure that we're safe.
Even a bog standard low spec SATA SSD can sequentially read at about 400MB/s. The better ones are much faster. If next gen has, say, 24GB of RAM of which like 20GB can be used for games (I'm using the current top end guess to make it a worst case for loading) then you can fill that 20GB in about 50 seconds.
The norm for next gen will be getting into the game world within 30 seconds of hitting the icon on your home screen and then never seeing another load screen again, as games will just be constantly streaming assets into memory. Even if there has to be a complete texture refresh due to changing environments, say from going from outside in a city to inside, devs will be able to easily mask short loads with airlocks.
Also, most people think are the SSD they'll be using is a next-gen PCIe4 part. They don't even exist yet, and should be even faster than the SSDs you can get today.
Edit: I just thought about fast travel though. That might still result in load screens in games that have that, but having fairly consistent 20s worst case fast travel is still miles better than today.
The thread or OP? Because the responses I see here piling on OP are pretty toxic
There's still stuff like procedural generation that can cause load screens; things that eat CPU or are network dependent (syncing with some sort of online world/db.) There's tricks they can pull like having you walk through a boring hallway to get somewhere so that the CPU can be used in the background but there's only so much they can do particularly for the online semi-connected worlds that are so common.
But you are probably right about data not being an issue anymore w/ the bandwidth + RAM size. But I still wouldn't guarantee it for all games.
Last edited:
Do some people think that game file sizes will massively increase next generation? I sure don't, especially if they will still ship games on Blu-Ray & the state of global internet speeds. Yeah, they can top out at 120GB+, but how far away is that from RDR2 file size? Plus how much of this premium storage will we have? And will it be user serviceable?
The insomniac Spider-Man GDC video is great since it not only has a good look at how at the game was built, what limitations they hit and gives some great thoughts at what a future will look like when some of these things are alleviated.
New compression methods can be employed too, but you will also have a CPU and most likely a RAM boost to help offset that in the PS5.
The insomniac Spider-Man GDC video is great since it not only has a good look at how at the game was built, what limitations they hit and gives some great thoughts at what a future will look like when some of these things are alleviated.
New compression methods can be employed too, but you will also have a CPU and most likely a RAM boost to help offset that in the PS5.
I don't get it. Doesn't make sense put it on ps5 then if things won't change for larger game.
Kinda baffled by this thread. Do people not know what loading is and how bigger games would that?
Well, it would still be faster compared to a slow (like the PS4 has) HDD, that's the point
Say bigger games will have the same loading times of the ps4, seems absurd to me. Why promote it in first place. Sony isn't it that stupid.
What don't you get? More assets take longer loads. It's not a constant variable.
Think of it this way.
One this gen dump truck that runs at 5 mph takes 10 mins to carry a load to its destination
A faster next gen dump truck running 10 mph can take the same load in 5 mins.
A next gen 4k game needs to take two loads instead of one so it carries two in 10 mins.
Same loading time but a lot more data.
Obviously not with making this thread as a knee jerk reaction, and not understanding NAND, and how consoles currently offload/stream data.
You know, in theory such stuff is developed with new games in mind. You don't study a new hardware with the old game assets in mind. Now if you means things could getting worse when more years have passed, sure. But hardly will see the same shitness of the Witcher 3, Prey and so on. The hardware should have been projected to avoid exactly that.
The system that was leaked and video shown during the Playstation Briefing talked about how some of the loading works. They are using some kind of PCIE/NVME storage with either some of it being on the PCB itself and offloading the game data lets say from a disc or HDD on the NVME which uses a form of NAND flash or whatever the newest form is which has changed last time I read up on it.
But anyway the way the data is pre-cached is on a temp storage that either loads part or the whole game on it it for fast access. WHich is why in the video thats circulating in other threads is shows how a game loads the data on PS4PRO vs PS5.
So as not to dogpile... Yes, loading is going to vary from game to game, and more complex PS5 titles are going to likely take longer to load than the games of the previous gen. But generally speaking, this isn't like memory size or something where the memory pool keeps increasing but devs just keep using it up. The jump to actually using an SSD/Whatever their custom solution (Something you can see now on PC), will continue to be a noticeable jump even into this next gen.
Honestly, I'd be more worried about PS4 titles not doing whatever is required to take advantage of this tech (At least in a meaningful way).
Honestly, I'd be more worried about PS4 titles not doing whatever is required to take advantage of this tech (At least in a meaningful way).
Pretty much yeah. SSD is gonna be a massive advance for read speeds, but games are also going to quadruple in size.
We don't know for sure since we haven't seen specs, but the increase in volume of assets being loaded will very likely be considerably less than the speed increases we will be getting from this new SSD tech. PS5 games will load plenty fast.
I think people are overestimating how big the assets will be. I think the big improvements next gen will be more in shading and lighting, including things like raytracing. Polygons and textures are already good enough for 4K, I don't think they'll get that much more complex.
It's a fair question... SSDs makes loading faster, but won't it be offset by devs using it to load higher quality (and quantity) assets?
But the answer lies in RAM. That's the real limiter... once it's full, there's nowhere left to load anything to. Unless the PS5 has an insane amount of RAM, loading times should be short/nonexistent even for PS5 games designed to take full advantage of the system's capabilities.
But the answer lies in RAM. That's the real limiter... once it's full, there's nowhere left to load anything to. Unless the PS5 has an insane amount of RAM, loading times should be short/nonexistent even for PS5 games designed to take full advantage of the system's capabilities.
I don't think so but it depends on how Sony executes bc. There should be no patch required to load games faster (games already have different loading times depending on the storage you use for PS4, just not to an extreme because of other reasons).
I understand what you're saying, OP, but games would have to have vastly, vastly heavier assets to make any meaningful difference. It's not really possible for that to be the case since storage media is seemingly not expanding dramatically alongside this. Other things you listed like raytracing aren't things that get loaded from the SSD, those sorts of things are mainly done in real time and lean on the CPU and GPU.
Every time someone in this thread says this I have to think about how to respond to it, because it makes no sense.
If the system only has so much RAM, let's say 16GB as a hypothetical with 14GB of that being usable by devs, the game being larger will not change how much is loaded into RAM other than less RAM, not more. 14GB is a fixed number in this case. Whatever it's using, which I've been leaning towards PCIe 4.0 since the Wired article, it will not change the speed the amount of data getting transferred is. the game could be 300GB in size but the assets still have to fit into 14GB of memory. The game could be 20GB and still fit the at-that-time used data into 14GB. The transfer speed will not change. the only thing that might change is decompressing any compressed data being sent, but that's going to be quick, because the CPU won't change either.
This thread is a mess. Op got backfired and some posters trying to correct him got backfired in their own logic lol
Thanks for the laugh Era.
Thanks for the laugh Era.
User Warned - Thread Whining
It has been a very long time since I bore witness to an Era thread whose very existence was as unmerited as this.
Last edited:
That's not how this works OP. Even with substantial increases in data needing to be transferred, it will without a doubt be eons faster than it currently is, that's the whole point of moving to SSD, the ceiling gets raised. The absolute most complex games will likely take more time based on what they are trying to process, but that's still completely different from relying on an ancient mechanical drive based somewhere in the last decade. And we're talking about a machine that comes with this read/write solution as standard and every game tailor made to its specifications. Its not the same as just putting an SSD in a PC or a current console.
