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Why is SSD in PS5 made to look like a game changer? PC’s have had it for decade and it hasn’t made that much difference?
- Thread starter mogster7777
- Start date
They must be optimized for inside sdd I guess. And usb external 4gb ssd must be quite expensive
For the console, it would be something that PC gamers have had for years. Console developers will now be able to have a good size virtual memory that's fast, be able to stream assets faster and faster loading levels. However, anyone with a PC should just ignore it as marketing ploys and won't affect PC gaming at all.
We know the console will have a SSD, but will it also have a HDD on top of that? A SSD is already expensive enough as it is, so it probably won't be a very big one (~250 GB is my guess). And knowing how people on here hate having to empty their fridge and swear by keeping every single game they own installed at all times, you'll be lucky if you can manage to hold more than 2 to 5 games on that SSD at any given time. I can't imagine them also including a HDD to hold the leftover games (which will also need time to move over to the SSD whenever you want to play them, by the way). I assume most everyone will need to purchase an external HDD for that purpose? How do people feel about it?
I don't really get it either. Load times on even even a 7200rpm spinner really aren't bad. I've being running a Kingston boot ssd for like 10 years now lol. I have 2 1tb 7200rpm spinners and 3 256gb ssds. I don't really hesitate to install games on the spinners.
I'm not sure if I buy the argument that not being able to "code to the metal" on load times is holding anything back.
I hear that The Division had atrocious loadtimes on console, but it was always very snappy on an NVMe. I don't think consoles having NVMe would have resulted in the PC version being qualitatively different.
Increased RAM capacities mean more complicated scenes in terms of available textures, that was a noticeable jump when getting ports to the PC when going from PS3 to PS4 gen. Also the PS4 has gotten a lot more historically PC exclusives that have basically been port-perfect. Think of Overwatch on PS4 vs. Team Fortress 2 on PS3.
We'll definiely see fewer "squeeze through this narrow gap" and "forced walking while talking" pseudo cutscenes, but I don't think SSD will result in higher FPS or resolutions. Look at old Tomshardware on Anandtech benchmarks from when SSDs were first hitting the market, benchmarks show negligible impacts on those fronts.
One final point.
SSDs are thought of as being far less durable in terms of write cycles. What does that mean for the running 5-minute replay "clip" button on consoles?
I hear that The Division had atrocious loadtimes on console, but it was always very snappy on an NVMe. I don't think consoles having NVMe would have resulted in the PC version being qualitatively different.
Increased RAM capacities mean more complicated scenes in terms of available textures, that was a noticeable jump when getting ports to the PC when going from PS3 to PS4 gen. Also the PS4 has gotten a lot more historically PC exclusives that have basically been port-perfect. Think of Overwatch on PS4 vs. Team Fortress 2 on PS3.
We'll definiely see fewer "squeeze through this narrow gap" and "forced walking while talking" pseudo cutscenes, but I don't think SSD will result in higher FPS or resolutions. Look at old Tomshardware on Anandtech benchmarks from when SSDs were first hitting the market, benchmarks show negligible impacts on those fronts.
One final point.
SSDs are thought of as being far less durable in terms of write cycles. What does that mean for the running 5-minute replay "clip" button on consoles?
Or just not own a [gaming] PC with a modern SSD drive...
I don't think that is quite as uncommon as you are suggesting.
It will be the same like this gen, or any previous generation. if you are all in digital I don't think 1Tb is enough, but that's our micro bubble. When I bought my PS4 500Gb (I knew what I was getting into), the seller told me 500GB is more than fine that's for people that like to put movies and music in there. It was in 2016.
The general perception of what we are talking about is moot in real world.
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If Fortnite is anything to go by, my iPad Pro 10.5" loads almost twice as fast compared to the Switch/base Xbox One. Although I do have Fortnite on a 7200rpm HDD on my PC (never bothered to move it to my SSD) and the load times are much, much faster yet, like 5x the speed or more. I think the load times are more apparent due to a faster CPU than just an SSD in the case of Fortnite anyways.
I frequently change file locations of my games on my computer switch from SSD to HD depending on the priority of games I'm playing and the difference in loading is huge. It's a difference in BF4 between 2 minutes of loading on HD and 10 seconds on SSD. Or Total war with similar loading times. Imagine developers having to spend all generation designing games around the limitations of HD, doing all sorts of tricks to try reduce loading times. It's going to have a huge effect on a lot of different areas of design. Having an SSD as a baseline in next generation is going to have a huge difference when multiplatform games no longer have to work around these constraints and PC users will also see the changes involved.
What I want to know is how people will deal with lack of space next gen. I assume the largest SSD in these will be 1-2TB, and with games already breaching 150GB you'll be able to store hardly anything on there. Then if you go out and buy a mechanical hard drive you lose that supposedly huge upgrade.
Check a look!
Path of Exile with a SSD makes it feel like a faster loading Diablo 3, and Diablo 3 already felt like magic with how fast it loaded (PC) zones. Path of Exile must be played with SSD and the Standalone version not Steam (patching takes so long on steam since it allocates such a big file before patching a 20mb hotfix for example).
Path of Exile with a SSD makes it feel like a faster loading Diablo 3, and Diablo 3 already felt like magic with how fast it loaded (PC) zones. Path of Exile must be played with SSD and the Standalone version not Steam (patching takes so long on steam since it allocates such a big file before patching a 20mb hotfix for example).
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I'm not sure why the use of an SSD is being downplayed so hard here, mechanical HDDs have been a primary bottleneck on PC for a while now. Mechanical HDDs, at least at the consumer level are near the end of production, especially 2.5" HDDs. Some started ceasing production years ago.
You can buy a 1TB SSD today for about $100 retail (and probably see some for around $50 next month when major sales come about) and that price will continue to go down as these new consoles release. Check the prices for a 1TB 2.5" 5400RPM or 7200RPM hard drive on Amazon, NewEgg or whatever reliable seller you find, options are becoming limited these days and the price gap isn't nearly as big and in some cases the HDD can cost as much or more than an SSD. The price per GB argument only really holds any water anymore when it comes to 3.5" HDDs since they're still widely available but they're not going to be put into a console and from the sound of things they're going with something NVMe size or smaller instead of the old 2.5" form factor. Besides that, Sony and MS aren't paying anywhere close to retail for their SSDs.
Also, I'll be surprised if any consumer level 2.5" HDDs are still in production by the mid-way point of the next generation. Hell, I'll be surprised if any consumer level HDDs are being produced at all by then.
This is about games actually being able to be designed around having an SSD, that's going to make a difference to any game that relies heavily on streaming assets like every open world game. The door opening to being able to do that hundred or however times faster is going to have an impact.
Also, the average user whether it's in a game console or PC is not going to kill an SSD from write cycles. Your HDD is going to more likely fail from mechanical breakdown before you kill an SSD from writing to it too much.
Maybe a bit on the GPU end but definitely not on the CPU front which is where the main "biggest performance jump ever" stuff comes from because the PS4/XBO's netbook CPU is shit.
You can buy a 1TB SSD today for about $100 retail (and probably see some for around $50 next month when major sales come about) and that price will continue to go down as these new consoles release. Check the prices for a 1TB 2.5" 5400RPM or 7200RPM hard drive on Amazon, NewEgg or whatever reliable seller you find, options are becoming limited these days and the price gap isn't nearly as big and in some cases the HDD can cost as much or more than an SSD. The price per GB argument only really holds any water anymore when it comes to 3.5" HDDs since they're still widely available but they're not going to be put into a console and from the sound of things they're going with something NVMe size or smaller instead of the old 2.5" form factor. Besides that, Sony and MS aren't paying anywhere close to retail for their SSDs.
Also, I'll be surprised if any consumer level 2.5" HDDs are still in production by the mid-way point of the next generation. Hell, I'll be surprised if any consumer level HDDs are being produced at all by then.
The biggest selling point comes from data streaming for games with open world and/or large, detailed environments that's been issue with mechanical HDDs as games get bigger/more detailed over the years and have become a bottleneck over the last decade in many cases, even outside of gaming. SSDs can absolutely help frame rates/times in certain situations like off initial loads into a game or whenever storage is being hit and reduce stuttering, Batman Arkham Knight which to be fair, is a bad example because the PC port was shit (but I'm sure someone can come up with a better one) however running the game off an SSD allowed people (including myself) to brute force the severe frame rate killing LOD issues it had. Your examples are games set in relatively small, closed environments so no, outside of load times they probably won't see much impact unless developers go nuts but it's going to still be noticeable it when games take a second to load. GTA V on PC I think it's a good example of seeing the benefits of an SSD vs HDD, especially when moving at higher speeds.
This is about games actually being able to be designed around having an SSD, that's going to make a difference to any game that relies heavily on streaming assets like every open world game. The door opening to being able to do that hundred or however times faster is going to have an impact.
Also, the average user whether it's in a game console or PC is not going to kill an SSD from write cycles. Your HDD is going to more likely fail from mechanical breakdown before you kill an SSD from writing to it too much.
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You don't know what you're talking about. Consoles can work magic when compared to PC in some situations due to developers being able to build their engines from the ground up around that tech being in every device.
A 80-90% reduction in load times is is a whole lot.
Absolutely not, ssd's have damn near eliminated loading times in some pc games, and with ssd's as a standard in all consoles developers can design the games with that in mind to further improve performance, and the added reliability is a nice bonus too.
Because there are no PC games that REQUIRE an SSD.
while essentially every next-gen game will require one, because it's standard.
Game design can fundamentally change when they know 100% of the playerbase has access to a feature,
so you don't need to add in workarounds for people on a slow HDD
The baseline has shifted. Same deal with raytracing.
while essentially every next-gen game will require one, because it's standard.
Game design can fundamentally change when they know 100% of the playerbase has access to a feature,
so you don't need to add in workarounds for people on a slow HDD
The baseline has shifted. Same deal with raytracing.
Yeah but I'm not looking forward to all the complaining on the PC side from people who still only run games off an HDD. :(
Even though by 2021 there's going to be little excuse not to have at least a reasonably large capacity 2.5" SSD.
It's not really that, it's that apparently freed from the generalized constraints of PC (file system? Some console exclusive hardwiring?) they are getting like a direct super fast connection to the SSD that PC's just cant replicate.
Then throw in they'll be like super fast NVME SSD as default, where PC SSD are who knows what, a million different configurations, SATA 3 etc. The mouth waters. Consider it like a really giant cartridge, IMO.
It's honestly fairly exciting as load times are something that we just never seemed to be able to conquer in the past.
When discussing NVME drives etc online I often say big deal, nothing will really use that throughput in general light use computing (unless you work with really big files). Welp, this is basically the time we will actually get to see that blazing NVME theoretical throughput speed. Giggity.
BTW Xbox will have this too, it's not unique. This is a general breakthrough that just made sense for all.
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And this console with a magical 1 TB SSD drive is going to cost $399?
no he believes all of this. Check out his post history. Specially threads created by him. Grab some popcorn. It will be a wild ride. Lol
It'll become a soft-requirement I think. Like, you can play on an HDD but the texture streaming, loading, etc, will be horrible.
Yeah, no doubt PC versions will also require games an SSDs if they're built with it in mind.
Game load times result from how long it takes to transfer data from a storage device to Memory. The major player there is the CPU and bus.
On PC moving from a HDD to a SSD does shaves some time off but doesn't even come close to even halving it in games despite the magnitude difference in read timings. The same thing with going from traditional SATA SSD to a nvme SSD, it further lessens the loading times but sure as hell doesn't show a 10x increase in speed.
Or there's cases where upgrading Storage speeds does jack shit:
This shit has been benchmarked to hell and back for a long time now. Essentially console games load slow as fuck due to shitty CPUs, not shitty the HDD.
The Sony SSD thing is just this gens GDDR crap again.
On PC moving from a HDD to a SSD does shaves some time off but doesn't even come close to even halving it in games despite the magnitude difference in read timings. The same thing with going from traditional SATA SSD to a nvme SSD, it further lessens the loading times but sure as hell doesn't show a 10x increase in speed.
Or there's cases where upgrading Storage speeds does jack shit:
This shit has been benchmarked to hell and back for a long time now. Essentially console games load slow as fuck due to shitty CPUs, not shitty the HDD.
The Sony SSD thing is just this gens GDDR crap again.
You forget about the Switch. Devs will still have to cater for them one way or another.
Basically.
WELL, in some sense mechanical hard drives should be more expensive eventually. They're a big thing with mechanical parts. An SSD is just some chips.
Sure that isn't reality yet, but SSDs have obviously reduced in price a stunning amount in recent years. I'd expect that to continue.
You can get a ~128GB SSD for 20 bucks. Thats a consumer price, MS/Sony will get it for less. A~512GB is ~$40-50 consumer. That's probably nearly equivalent wholesale cost to the mechanical's they are putting in now. You save $ in things like space and power of the form factor design, mabe cooling of the entire system, it's just so much nicer. A 2.5" HDD vs a NVME SSD is no comparison.
So I can see them stretching, big volume discounts, rapidly falling prices, and they'll probably get a 1TB SSD in there if I had to guess, but CERTAINLY no less than 512, (but I'd say 99% odds of a 1TB). But yeah probably 499 at first, who expected different? Last consoles were 499/599 at launch 6 years ago...you wont be just paying for the SSD, also snazzy new Zen 2 chipset ring a bell? Not inexpensive.
Sony and MS arent dumb. They're not guessing this will work, they know it will work, and they know the prices they will pay for storage in 2020, and they're not stupid, they arent going to ship a console with a 256 SSD.
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Sigh. False. They're limited to USB 3.0 for starters, it doesn't even matter how fast of an SSD you put in when the I/O is limited. On top of that current consoles OS arent even designed to take advantage of SSD at all. SSD does help, I use one on Destiny. But it's not like gen next will be.
Trust, you will see. It should be a huge difference.
This is a wrong statement because it's incredibly game dependant. In some it does make barely any difference, but then I've played others where it does far more than halve loading (and that's without getting into other bonuses like less stuttering in games with lots of streaming and other mid-game loading).
You can buy a Crucial P1 1 TB Nvme Pci Express x 4 for 95 dollars, which is a fast drive but still average or below compared to other brands like Samsung Evos. Sony PR is promising the fastest SSD speeds ever. Not going to happen.
I don't think it will be a custom interface; it will be a PCIe 4.0/NVMe drive.
But virtually all drives for PC only use four PCIe lanes. There are a number of reasons for that, but the main one is that you have a limited number of lanes from the CPU on mainstream platforms (24 with Ryzen, fewer with Intel) and the main 16-lane connection is used for the GPU. The remaining lanes are split across multiple ports for connecting other devices.
A console doesn't need extra PCIe slots for expansion devices, so you would be able to dedicate 16 lanes to a single drive - which is my prediction for the PS5's "custom SSD".
I'm expecting that to have read speeds around 16GB/s, which would be enough to fill the system's RAM in 1 second.
16GB/s sounds like a lot, but it would be quite modest for a 16-lane PCIe 4.0 drive when you consider that 4-lane drives are currently reaching speeds of 5GB/s and theoretically should be able to reach 7GB/s.
It would actually be a lower-end drive per-lane, but makes up for it by using many of them.
I expect the Xbox to be using an off-the-shelf 4-lane PCIe 4.0 SSD with ~5GB/s read speeds.
So it will be a significant improvement, but not quite what Sony is doing with its custom drive.
If the Xbox design is modified to try and compete with Sony's custom SSD we might see them using two drives for ~10GB/s, but I'm expecting a single 4-lane drive.
Eehhh...not in the way you are thinking. Switch will get the ports from the PS4/XBO versions, not so much the PS5 versions unless they are really scaled down.
Oh, the lengths we go to optimize load times during development... De facto SSDs on both consoles will be a blessing (along with the larger RAM pool).
I mean you can install an SSD on a PS4 Pro today. I think the point is they can control the BUS, and optimize every component for performance. Then developers and optimize games for it, vs on a PC where you need more horsepower for equivalent performance. The thing is, it will probably make a significant different, and help make SSDs on PC more useful as well.
Well said.
Also, SSD's have made a huge difference in PC's, I honestly can't remember the last game that made me wait a while on a loading screen.
Because PC gaming isn't as big as Console gaming?
It's like asking why something iOS or Android did is a big deal when Windows Phone did it years ago.
It's like asking why something iOS or Android did is a big deal when Windows Phone did it years ago.
Anthem should have waited for this haha. I bet super fast or no loading would make that game more enjoyable, ok obviously it would. SSD made PC version of Dragon Age Inquisition more tolerable to change locations. The long loading made me dread thinking about leaving areas.
This varies wildly depending on the game.
Here's Skyrim as an example, where load times are sped up between 2 and 3 times faster.
All the Elder Scrolls games are heavy on the hard disk reads, since there are so many files being read every time you load an area. When Morrowind came out there was a very noticeable difference in load times between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM hard disks.