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How Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture supercharge the IO system of the Sony PS5

platocplx

platocplx

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The Sony PS5 will have the fastest data loading ever available in a mass market consumer device, and we think it may be even better than you have previously heard. What makes that possible is a fast SSD, an excellent IO stack that is fully independent of the CPU, and the Kraken hardware decoder. Kraken compression acts as a multiplier for the IO speed and disk capacity, storing more games and loading faster in proportion to the compression ratio.
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Sony has previously published that the SSD is capable of 5.5 GB/s and expected decompressed bandwidth around 8-9 GB/s, based on measurements of average compression ratios of games around 1.5 to 1. While Kraken is an excellent generic compressor, it struggled to find usable patterns on a crucial type of content : GPU textures, which make up a large fraction of game content. Since then we've made huge progress on improving the compression ratio of GPU textures, with Oodle Texture which encodes them such that subsequent Kraken compression can find patterns it can exploit. The result is that we expect the average compression ratio of games to be much better in the future, closer to 2 to 1.
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Kraken plus Oodle Texture gets nearly double the compression of Zip alone on this texture set.

Oodle Texture is a software library that game developers use at content creation time to compile their source art into GPU-ready BC1-7 formats. All games use GPU texture encoders, but previous encoders did not optimize the compiled textures for compression like Oodle Texture does. Not all games at launch of PS5 will be using Oodle Texture as it's a very new technology, but we expect it to be in the majority of PS5 games in the future. Because of this we expect the average compression ratio and therefore the effective IO speed to be even better than previously estimated.
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More at the link
cbloomrants.blogspot.com

How Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture supercharge the IO system of the Sony PS5

The Sony PS5 will have the fastest data loading ever available in a mass market consumer device, and we think it may be even better than yo...
cbloomrants.blogspot.com cbloomrants.blogspot.com

Really sounds promising for the size of games in the future. Really interested to see this in real life applications.
 
Musubi

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I cannot wait to see the PS5 in action. Like goddamn. The potential of this hardware has me downright giddy.
 
RivalGT

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I really don't understand much of this, but it sounds like a good thing. PS5 already had a crazy good IO, and this will make it even more efficient.
 
MercuryLS

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So 2:1 ratio we're looking at 11Gb/s decompressed? That's wild, taking the OS overhead out, that's like 1 second load time.
 

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Really impressive stuff. What we have seen so far in just the tip of what I expect to be an awesome generator games. Game design around SSD is only going to get better.
 
MercuryLS

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platocplx said:
Yeah. This shit is actu going to get faster if devs use the oodle texture. Kind of insane to think about.
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More interesting than the load time is what Cerny spoke about regarding loading tons of assets the second the player turns around, in that one second it takes to turn you can load everything seamlessly.
 
Musubi

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The fact that Kraken allows the PS5 to stream 8-9GB/s of decompressed data is just insane. Once games start being really optimized I think its really going to be amazing what the PS5 can do.
 
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platocplx

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MercuryLS said:
More interesting than the load time is what Cerny spoke about regarding loading tons of assets the second the player turns around, in that one second it takes to turn you can load everything seamlessly.
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I don't really think people realize what he meant from all of that. If you go back to road to PS5 there is a chart where they were Targeting reading 2GB in .27 Seconds. Yeah. This basically can allow for some crazy stuff loading game data.
 
Belvedere

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I'm really interested in seeing how this translates to both multiplats and built from the ground up 1st party titles.
 
MercuryLS

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platocplx said:
I don't really think people realize what he meant from all of that. If you go back to road to PS5 there is a chart where they were Targeting reading 2GB in .27 Seconds. Yeah. This basically can allow for some crazy stuff loading game data.
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People always say that the super fast loading wasn't worth a smaller GPU, but I really think Cerny's goal was loading that's so fast that you can stream in and ditch assets so fast that as the player navigates the world you can bring in insane amounts of high quality assets at a moments notice as you play. It really feels like PS5 was designed with open worlds where you can navigate quickly through it in mind.
 
RedHeat

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It's crazy how Sony isn't advertising this, but I guess it doesn't mean anything to the average person
 
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platocplx

platocplx

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MercuryLS said:
People always say that the super fast loading wasn't worth a smaller GPU, but I really think Cerny's goal was loading that's so fast that you can stream in and ditch assets so fast that as the player navigates the world you can bring in insane amounts of high quality assets at a moments notice as you play. It really feels like PS5 was designed with open worlds where you can navigate quickly through it in mind.
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Yup and them totally bypassing the CPU for I/O adds precious threads to game design as well. No one is doing this.
 
cyrribrae

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Who dis? The people who made Kraken?

Sounds really cool. Funny that the speed of the SSD actually forces them to compress a little less aggressively to make sure that Kraken is never the bottleneck. Reading this, I can see now why MS's SFS solution works best with good decompression. Finding the types of patterns that Oodle Texture is doing also seems like the key (in perhaps a different way) to finding the parts of textures that you can eliminate and not stream. Now that I've written this sentence, I take it back lol, they're different things. But they're both focused on finding patterns to exploit. Awesome that they're still putting in more work and getting better to improve the IO performance.

I didn't really understand the modularity part, but that seems interesting. Does that mean it works even better, in comparison to other compressors, when dealing with a really complicated scene with lots of different types of data to compress? Or is that pointing to some other advantage entirely?
 
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DangerMouse

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Musubi said:
The fact that Kraken allows the PS5 to stream 8-9GB/s of decompressed data is just insane. Once games start being really optimized I think its really going to be amazing what the PS5 can do.
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Yeah.

MercuryLS said:
People always say that the super fast loading wasn't worth a smaller GPU, but I really think Cerny's goal was loading that's so fast that you can stream in and ditch assets so fast that as the player navigates the world you can bring in insane amounts of high quality assets at a moments notice as you play. It really feels like PS5 was designed with open worlds where you can navigate quickly through it in mind.
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Agreed, that's exactly how Cerny described the benefits of their custom pipeline in his design example too back in that talk so I definitely think being able to do that was his goal.
 
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Musubi

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RedHeat said:
It's crazy how Sony isn't advertising this, but I guess it doesn't mean anything to the average person
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Most people aren't going to know what I/O even means. Its not really a back of the box bulletpoint type thing. I've been pounding this drum ever since the tech unveiling though that the I/O speeds are actually what is going to make the PS5 incredibly impressive. With how fast things stream too there is no need for LOD's either. Which again is insane and what made that Unreal 5 demo so crazy.
 
nujabeans

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I wonder if a bigger reason for the large size of the PS5 is to cool the SSD to avoid throttling. Once the top devs like ND start using the SSD to its full potential, we will see how the hardware and cooling design can handle it.
 
zombiejames

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Uzupedro said:
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Amazing stuff.

Going through the article, this part is key:

Not all games at launch of PS5 will be using Oodle Texture as it's a very new technology, but we expect it to be in the majority of PS5 games in the future. Because of this we expect the average compression ratio and therefore the effective IO speed to be even better than previously estimated.
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This is really new and most likely launch games aren't using this technology yet. I personally think a game like Demon's Souls looks incredible for what you're getting at 66GB but it would be amazing to see these big AAA games come in at 40-50GB again (or maybe even lower, who knows).
 
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platocplx

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nujabeans said:
I wonder if a bigger reason for the large size of the PS5 is to cool the SSD to avoid throttling. Once the top devs like ND start using the SSD to its full potential, we will see how the hardware and cooling design can handle it.
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the Xbox would be more similar in size if they didn't split the motherboard. Honestly really great design they went with. I'm not sure if the faster raw speed does cause more heat. But I think heat considerations are different since Sony's chip decouples all decompression and I/O tasks from the CPU.

zombiejames said:
Amazing stuff.

Going through the article, this part is key:



This is really new and most likely launch games aren't using this technology yet. I personally think a game like Demon's Souls looks incredible for what you're getting at 66GB but it would be amazing to see these big AAA games come in at 40-50GB again (or maybe even lower, who knows).
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Yeah. It's not that games will get smaller than last gen. It's more that games will be as be On average smaller pretty much keeps them in line with the size of a Blu-ray disc.
 
nss

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platocplx said:
Yeah. This shit is actually going to get faster if devs use the oodle texture. Kind of insane to think about.
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And didn't Sony get the license for every dev on the PS5 to use it, so that if you dev on PS5 its 0 cost. (This may be an industry standard and a moot point anyways, but I thought it was interesting)

The idea of near-instant or lowering the dev work necessary to get Trials/Celeste/Meatboy level fast restarts for much more complicated games is SUPER Exciting to me.
 
gozu

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So, with Oodle texture compression, when we're decompression textures we go from the 8-9GB/s average to to 16.5 15 GB/s average ?

Sounds too good to be true. Textures are the bulk of game data usually.
 
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Betelgeuse

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Great news! I'm glad Sony built in some headroom on the hardware side to accommodate advances on the software side.
 
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platocplx

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nss said:
And didn't Sony get the license for every dev on the PS5 to use it, so that if you dev on PS5 its 0 cost. (This may be an industry standard and a moot point anyways, but I thought it was interesting)

The idea of near-instant or lowering the dev work necessary to get Trials/Celeste/Meatboy level fast restarts for much more complicated games is SUPER Exciting to me.
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Yup. All devs have it.

 
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platocplx

platocplx

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gozu said:
So, with Oodle texture compression, when we're decompression textures we go from the 8-9GB/s average to to 16.5 GB/s average ?

Sounds too good to be true.
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you can see how their compression tech works lower in the post. They explain how it's achieved.
 
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