Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming • Hacker News Board

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#11

Post by ardit33 » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:30 AM UTC

I hate to say it but this SSD story has been plastered all over the news by the PR machine, mainly because the new consoles have no other inovations whatsoever....

No, it is not going to usher a new area of gaming, just make game have less 'loading' screens, and perhaps larger open worlds.... but it is no near the innovation and changes we experiences in the 90s and early 2000's....

Let me say in a more popular language: History has demonstrated that gamers don't give a f@ck on how fast is the SSD.... PS1 won over N64 even though it had huge loading times, compared to near instantaneous N64's loading screens....

I meant, personally, i think it is great, as PS4 loading time are bad, but just fast loading time it is not going to make me buy a game.

Anyway, just a sad PR piece trying to get people exited for something that looks a small (but good) evolutionary improvement over the current PS4 Pro/Xbox X.

Now if we had custom fast/ray-casting technology, than it would have been exiting. But it looks like if enabled, a game will either have to drop resolutions and cap frame-rates to barely playable 30fps.

But, hey your SSD will be fast.....

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#12

Post by wmeredith » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #5

walrus01 wrote: post #3

One really good example of an Xbox One game that has grown to truly bloated proportions is Destiny 2. The loading times are multiple minutes per map section now. Total game is about 105GB on disk. People have even resorted to using external 256GB SATA3 SSDs in USB3.0 enclosures, which are faster than the internal 5400 rpm HDD in an Xbox One S. I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 exte…

A friend really wanted me to play Destiny 2 with him. I was going to give it a shot during one of their free weekends, but didn't do it because my gaming laptop's hard drive is only 500GB, and I didn't want to delete half a dozen games or so just to install Destiny. I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually losing potential players because of it - if the download had been half the size, they certainly could have co…

It took me five years and about 2000 hours to get the Destiny monkey off my back. Rarely have I been such an abusive relationship a piece of software. I’ll cut the rant short here, but it’s like their Skinner box was made for me. The questionable (to put it charitably) decisions made by the people running that game still boggle my mind.

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#13

Post by delroth » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:32 AM UTC

christoph wrote: post #6

walrus01 wrote: post #3

One really good example of an Xbox One game that has grown to truly bloated proportions is Destiny 2. The loading times are multiple minutes per map section now. Total game is about 105GB on disk. People have even resorted to using external 256GB SATA3 SSDs in USB3.0 enclosures, which are faster than the internal 5400 rpm HDD in an Xbox One S. I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 exte…

Ahhh, remember those days when you would get back from the shop with a cartridge, rip off the shrink rap, drop it in the slot, hit the on button and you were playing straight away in seconds. Good times. Fallout 76 was something like a 45gb install and then a 50gb day 1 "patch"...

Instead now you have most online services allowing you to pre-download the game (and often the day 1 patches too if any) and just do a quick install on release day. The experience isn't significantly worse, it's just different. Even Nintendo's e-shop supports this, and god knows how far behind they are in terms of online feature support compared to everyone else.

I'm pretty happy to not have to keep a large amount of game boxes and worry about scratching discs too.

EDIT: To your specific example, FO76 released on Nov 14, PS4 preload with base game + day1 patch started on Nov 11 according to online sources I've found.

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#14

Post by colesantiago » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:39 AM UTC

ardit33 wrote: post #11

I hate to say it but this SSD story has been plastered all over the news by the PR machine, mainly because the new consoles have no other inovations whatsoever.... No, it is not going to usher a new area of gaming, just make game have less 'loading' screens, and perhaps larger open worlds.... but it is no near the innovation and changes we experiences in the 90s and early 2000's.... Let me say in a more popular langu…

Yes, gamers don't give a toss about the tech details [0], and they shouldn't, Sony gave a presentation about all of the internals of the PS5 and all they got in response was "ZZzzZZZZZZ".

They only want the console for the games, man, nothing else.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#15

Post by duxup » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:39 AM UTC

Are any of these magical load times and such going to actually happen?

I feel like gaming companies really don't emphasize load times unless they have to and their energy goes into pretty graphics or other things.

In theory couldn't they have ultra fast load times now if they just lowered the amount they needed to load to start? / Manage the amount of content they need to load to start?

I wonder if they'll just focus on pushing any speed benefits into....load times for even more assets, pretty graphics or whatever they choose.

In the meantime console announcement promises/ hype have a terrible history as far as accuracy goes...

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#16

Post by xoa » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

This article of course focuses primarily on the consoles with an interesting gathering of some of the lower level details behind "fast SSD". But while it compares it to servers what it really brought to mind to me was mainframes, which often had not particularly impressive CPU specs at first glance but were kings of IO and offloading. It made me wonder if over the next decade we'll see yet another example of the cyclical nature of the tech industry in PCs. I haven't been following storage super closely for a bit, but it hasn't been that long yet the numbers the author tosses out in terms of "by the end of the year everyone will be doing 6-7+ GB/s" felt pretty staggering. Combined with the sudden leap forward in system bandwidth thanks to AMD, and after a fairly long period of stagnation around HDDs and the limits of SATA it feels like a huge amount of progress in storage is happening at an enormous clip. And that is leading to the discovery of bottlenecks elsewhere, like with ZFS Issue #8381 [1] where the ARC meant to improve performance actually becomes troublesome. AMD has really pushed available PCIe bandwidth up dramatically with EPYC 2 doing up to 128 GB/s, yet with drive numbers like those arrays could actually be made to get towards it already!

As the article says that kind of IO becomes a real strain on valuable general purpose CPU time. So I wonder if we'll actually start to see regular PCs begin offloading again, reversing the generalize everything a bit with more support specialized silicon so that they can actually feed the beast. I could see that having real implications for a lot of future software and OS development too, particularly for OSS. If things go that way I hope some good open standards can get out ahead of it.

----

1: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#17

Post by betoharres » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:45 AM UTC

"all games and game engines are still designed to be playable off hard drives because current consoles and many low-end PCs lack SSDs"

Saved you some time

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#18

Post by walrus01 » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:46 AM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #7

walrus01 wrote: post #3

One really good example of an Xbox One game that has grown to truly bloated proportions is Destiny 2. The loading times are multiple minutes per map section now. Total game is about 105GB on disk. People have even resorted to using external 256GB SATA3 SSDs in USB3.0 enclosures, which are faster than the internal 5400 rpm HDD in an Xbox One S. I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 exte…

> I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles. The real question is: How many games will support that configuration? A game written for a slower HDD can always be run on an SSD, either with no improvement or an improved experience. But a game specifically designed for an SSD may be unplayable or even unstable on a system with an HDD.…

Hopefully single player only games should support that. It's a standard supported configuration on xbox one right now to connect any USB3.0 >250GB HDD externally and move games onto that.

With PS5 there should be a number of single player games where greatly-increased loading times won't have a negative impact on anyone else, unlike multiplayer games where everyone should load into a map at the same time. I have in mind the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, and the upcoming Assassin's Creed.

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#19

Post by wtallis » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:46 AM UTC

wltprgm wrote: post #8

This article didn't talk deep enough about PS5 custom storage chip controller or I missed it. Reference: 1. https://youtu.be/4ehDRCE1Z38?t=480 2. https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1205112-i%E2%80%99ve-di...

I think you may have failed to notice that there's more than one page to this article. Page 1 covers the SSD hardware itself, and page 2 covers the other storage-related hardware that's not actually on the SSD itself.

Re: Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming

#20

Post by jhack » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

ardit33 wrote: post #11

I hate to say it but this SSD story has been plastered all over the news by the PR machine, mainly because the new consoles have no other inovations whatsoever.... No, it is not going to usher a new area of gaming, just make game have less 'loading' screens, and perhaps larger open worlds.... but it is no near the innovation and changes we experiences in the 90s and early 2000's.... Let me say in a more popular langu…

You can tell someone hasn't watched the Ratchet & Clank demo from the other day[0]. The SSDs in these consoles go far beyond short load times. They can radically change how games are made and designed.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsnG-3-r6-Q