Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 159 posts

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

#51

Post by arthurfm »

Nextgrid wrote: post #24
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…

There's absolutely no excuse for why a console released in 2016 still had 5400 rpm spinning rust. Those drives are barely usable in low-end laptops, and you're trying to run games from it?

Seagate stopped making 7200 rpm 2.5" HDDs in 2013 [1]. I assume Microsoft didn't want to pay more for a 7200 rpm 2.5" WD Black HDD so that leaves 5400 rpm drives as the only option.

The hard drive in the Xbox One is a 2.5" 9.5mm Samsung Spinpoint M8 drive [2]. Seagate purchased Samsung's HDD business in 2011 [3].

[1] https://techreport.com/news/24439/seagate-to-stop-making-720...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/1r5gc6/xbox_one_us...

[3] https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/news/news-archive/seagate-comp...

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

#52

Post by djsumdog »

jhack wrote: post #20
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

That is impressive if each of those worlds is loaded as you go, but I feel like both Microsoft and Sony were holding off on this next generation until graphics tech got better.

We still are nowhere near photo realistic, cinema type game play (and yes I realize that such animation has to be scaled down a bit because it can disturb people if it's too real, but we're not even at that point yet).

Real time ray tracing was going to be nVidias whole push into a new generation of 3D graphics, but that turned out to be not all that impressive (and with huge performance costs).

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

#53

Post by wltprgm »

jhack wrote: post #20
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

It just means fast loading assets, so if SSD becomes RAM one day, anything interesting at all? Same goes for ray tracing, looking more realistic with control of light...

Nothing special here, no need to hype

edit:

You know what really makes a difference?

You playing an VR open world game where every single artificial intelligence NPC does thing in every possible way leading to different gameplay and outcome. And you as a character can just grab anything you want and throw at any monster that you just CREATED in that game itself

Or you can control that monster that you created in your own way, time travelling to another open world game saying hello to your friend playing in his house back and forth

Together with some AI NPC friends you made in that game, you live in that dimensional space forever as you want even after your human body dies, your conscious stays in electronic form

Referencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Art_Online:_Alicization

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

#54

Post by hyperpallium »

jhack wrote: post #20
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

Ratchet & Clank is the only demo with new gameplay based on the SSD.

But it's overused, giving each game world less weight. The technological imperative, preoccupied with whether they could, etc. In contrast, artificial constraints add depth to gameplay, e.g. limited movement speed/duration ("sprint").

All that said, keeping processors fed with data is a central problem of CS. The innovations here are not just the SSD itself, but elimination of bottlenecks in the architecture (e.g. direct placement in GPU RAM).

Typically, storage is 1000x slower than RAM. On PS5, it's 50x. That has got to be a revolution in algorithmic space-time tradeoffs... which has got to be reflected in gameplay, somehow, somewhen.

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

#55

Post by nmfisher »

jimmaswell wrote: post #28
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…

The N64 looked way better, loaded faster, had a better controller, and to me had a better game library as a whole. The PS1 had comparatively horrible architectural choices like no built-in z-buffer, texture filtering, or floating point processing. Apparently N64 sold less per year available though. What did everyone see in the PS1?

> What did everyone see in the PS1?

Mod chips.

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

#56

Post by snuxoll »

walrus01 wrote: post #18
Someone1234 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

The push for these crazy fast SSD’s when even a SATA3 SSD would be a huge leap for load times isn’t just to reduce load times but to allow on-demand streaming of assets just in time. An external HDD isn’t going to cut it for the random reads developers looking to get the most out of the hardware are going to be doing.

Archiving games you aren’t currently playing because a USB hard drive is most certainly the faster option for anyone without a gigabit internet connection? Sure. But there’s no chance in hell they will let you run games off one.

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

#57

Post by brownbat »

rasz wrote: post #39
resist_futility wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't count a load time of almost 10 times faster as a generational leap? Ray tracing right now is just a gimmick, I don't care about puddles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqV7BNoQEr4

What this shows you is how bad consoles are compared to PC gaming.

Yeah. What's frustrating is I feel like a lot of ports have long load times just coded into them. Sometimes it barely matters if you run them on an NVMe or even a RAMDisk.

I'm sure the cost of speeding up loading isn't worth it after you've written it with one set of expectations in mind.

I just hope an unintended side effect here is that load times for big studio PC games speed up too.

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

#58

Post by Animats »

anamexis wrote: post #30
resist_futility wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't count a load time of almost 10 times faster as a generational leap? Ray tracing right now is just a gimmick, I don't care about puddles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqV7BNoQEr4

It's a generational leap in game load times, but it's not a generational leap in gaming.

Watch the UE5 demo. Realize what they're doing. They're loading the high-detail geometry into the GPU and letting the GPU do the mesh reduction. For that to work, huge amounts of geometry has to be loaded into memory the GPU can see. The PS5 is built for that. The GPU has access to the same memory (24GB) the CPU does, and, presumably, so does the SSD controller. So you can put vertex buffers in files and load them directly into the GPU if you want.

On the PS5, a Blu-Ray type drive is optional. Are you going to have 100 GB downloads from the network? That's going to take a while. Even if you have a gigabit network connection, it's going to take 15 minutes or so to download a large game. Few people have that much bandwidth. Red Dead Redemption 2 needs 150GB of disk space now, so games are already that big.

Games will have to have some starting level that keeps the user busy while the downloader pulls in content. But after that, performance should be impressive.

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

#59

Post by leddt »

freeone3000 wrote: post #45
jhack wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That portal transition effect likely hides the load screen - it's still there, nearly half a second, it's just shorter. This is comparable to current load times with an SSD on PC!

The difference with PCs is that since the hardware is standard, developers can now create gameplay that depends on those capabilities.

Until all (or most) PCs are equiped with high performance NVMe SSDs, those kind of features won't be possible other than on consoles.

Also, the PS5's architecture is optimized end-to-end for faster loading times, it's more than just faster storage.

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

#60

Post by hyperpallium »

wltprgm wrote: post #53
jhack wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It just means fast loading assets, so if SSD becomes RAM one day, anything interesting at all? Same goes for ray tracing, looking more realistic with control of light... Nothing special here, no need to hype edit: You know what really makes a difference? You playing an VR open world game where every single artificial intelligence NPC does thing in every possible way leading to different gameplay and outcome. And you…

"SSD as RAM" is a good way to reason about it.

It means you have a lot more RAM, e.g. thus, PS5 has 825GB of RAM. RAM in the TB, soon.

Would a couple of orders of magnitude make a difference? If software is designed with terabytes of RAM in mind?

Post reply on HN