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

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

#71

Post by Goronmon »

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…

Modern Warfare is approaching 200GB installed these days.

Just a couple of days ago they had a 40GB update, which ballooned to 85GB for a good chunk of people due to an issue with the updater.

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

#72

Post by Goronmon »

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…

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...

These new SSD's are more of an upgrade then we've had in any console over multiple generations. Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4 were all pretty standard "mini-PC" consoles. PS3 had a different architecture that didn't really pay off until much later in the console's life-cycle and still didn't have a huge impact, hence the PS4 dropping Cell for the PS4.

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

#73

Post by CivBase »

My understanding is that what makes these new SSDs so special is the embedded decompression hardware. That sounds great... but I can't help but think back a couple generations to the PS3 and its cell architecture. Yeah, it was more efficient than x86, but few developers really managed to capitalize on it until the end of that generation. By that point, the PS3 was lagging far behind the 360 is US sales and had long since been eclipsed by PCs in terms of performance.

Will we see something similar with these SSDs? Are devs actually prepared to take advantage of the special decompression hardware? Or will it be the stuff of dreams and tech demos for the first few years?

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

#74

Post by sosborn »

CivBase wrote: post #73

My understanding is that what makes these new SSDs so special is the embedded decompression hardware. That sounds great... but I can't help but think back a couple generations to the PS3 and its cell architecture. Yeah, it was more efficient than x86, but few developers really managed to capitalize on it until the end of that generation. By that point, the PS3 was lagging far behind the 360 is US sales and had long s…

PS3 actually sold more than the the 360, but they both got smashed by the wii.

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

#75

Post by GhostVII »

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.

That's not really a fair comparison. Of course PC gaming will be far faster in many cases, there is no price or size ceiling.

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

#76

Post by acidbaseextract »

wtallis wrote: post #64
hyperpallium wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

"SSD as RAM" is a bad way to think about it. What you need to realize is that the standard for games has been to treat RAM as storage, because the hard drive was too slow to use for loading data on the fly. SSDs mean games can use storage as storage, but they still have to fit the working set in RAM.

And that's really what the hype is about in terms of better game experiences on these new systems — we should be able to have larger working sets because you don't need to waste RAM as storage.

To get specific about what this enables, I think we will see many more indie games with great looking graphics. The combination of high res asset scans, automatic resolution scaling, automatic texture compression, generally less tight performance budgets that don't need teams to do optimization work (next gen consoles), and a financial model around tools to take advantage of all of this (Unreal + Quixel as the leader here) should make this next generation of games pretty awesome.

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

#77

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

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"...

Yeah, I remember. I also have no wish to go back to those days. If I want to, emulators are easily available, but I don't. Games have moved forward in a lot of ways. Patches are a worthwhile trade-off for what I see as more interesting games.

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

#78

Post by hyperpallium »

> The PS5's SSD can supply data at 5.5 GB/s. The RAM runs at 448 GB/s, 81 times faster. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps...

SSD is compressed (by "Kraken"), giving 8-9GB/s typical.

You could compress RAM too, but not worth the latency penalty.

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

#79

Post by ezconnect »

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?

Games that show violence, guns, monster gore, zombies in a nutshell more games.

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

#80

Post by acidbaseextract »

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.

The whole storage architecture (not the SSDs alone) is a generational leap in gaming because it's a generational leap in game production economics. Asset cost has been skyrocketing for modern games, and the slate of storage technologies in these consoles directly addresses that. These improvements make assets reusable. SSDs + built in compression / storage co-processing + dynamic resolution makes it possible for small teams to plonk high res assets from libraries into games without spending crazy amounts of time doing asset performance optimization.

It's also going to be a driver of 1440 and 4k gaming, because there will be more games that look good enough to make high res gaming worth it.

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