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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

#91

Post by heromal »

gameswithgo wrote: post #21
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 think you have become way too cynical. of course we don’t have the huge leaps we used to. the marginal utility of twice as many polygons or pixels is much less now. the effort that goes into these advances we do get is much more than it was nonetheless, and borders on magic. amazing time to be alive for computing hardware power and great to see the consoles letting us fully leverage it

Exactly. Moore's Law had to end at some point.

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

#92

Post by dmonitor »

tylersmith wrote: post #10
christoph wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"...

That sounds like a lot more effort and time than just downloading 95gb.

Depends where you live. For me, 95gb takes a couple hours. For my friend in Kentucky, it takes at least a week

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

#93

Post by rubber_duck »

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…

Umm - streaming data in to working memory at radically improved speed has the potential to provide techniques way more interesting/impressive than *tracing techniques. Who knows what geometry representation and handling this will enable.

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

#94

Post by iphone_elegance »

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…

It seems like a pretty big quality of life improvement to me, I'm not sure why you're trying to frame it as a bad thing

In the past you could choose between capacity or speed now you get both

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

#95

Post by ladberg »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #85

> Game programmers cannot take full advantage of NVMe SSD performance without making their games unplayably slow on hard drives. Well, yet. As history shows, many big game shops care very little whether their game is unplayable on current systems and push for a more expensive setup instead. On the other hand, this is partly the reason I can now do ML at home doing things that were far out of my range a few years ago.

Game developers might treat PC players like that, but never console players. If an optimization boosted performance on PCs but was detrimental to consoles they would never implement it.

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

#96

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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…

Agreed. Before that, you had to choose between exceptional graphics and short loading times.

Now they can do both.

I mean, it's nice, but it's not really revolutionary.

It's a welcome incremental improvement, at best.

But the PR machine worked really well.

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

#97

Post by inertiatic »

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?

Maybe N64 had a better library of games to you, but for others PS1 had Silent Hill, MGS, FFVII, Gran Turismo, Tomb Raider, Tekken, all games that define their genre even 20 years later.

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

#98

Post by therockhead »

serf wrote: post #68
jimmaswell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? storage space for CD quality audio, storage space for full-motion video, on-board full motion video decoders, cheaper media costs, easier media to deal with on development side, and most importantly a game library that catered more towards 'adultish' fans. I remember reading back when these consoles were current that the biggest draw for most consumers was the fact that full-motion-…

I think the demo disks with the PS magazines are often overlooked as well.

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

#99

Post by slx26 »

013a wrote: post #84
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…

There is a really critical component of having an SSD, and knowing you'll have an SSD (as a game developer) which is easily missed (the article may cover this, but just to reiterate). Lets say you only have 8gb of memory. Most importantly: You know you'll have 8gb (not more, not less). You build your game around having 8gb; textures are a specific size and quality, levels are designed around this, etc. With a hard dr…

Yes, a lot of people commenting here should really go watch the talk Mark Cerny gave [0].

It's clear there's no "big technological breakthrough". SSDs are great but have been around for a while already, we simply had to wait for the technology to mature enough.

What we are seeing is that we can't just keep slapping better CPUs and GPUs to the machines, because the improvements nowaday are not that impressive anymore, so at least for the PS5 they have switched and started focusing on the architecture, removing bottlenecks, removing major pain points, and using additional hardware to handle tasks like compression and freeing resources for other purposes.

Some people might say these improvements happen because they were lazy before and never focused properly on dev needs and bottlenecks and the specific needs of game development. I partially agree, but the SSDs really don't just improve disk speed, they allow a completely different set of architectural optimizations.

[0] https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg

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

#100

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Its not about making slow loads faster. Its about increasing what things we can stream from disk in real time.

Massive textures, massive look up tables, massive geo, etc. A lot of techniques can use pre-baked data in interesting ways.

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