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

Why PS4 downloads are so slow

snellman.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 201 posts

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#111

Post by hug »

stephen_g wrote: post #97
philsnow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no, the issue is that the ps4 is constraining the tcp receive window (which is how much data is in flight at once), so if your ISP DNS gives you a CDN node that's 200ms away but google's DNS gives you a CDN node that's 10ms away, you get receive_window bytes every 10ms instead of every 200ms. There's a similar thing happening (different DNS giving vastly different experience) with Netflix as well: Netflix has lo…

Hmmm, does that actually improve speeds for Netflix, or was that somebody just doing it because they thought it would? It's been a while since I've looked into it, but I thought that Netflix's devices peer with the provider's routers and intercept traffic through that way, so the DNS server shouldn't matter (because they would share the same IPs as the publicly accessible CDN load balancers). I thought most CDNs work…

Anecdata: Office 365 will put you on an APAC CDN instead of an AU CDN if you use Google Public DNS from Australia, but not so if you use local ISP DNS (like, say, Telstra's).

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#112

Post by theWatcher37 »

MBCook wrote: post #104
jdormit wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Steam Link, and I get all the benefits of PC gaming from my couch. It's a pretty seamless best-of-both-worlds situation.

You also get the downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC, which is one of the things I was happy to leave behind when I became a console-only gamer.

I have less free time than most here and somehow I find a way.

"Maintaining" a PC is super easy...

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#113

Post by jonny_eh »

bitwize wrote: post #76

This is so that there's plenty of bandwidth available for networked play. The Switch firmware even states that it will halt downloads if a game attempts to connect to the network.

Even if the game is suspended? It seems reasonable that you're right, but it also seems like an oversight to not lift the throttling when games are suspended, or if the game's not being played online.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#114

Post by cdevs »

As a developer people seemed surprised I don't have some massive gaming rig at home but there's something about it that feels like work. I don't want to sit up and be fully alert - I did that all day at work I want 30 mins to veg out on a console jumping between Netflix and some quick multiplayer game with less hackers glitchin out on the game. It seems impressive what PS4 attempts to accomplish while you're playing a game and yet try and download a 40gig game and some how tip toe in the background not screwing up the gaming experience. I couldn't imaging trying to deal with cranking up the speed here and there while keeping the game experience playable in a online game. Chrome is slow? Close you're 50 tabs, want faster PS4 downloads, close your games/apps. Got it.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#115

Post by quazeekotl »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #79
bitwize wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC release of Sonic Mania was delayed because of slowdown issues. Slowdown issues. On a game that is literally nothing but 90s graphics.

The game is more graphically intensive than you might think and the people that care about this kind of game very much value a solid 60 FPS frame rate.

yet somehow it ran at 60fps 20 years ago on hardware that was 10000 times slower

hmm

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#116

Post by dcow »

cdevs wrote: post #114

As a developer people seemed surprised I don't have some massive gaming rig at home but there's something about it that feels like work. I don't want to sit up and be fully alert - I did that all day at work I want 30 mins to veg out on a console jumping between Netflix and some quick multiplayer game with less hackers glitchin out on the game. It seems impressive what PS4 attempts to accomplish while you're playing…

But it's just one app and boom 7kb receive window. The author goes into how terrible the impl is. I'm sure it might seem crazy if you're not familiar with kernel networking. Also I hope you get more than 30 min of free time each day (=

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#117

Post by bitwize »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #79
bitwize wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC release of Sonic Mania was delayed because of slowdown issues. Slowdown issues. On a game that is literally nothing but 90s graphics.

The game is more graphically intensive than you might think and the people that care about this kind of game very much value a solid 60 FPS frame rate.

It's about Sega Saturn levels of graphically intensive, and should be well within the range of capability of even pleb-tier GPUs from the modern era.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#118

Post by jmkni »

bitwize wrote: post #77
PaulHoule wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is astonishing how oblivious people who are "paid to spend time on the product" can be about the products they ship. Case in point, Microsoft shipped a EXPLORER.EXE with Windows 10 that is 20% whitespace because of an Adobe invented metadata format that I bet nobody involved with Windows ever thought about it. See http://ontology2.com/essays/LookingForMetadataInAllTheWrongP...

The PC release of Sonic Mania was delayed because of slowdown issues. Slowdown issues. On a game that is literally nothing but 90s graphics.

Unrelated, but about a year ago I downloaded Sonic the Hedgehog 2 from the Xbox Store onto my Xbox one (I think it cost £0.99).

Anyway, it was about 500Mb in size and it runs Sonic 2 on the Xbox One's Xbox 360 emulator, which is then emulating a Sega Mega Drive.

That just blows my mind! 8 x86 cores to emulate 3 PPC cores to emulate a mega drive.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#119

Post by anmorgan »

quazeekotl wrote: post #115
coolsunglasses wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game is more graphically intensive than you might think and the people that care about this kind of game very much value a solid 60 FPS frame rate.

yet somehow it ran at 60fps 20 years ago on hardware that was 10000 times slower hmm

Though we do have 4K tvs now.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#120

Post by govg »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #112
MBCook wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also get the downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC, which is one of the things I was happy to leave behind when I became a console-only gamer.

I have less free time than most here and somehow I find a way. "Maintaining" a PC is super easy...

Upgrading a PC is a one time thing you need to do once every few years. You'd be "upgrading" your console by putting it in the bin and buying a new one, so I'm not sure what the argument is against PC gaming here...
Post reply on HN