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

111–120 of 159 posts

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

#111

Post by limomium »

runawaybottle wrote: post #70
freeone3000 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

So imagine this tech in a simulated war mmo, where each server of 64 players represents a part of a battlefield and you instantly can transition to a new server representing the next part of the battlefield when you walk there. All of WW2 would be a collection of servers that represent parts of Europe. Takes a little imagination, but when you look at the ingenuity of something like F-Zero on SNES (2.5d graphics), it’…

A fast SSD won't solve the network latency of connecting to a server and downloading all its data.

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

#113

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

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…

> Now if we had custom fast/ray-casting technology

No offence but I just cannot understand this viewpoint. A game is about fun, about gameplay. Pretty graphics do little for that (IMO) once the novelty's worn off, and can easily start to get in the way. A game's tech is mostly decoration (I said mostly, sometimes it can help). The real breakthrough in games would be in their depth of interaction, and that would take some kind of comprehensive model of humans and human experience, and more. We're not getting that soon.

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

#114

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

vardump wrote: post #109
brigade wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPU directly read from a SSD, bypassing all of the steps in between Ehh... unless you have more specific knowledge that’s still under NDA, the reasonable assumption is that the CPU still mmap()es the file into the GPU’s address space, and then the CPU pages in data from the SSD as the GPU generates page misses. Which is technically possible on PCs today, but isn’t done because you can’t assume fast SSDs and you def…

Better be at least 2 MB pages then. 5.5M (max. 22 GB/s compression output on PS5) page faults per second for 4 kB pages might otherwise ruin this scheme a bit... 2 MB page size would reduce this to "just" 11k page faults per second.

I know nothing about this, but wouldn't most textures be quite small, and with a large page size you might end up reading in much more than you need, making it often worse than useless?

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

#115

Post by rasz »

russli1993 wrote: post #106
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 missed the real point: Textures stored on the SSDs is now byte addressable by the texturing unit on the GPU. When the texturing unit issue a read for texture data, the read can now go directly to the SSD controller, and SSD controller issue NVMe commands to read the data. The texture decompression block sits between the GPU and SSD controller, decompresses the texture at line speed. This way, the GPU can…

Texture streaming is a thing in current gen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvdTtl27TpM

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

#116

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

ladberg wrote: post #95
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.

I was specifically referring to PC games. They can't do that on consoles as the game for model X is for model X, whereas the one for PC has minimal and recommended requirements.

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

#117

Post by Tehdasi »

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…

"But, with SSDs, this changes entirely: new textures can be paged in within just a couple frames. Now, that paging can happen more on-demand." Erm, texture loading from RAM to the GPU memory already is critiqued in games, since players can see the slowdown when it happens.

Either this is going to be using the system RAM as a cache for the SSD data, (and then it will have the same problem, plus the developers will have to make sure that scenes can stay completely in the system RAM they have available, so this will be the limitation, not the size of the SSD), or they are getting the GPU to pull data directly from the SSD, and SSDs are very slow compared to RAM.

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

#118

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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.

It's probably not additive. If you bought and installed the game fresh only after the release of the patch, I'd guess the total download size would be well under 95GB. Game patches aren't known for being well optimised binary diffs with minimal download size.

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

#119

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

brownbat wrote: post #57
rasz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm reminded of the PC version of Mass Effect 2, where the loading time was significantly shorter than the video played during loading, but the video always played until the end.

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

#120

Post by runawaybottle »

limomium wrote: post #111
runawaybottle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So imagine this tech in a simulated war mmo, where each server of 64 players represents a part of a battlefield and you instantly can transition to a new server representing the next part of the battlefield when you walk there. All of WW2 would be a collection of servers that represent parts of Europe. Takes a little imagination, but when you look at the ingenuity of something like F-Zero on SNES (2.5d graphics), it’…

A fast SSD won't solve the network latency of connecting to a server and downloading all its data.

So we’ll have to wait for 5g!
Post reply on HN