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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

#121
post #59

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!

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.

All AAA games need to be cross platform to maximize revenue with a long tail, so they target the lowest common denominator for hardware requirements.

No one is going to design gameplay for a special hardware constraint unless the gameplay can degrade to lowest common denominator. Which of course, makes needing the special hardware optional.

There are few exceptions to this rule. Some platforms pay for exclusivity, effectively covering lost revenue from other platform streams. And Nintendo alone makes a profit on hardware, so they can produce platform exclusives to drive addtl revenue from hardware sales.

Special SSD pipelines, while PC gamers are still using 7200rpm HDDs, are about as appetizing to game devs as waggle controls or Kinect sensor games.

The new consoles include these SSDs not to make something possible now, but to remain relevant in ten years time when PCs may have caught up.

This is the game industry's equivalent of supporting IE 11.

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

#122

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.

FreeBSD superpage max size on amd64 is 1GB

edit: and there have been SPARC CPUs with memory controllers that can do 256GB pages

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Transparent superpages solve this

http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~wiseman/2os/superpage/navaroo1.pdf

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

#124

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.

Assuming the maps and assets are static, the only thing needing to be downloaded is the current state of the game and entities, which is a handful of megabytes. I agree that an SSD is completely irrelevant here, but so is the network. The hard problem here is how do you sync state between the different servers in real time so that transitioning between servers is seamless (and how do you handle reconciliation after an eventual net split).

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Transparent superpages solve this http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~wiseman/2os/superpage/navaroo1.pdf

That's 113 pages, does this really cover the issue of reading too much? IF so, I'll try and find the time.

I mean I'm not complaining about TLB issues which large pages do better at for obvious reasons, but thrashing the TLB is likely to be a lot cheaper than reading too much from the disk.

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

#126
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"...

I don't recall which Yakuza on PS4 requires a patch otherwise it won't go further than the intro.

I'm not completely sure but I also think that Just Cause 3 required a patch at day one to work on PS4 and IIRC it was considerably big against a weak 4 Mbit DSL...

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

#127
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?

CDROM had massive amounts of storage compared to a cartridge, and production costs were far lower as well, leading to much better profits.

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

#128

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?

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.

Yeah, I still remember playing Tekken for the first time at my friends house, which was over 25 years ago. It was truly jaw dropping for the time.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

You do realize the GPU can just read it from the physical address space and not via the CPUs MMU. It's not an innovation. There is still a lot of level3 Bus transactions. If the SSD had two buses, with 1 directly to the GPU (read only type) there would be less pressure on the level3 bus and that would speed things up.

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

#130
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.

I'm confused by the size. Do I really need all assets, if I'm not going to use them. The code size is probably 50mb
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