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

141–150 of 201 posts

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#141

Post by lokedhs »

As one piece of information I offer my own experience with PSN downloads on the PS4.

I'm in Singapore and my normal download speed is around 250 Mb/s, sometimes getting closer to 300.

However, I sometimes download from the Swedish store as well, and those download speeds are always very slow. I don't think I've ever gone above one tenth of what I get with local downloads.

That said, bandwidth between Asia and Singapore are naturally more unpredictable, so I don't know if I can blame Sony here. My point is that PS4 downloads can be very fast, and the Singapore example is evidence of this fact.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#142

Post by gambiting »

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

That's being incredibly unfair in comparison. Old hardware had built in support for sprites, and as long as you kept within the limit the game would run smoothly. It had nothing to do with CPU speed - the machine had hardware support to draw say 8 sprites at the same time so if you were only drawing 8 it was fine, but try drawing 9 and you won't render even a frame a second. Nowadays we're doing an extremely brute force approach because everything is its own object that has to be refreshed every frame - and in a game like sonic mania there is so much animation going on it's insane. In a way it would be easier to do a 3D game than a very complex 2D game like this.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#143

Post by jhasse »

rado wrote: post #132
Reedx wrote: post #60

PS3 was even worse in my experience - PS4 was a big improvement, although still a lot slower than Xbox. However, with both PS4 and Xbox One it's amazingly slow to browse the stores and much of the dashboard. Anyone else experience that? It's so bad I feel like it must just be me... I avoid it as much as possible and definitely decreases the number of games I buy.

Not network related (?), but the slow and choppy PS4 UI/dashboard is one of my "favourite" features. What were they thinking?

"JavaScript is just as fast as C++ nowadays."

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#144

Post by kiallmacinnes »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #125
peterwwillis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasting space is a byproduct of having too much space. Just because it's bloated does not mean they didn't know it was bloated. They probably didn't care. As time goes by, minimum hardware requirements for operating systems increase. This isn't because it is more difficult to write software, or the hardware stopped being capable of doing the same thing it used to do. It's because software design wastes more resources…

This is one of the reasons for Docker containers to be so popular. They are basically statically linked apps, carrying everything they need within themselves. But - I like that. Not having to worry about some library version because I know the obe that is supplied is the same one the developer put there. Nice.

I believe this is a myth! You still very much have to care - for security updates.

However, more often than not, you've just lost visibility into what libraries and versions you're actually running..

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#145

Post by xorblurb »

barrkel wrote: post #84
xorblurb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows does not really have interrupt priorities IIRC. It kind of sort of have some, but the applicative code (device driver included) can't chose at which level they run their ISR, so its quite random whether or not the ISR you prefer should preempt others. Plus typically general purpose OSes don't map hw interrupt priorities mechanisms to their own priorities (and very soon the hw interrupt controllers do not even…

Windows interrupt priorities are called IRQLs, see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/doronh/2010/02/02/what-is-i... for a discussion. Mostly PnP decides the levels, unless you have multiple IRQs and you need to specify the priority.

That very page makes me think device drivers don't choose their DIRQL. Any more precise pointer to how they can do that?

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#146

Post by rohmish »

lokedhs wrote: post #141

As one piece of information I offer my own experience with PSN downloads on the PS4. I'm in Singapore and my normal download speed is around 250 Mb/s, sometimes getting closer to 300. However, I sometimes download from the Swedish store as well, and those download speeds are always very slow. I don't think I've ever gone above one tenth of what I get with local downloads. That said, bandwidth between Asia and Singapo…

I've experienced similar thing with PS3. That said, unlike the author I am too lazy to inspect traffic on that.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#147

Post by w0utert »

gambiting wrote: post #142
quazeekotl wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's being incredibly unfair in comparison. Old hardware had built in support for sprites, and as long as you kept within the limit the game would run smoothly. It had nothing to do with CPU speed - the machine had hardware support to draw say 8 sprites at the same time so if you were only drawing 8 it was fine, but try drawing 9 and you won't render even a frame a second. Nowadays we're doing an extremely brute fo…

Uhm, no? Even a PC video card from 10 years back can literally render millions of textured polygons (=basically sprites) at a steady 60 fps. Any modern card with programmable shaders would be able to do all the transforms and effects on the GPU with virtually zero CPU overhead at the same time.

There really is no excuse whatsoever for a 2D game like sonic mania to run badly on even low-end PC hardware even with built-in graphics hardware.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#148

Post by ric2b »

ew wrote: post #137
theWatcher37 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Go watch some of the major streamers on Twitch. They're constantly trying to figure out why they're dropping frames or why SLI is suddenly fucking up. The illusion that the PC-Master-Race folks like to push is that maintaining and building PCs is easy. Having built many, and owned a computer repair shop, I know that it simply isn't that easy for your average consumer to troubleshoot a computer.

> They're constantly trying to figure out why they're dropping frames or why SLI is suddenly fucking up.

But consoles drop frames as well, people just don't care. You can also not care on PC, like lots of people do.

And hardly no one uses SLI or even recommends it, precisely because it's annoying.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#149

Post by ric2b »

ekianjo wrote: post #126
ripdog wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are in a dominant market position. Honestly, it's your fault for buying a console - you knew you'd be at sony's mercy due to the monopolistic nature of consoles. The cost of switching to the one comparible console option is so great, most people will not bother unless sony's issues become too great - and network speed is presumably not a deal-breaker for enough people for sony to care. So you will contin…

> If my steam purchase downloaded super slow, I could simply get a refund on steam (an automated process) and purchase the same game on GOG, or on Humble Store I'm with you in general (PC Gamer here) but your example does not really work well. There are many games only available on Steam and not GOG, and while you get most Steam games (but not all) on Humble Bundle, Humble Bundle only gives you a Steam key so you are…

> Humble Bundle only gives you a Steam key so you are back to Steam and its potential issues.

No, you can download the game directly from Humble Bundle but sometimes (often) they also give you a steam key.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#150

Post by tinus_hn »

AndrewGaspar wrote: post #121
tinus_hn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows, like other modern operating systems, a driver is supposed to do only the minimum amount of work possible in the interrupt handler, to avoid this problem. The real work is supposed to happen later when it can be scheduled.

While it's true that networking device drivers on Windows defer all meaningful work to post-ISR, it only moves the goal posts a little bit. On Windows, a lot of network traffic processing (e.g. tcp/ip acknowledgment, virtual switch packet forwarding) is performed in a DPC[1] queued in response to the device's interrupt. A DPC generally runs at dispatch level, which gives it more-or-less exclusive access to the CPU un…

These are hardly complex tasks, they could be done by computers from the 70s. It's quite possible that Windows makes a mess of it anyway, of course.

But the top comment was about how interrupts from the network card interfere with interrupts from the sound card so it can't keep its buffer filled. That shouldn't happen.

Unless the CPU just isn't fast enough to do networking and decode or generate the audio at the same time, but then it's never going to work properly.

Post reply on HN