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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

#141

Post by rowanG077 »

jhack wrote: post #20
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…

You can tell someone hasn't watched the Ratchet & Clank demo from the other day[0]. The SSDs in these consoles go far beyond short load times. They can radically change how games are made and designed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsnG-3-r6-Q

Things like this have been possible for almost a decade now. Bioshock infinite being a prime example.

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

#142

Post by OGWhales »

tmpz22 wrote: post #88
leddt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most tests I've seen of real-time game asset loading between the various types of SSDs on PC are incredibly inconsistent - for most games it is hardly noticeable. I'd be excited if I was proven wrong but this really feels like the typical console hype ramp up to black friday that South Park portrays so well...

This is not great logic, as those games are not designed around taking advantage of the faster SSD storage like new games will be with the launch of the new consoles. Most games are built with an HDD in mind and thus the ssd is not the bottleneck.

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

#143

Post by rowanG077 »

leddt wrote: post #59
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!

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.

This is simply not true. That's like saying no game on PC is possible because not everyone has a good enough graphics card. Just have a minimum spec for required storage speed and you're golden.

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

#144

Post by OGWhales »

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.

This is exactly it. With most games being designed around HDD speeds, storage is rarely the bottle neck. It’s why testing game loading times with different SSDs is so inconsistent amongst different games.

This will change as the new lowest common denominator will eventually become the new consoles with their faster NVMe drives

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

#145

Post by rowanG077 »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #113
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…

I used to think like you. But the way a game looks definitely has impact on the way the gameplay feels. Smoke particles out of a gun, the slight tilt of your viewport. The flash that reflects of the walls. These things have an incredible impact on gameplay even if mechanically it makes no difference.

Vision is one of our most important senses and discounting it and saying well it shouldn't matter because gameplay is the most importing is shortsighted. Graphics are a huge part of gameplay.

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

#146

Post by OGWhales »

walrus01 wrote: 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…

> I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles

I doubt this very much. For one, we already know the storage expansion options for the Xbox series x… which is an external drive equally fast to the internal one.

Ps5 is similar deal except there aren’t any NVMe drives that are compare right now. Maybe there are and I’m unaware, but regardless you can still attach a fast NVMe drive. Ps5 will be approving these drives, to ensure they are fast enough for the system.

Basically no, nobody will be using any external spinning drives for their games. They will be NVMe drives.

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

#147

Post by spoopyskelly »

rasz wrote: post #39
resist_futility wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't count a load time of almost 10 times faster as a generational leap? Ray tracing right now is just a gimmick, I don't care about puddles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqV7BNoQEr4

What this shows you is how bad consoles are compared to PC gaming.

What this shows you is that PC gaming still doesn't matter and consoles will progress at their own pace because that's where the money is.

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

#148

Post by spoopyskelly »

freeone3000 wrote: post #50
GiorgioG wrote: post #2

It's about time. SSDs have been around a very long time, and without a supported way of swapping out the internal hard drive, console gamers are penalized with long waits vs PCs where SSDs have become fairly standard.

PS4s have been able to swap out their hard drive and it's fully supported. However, base model PS4s run it at SATA2 speeds no matter what's attached, with SATA3 only being supported on the Pro.

Swapping the 5400 RPM drive with a SSD still makes sense even on SATA2. You'll go from 80ish M/s reads to 300.

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

#149

Post by asdff »

rowanG077 wrote: post #145
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I used to think like you. But the way a game looks definitely has impact on the way the gameplay feels. Smoke particles out of a gun, the slight tilt of your viewport. The flash that reflects of the walls. These things have an incredible impact on gameplay even if mechanically it makes no difference. Vision is one of our most important senses and discounting it and saying well it shouldn't matter because gameplay is…

Some of it can get in your way. I usually turn off bloom and blur, I get a higher FPS and my peripheral vision is already running a native blur function, so why waste resources on another process doing the same thing? A lot of technological innovation ends up being spent on style points for the sake of making a sexy trailer and getting pre orders. When Battlefield 3 came out with all the engine improvements, many users ended up hating all the blue and shiny flashes with everything and blur and bloom that got in the way of actual game play.

Sometimes people running lower specs might even play better than someone running higher specs, if that means the higher spec has more grass textures that better hide character models or something like that. Those sort of improvements are improvements for the sake of vanity, and are generally panned by a game's core players.

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

#150

Post by rasz »

CountSessine wrote: post #132
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…

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. You seem to know quite a bit about this - just wondering - how does this work? The GPU can generate PCIe bus traffic to do RAM reads or writes, but how does it cause a page fault in the CPU? Is this some kind of IOMMU? Is there any place I can re…

APU, shared memory controller, unified memory address space.
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