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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

#151
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.

Or a PC game can just slap a minimum RAM requirement on and be done with it.

I’m impressed with the tech but it seems like the end goal was to keep console manufacturing costs down. Now it’s being sold as a gameplay-enabling feature and reason to upgrade. The upgrade only looks impressive because the PS4 by now is so old.

Relying on cheap SSD storage instead of expensive RAM, and relieving CPU effort via the storage streaming chip is a cool trick. But that tech alone enables absolutely zero gameplay experiences.

It hasn’t been proven to us whether or not a typical gaming PC’s increased memory just overcomes the need for this tech. If I have a PC with 32GB of RAM and my GPU has 8GB of its own RAM I’m not convinced that a PS5 with 16GB of shared RAM will do anything that the PC setup can’t.

Desktop computers eclipsed the performance of current consoles gen consoles so long ago that I am still suspect: my prediction is that a decent mid-range gaming computer is completely capable of playing any PS5 game.

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

#152
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 hav…

> Erm, texture loading from RAM to the GPU memory already is critiqued in games, since players can see the slowdown when it happens. Well then, its good that the PS5 doesn't have system memory; like the PS4 before it, it uses a unified pool of GDDR memory for everything. > or they are getting the GPU to pull data directly from the SSD, and SSDs are very slow compared to RAM. Yes, this is what they're doing. SSDs are…

In your last paragraph you are conflating throughput with latency. What good is 'loading 150MB of data within one frame at 60fps' when your game freezes while doing that. You cant simply count on MMU page table fault being handled, and new missing texture loaded 'just in time' from compressed SSD. You cant even do that _today_ on modern PC with uncompressed textures in main RAM, latency is still too big. Plus this isnt exactly new idea. 13 year old Carmack megatexture was one of the first widely known implementations. AMD shipped hardware support for Partially Resident Textures almost 10 years ago https://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-revie.... We can go further 20 years back back to Gamecube flipper gpu virtual texturing (specialized texture unit MMU) http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/guide/1786/gamecube-faq-n...

At the end of the day PS5 will still precache streaming geometry/textures like PS4 does now (COD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvdTtl27TpM), like PS3 did (GTA4), like PS2 did (GTA3), like PS1 did (Crash Bandicoot). Sadly there is no magic breakthrough coming with next gen consoles, and this SSD thing was the best they could muster to build the hype :(

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

#153

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…

I don't think the GPU can generate page faults in the traditional sense (which core would #PF be delivered to?). The CPU has to pre-fetch data before the GPU tries to use it. On the PS5, the GPU may be able to issue read requests directly to the IO coprocessor and have it load data off the SSD, run it through the decompressor, place the data into the requested DRAM addresses, and invalidate the necessary cache lines in any GPU or CPU cores. But I'm not sure that the PS5 can actually do that with zero CPU involvement.

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

#154
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Prey did the same thing 14 years ago... I don't see what is groundbreaking about this particular gameplay segment at all.

it's been forever since I played the first Prey but I don't remember anything like this aside from perhaps the single usable portal in the game? Was pretty cool at the time and then Valve explored the concept properly in Portal 1 & 2.

Having said that, the original Prey looks pretty rough these days. And I don't see how a single portal is "the same thing" at all.

In fact, I think the only thing that I can think of to compare to is the ending of Portal 2 where you shoot a portal to the moon, but even that was just a single portal to a fairly low detail environment.

Are you referring to Prey's usage of that portal? Or something else.

FYI, the new Prey game released a few years ago is amazing. It has basically nothing to do with the original because they apparently just wanted to use their rights to the name on a flagship title. But it's amazing if you're into System Shock/BioShock type games.

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

#155
post #152
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Erm, texture loading from RAM to the GPU memory already is critiqued in games, since players can see the slowdown when it happens. Well then, its good that the PS5 doesn't have system memory; like the PS4 before it, it uses a unified pool of GDDR memory for everything. > or they are getting the GPU to pull data directly from the SSD, and SSDs are very slow compared to RAM. Yes, this is what they're doing. SSDs are…

In your last paragraph you are conflating throughput with latency. What good is 'loading 150MB of data within one frame at 60fps' when your game freezes while doing that. You cant simply count on MMU page table fault being handled, and new missing texture loaded 'just in time' from compressed SSD. You cant even do that _today_ on modern PC with uncompressed textures in main RAM, latency is still too big. Plus this is…

Predicatively caching assets will absolutely still happen, but the critical point is that it has to happen less; if developers had to "predict" the next 20 seconds of viewports a player may see on a hard drive, an SSD may drop that to 1 second, or slightly more or less depending on what is expected to happen next in the scene. Not only is this strictly fewer assets, but its far, far easier to predict, which improves the accuracy of the predictions and thus lowers cached assets further.

Which brings me back to that 150MB in 1 frame number; that's not saying that nothing is being predicatively cached; its saying that some N frames are being predicatively cached, but if the developers make an intentional or unintentional cache miss, recovery from that miss is far, far faster.

Imagine you're walking down a grimy hallway; the player opens a door, and walks out into a sun-drenched paradise. 98% of players will just walk down the hallway and open the door, so the developers have a problem: They should definitely be predicatively loading the assets for the paradise outside, but should they also load the assets for the hallway behind the player? Most players won't turn around. If they throw out some of those assets behind the player, that could make more room for the paradise that's coming. Could have more particles, more bloom, higher res textures, all good things. Today, the answer to that question is usually Yes; if those hallway assets get de-loaded, the frame drops would be too huge if a player decides to turn around. Or, more commonly, its Yes (But): Maybe we could build a bend in the hallway, or put a second door behind the player, so if they turn around the immediate assets we'd need to load would be less, and we'll have more time to load what's further behind them if we need to.

With an SSD, that answer may be No; if they can load at 8 GB/s, they know the maximum turn speed of the player, the math is more likely to work out that they can actually just throw away those assets, or never build that bend in the hallway. If they end up needing them, maybe the framerate will drop from 60fps to 45fps for a couple seconds; that's still faster than nearly every game from current gen.

Technical limitations like IO bandwidth and latency have guided the development of games for generations, all the way to the very artistic design we take for granted as being the "vision" of some creative leader on the development team. You're playing Halo; you drop down a ledge; you can't climb back up the ledge to go backward. It feels real, we don't question it, but really that ledge is only there because an engineer needed a checkpoint to make sure the player couldn't go backward, so they could de-load some assets. Simple as that. Its not driven by artistry (though, it could be); its driven by technology and its limitations (learning about these "checkpoint ledges" is a "I can't un-see that" moment for many people; checkpoints are everywhere in many boundary-pushing games. Even the hyper-recent FF7R uses them all over, often like "duck underneath this pipe" or "squeeze through these boxes"; they usually let you go back, but it takes several seconds in a confined area, which gives the game more time to load the next area. Same concept).

With an SSD, maybe a creative designer says "lets put a ledge there, we want to keep the player moving forward". But it'll be an artist making that call, not an engineer.

This is also why this generation is significant even for PC gamers! What we're talking about isn't at a technical level; its not faster load times, its not higher framerate, its fundamental changes to the game design itself which were necessary for games running on consoles. It didn't matter that your $3,000 PC had a 970 Pro NVME SSD; Assassins Creed Odyssey was designed to run on a PS4, and it doesn't. But, now that everyone has an SSD, even PC games will benefit because the game will be designed under the assumption that its alright to load multi-gigabytes per second of assets from the cold storage. This "SSD-by-default" will get built into game engines which power games across every platform. And sure, we'll see the biggest benefits on the PS5 and with its exclusives, as its SSD and hardware decompress pipeline is far-and-beyond more powerful than anything PC gamers or the Series X has, but everyone will benefit none-the-less.

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

#156
post #151
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.

Or a PC game can just slap a minimum RAM requirement on and be done with it. I’m impressed with the tech but it seems like the end goal was to keep console manufacturing costs down. Now it’s being sold as a gameplay-enabling feature and reason to upgrade. The upgrade only looks impressive because the PS4 by now is so old. Relying on cheap SSD storage instead of expensive RAM, and relieving CPU effort via the storage…

Both worlds win here:

Finally the gamer gets low/no loading which is nice to have.

But also it becomes much easier for Game Developers.

I'm still looking forward to it, after all, it is an huge improvement to current gen, independently of how long it took and how old the ps4 is.

And i'm not 100% sure if this doesn't affect PC Gaming. After all Direct Storage will hopefully fix small SSD Issues you also have on PC right now.

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

#157
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 see a huge change through what Epic Games showed with UE5 and that geometry.

For me, this next Gen basically just solved Load Times, SSD Load Priority, Raytracing/Light, Detailed Geometry with Light etc.

It feels very obvious, don't get me wrong, but it is still not available yet. It is new.

I personally like the independed IO chip very much. I have and had seen enough latency issues on current Operating Systems due to full busses due to super fast NVMs.

I was used to SSD Speed, then i added an NVM and holy shit that shit is so much faster.

Good time to be alive.

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

#158
post #155
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your last paragraph you are conflating throughput with latency. What good is 'loading 150MB of data within one frame at 60fps' when your game freezes while doing that. You cant simply count on MMU page table fault being handled, and new missing texture loaded 'just in time' from compressed SSD. You cant even do that _today_ on modern PC with uncompressed textures in main RAM, latency is still too big. Plus this is…

Predicatively caching assets will absolutely still happen, but the critical point is that it has to happen less ; if developers had to "predict" the next 20 seconds of viewports a player may see on a hard drive, an SSD may drop that to 1 second, or slightly more or less depending on what is expected to happen next in the scene. Not only is this strictly fewer assets, but its far, far easier to predict, which improves…

But there is nothing new here. Its not like developers avoided streaming assets and now somehow will do it. We have 7 years of Full hardware support in current gen consoles and plenty of games using it. ps4 - Partially Resident Textures, x1 - Tiled Resources https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2014/01/30/direc...

Here is another example, 6 year old Far Cry 4 with custom implementation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVPMhGteeuE

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

#159
post #158
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicatively caching assets will absolutely still happen, but the critical point is that it has to happen less ; if developers had to "predict" the next 20 seconds of viewports a player may see on a hard drive, an SSD may drop that to 1 second, or slightly more or less depending on what is expected to happen next in the scene. Not only is this strictly fewer assets, but its far, far easier to predict, which improves…

But there is nothing new here. Its not like developers avoided streaming assets and now somehow will do it. We have 7 years of Full hardware support in current gen consoles and plenty of games using it. ps4 - Partially Resident Textures, x1 - Tiled Resources https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2014/01/30/direc... Here is another example, 6 year old Far Cry 4 with custom implementation https://www.youtube.com/…

Then why do even modern games still use these map and character movement tricks? According to you, this problem should be solved!

Because its not solved. Games have only gotten bigger; assets are bigger than ever. Having a hard drive in every console actually helped a ton, because the hard drive/memory bandwidth is larger than the disk/memory one, but it didn't help enough.

There's no way around the fundamental bandwidth at the hardware: If a game needs a gigabyte of assets for the next major scene transition, it will probably need to use tricks to make sure that scene transition takes longer than, say, 10 seconds (50-100MB/s is a typical read rate). Checkpoints; stall sections which slow the player down; limiting the top speed of the character or (especially) vehicles; slow opening doors (think Dark Souls/Bloodborne); vestibules between two doors with an adjustable length based on expected load time... They use technical tricks on the hard drive, copying commonly used assets all around the platter to reduce seek times. I've even heard it said by a developer that "we'd be fine in this transition if the game gets installed to the inner edge of the platter, but on the outer edge the load will take too long"; that's how close modern games run against hardware limitations.

The software in play hasn't changed. Duh. We're not talking about the software, we're talking about the SSD.

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