14 ms·

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

125 points by xoa 6y ago

GiorgioG 6y ago
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.
- walrus01 6y ago
  In terms of overall console failure rates and unhappy end users, it has to be a huge relief to the xbox and ps5 hardware dev teams to remove anything with moving parts. The long term reliability and failure rates for rotating 2.5/3.5" HDDs vs NVME SSD will be very different. The limiting factor for SSD endurance is volume of writes, which can be very carefully controlled in a walled-garden console OS+app design. Ordinary consumers are already very unlikely to run into write-endurance issues with something like a samsung nvme m2.2280 512GB-1TB SSD in a desktop PC.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  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.
  - spoopyskelly 6y ago
    Swapping the 5400 RPM drive with a SSD still makes sense even on SATA2. You'll go from 80ish M/s reads to 300.
- pixl97 6y ago
  Getting SSD reliably and cheap in console quantity has been the problem before now. Prices have fluctuated considerably in the past few years as other big buyers like data centers are up large amounts of the relatively small amount of ssd production.
walrus01 6y ago
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 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles. 1TB of SSD space is enough for maybe 12 or 14 games, maximum. "Serious" console gaming people buy many more games than that...
- GuiA 6y ago
  A friend really wanted me to play Destiny 2 with him. I was going to give it a shot during one of their free weekends, but didn't do it because my gaming laptop's hard drive is only 500GB, and I didn't want to delete half a dozen games or so just to install Destiny. I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually losing potential players because of it - if the download had been half the size, they certainly could have converted me.
  - wmeredith 6y ago
    It took me five years and about 2000 hours to get the Destiny monkey off my back. Rarely have I been such an abusive relationship a piece of software. I’ll cut the rant short here, but it’s like their Skinner box was made for me. The questionable (to put it charitably) decisions made by the people running that game still boggle my mind.
- christoph 6y ago
  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"...
  - tylersmith 6y ago
    That sounds like a lot more effort and time than just downloading 95gb.
wltprgm 6y ago
This article didn't talk deep enough about PS5 custom storage chip controller or I missed it. Reference: 1. https://youtu.be/4ehDRCE1Z38?t=480 https://youtu.be/4ehDRCE1Z38?t=480 2. https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1205112-i%E2%80%99ve-disappointed-and-embarrassed-myself/ https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1205112-i%E2%80%99ve-di...
- wtallis 6y ago
  I think you may have failed to notice that there's more than one page to this article. Page 1 covers the SSD hardware itself, and page 2 covers the other storage-related hardware that's not actually on the SSD itself.
  - wltprgm 6y ago
    I really failed to notice that, yea they did talk about it in other pages
ardit33 6y ago
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 language: History has demonstrated that gamers don't give a f@ck on how fast is the SSD.... PS1 won over N64 even though it had huge loading times, compared to near instantaneous N64's loading screens.... I meant, personally, i think it is great, as PS4 loading time are bad, but just fast loading time it is not going to make me buy a game. Anyway, just a sad PR piece trying to get people exited for something that looks a small (but good) evolutionary improvement over the current PS4 Pro/Xbox X. Now if we had custom fast/ray-casting technology, than it would have been exiting. But it looks like if enabled, a game will either have to drop resolutions and cap frame-rates to barely playable 30fps. But, hey your SSD will be fast.....
- devwastaken 6y ago
  It's not just load times of maps. Think load times of assets in real-time. Traditionally youd store everything in ram because the disk storage was slow. This leads to obvious caps in how much you can have loaded at a time. But with fast enough storage you can rely on pulling assets from storage during game, not having to preload. This opens all sorts of flexibility that wasn't possible before.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  Yes, gamers don't give a toss about the tech details [0], and they shouldn't, Sony gave a presentation about all of the internals of the PS5 and all they got in response was "ZZzzZZZZZZ". They only want the console for the games, man, nothing else. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg
  - PudgePacket 6y ago
    This was actually a really awesome presentation. I don't think the intended audience was their customers, perhaps more for the media & gamedevs.
duxup 6y ago
Are any of these magical load times and such going to actually happen? I feel like gaming companies really don't emphasize load times unless they have to and their energy goes into pretty graphics or other things. In theory couldn't they have ultra fast load times now if they just lowered the amount they needed to load to start? / Manage the amount of content they need to load to start? I wonder if they'll just focus on pushing any speed benefits into....load times for even more assets, pretty graphics or whatever they choose. In the meantime console announcement promises/ hype have a terrible history as far as accuracy goes...
- _kbh_ 6y ago
  The great thing about having these ultra fast SSDs and the associated software stacks is that you can get both faster load times and also more assets. One of the greatest benefits of these SSDs imo is that it tightens up how big your streaming pool has to be, freeing up a large amount of ram and allowing for on demand loading of assets just before they are needed. Additionally the huge bandwidth means that the consoles can fill their entire ram in between 3ish and 6ish seconds, which should reduce max loading times by a lot.
xoa 6y ago
This article of course focuses primarily on the consoles with an interesting gathering of some of the lower level details behind "fast SSD". But while it compares it to servers what it really brought to mind to me was mainframes, which often had not particularly impressive CPU specs at first glance but were kings of IO and offloading. It made me wonder if over the next decade we'll see yet another example of the cyclical nature of the tech industry in PCs. I haven't been following storage super closely for a bit, but it hasn't been that long yet the numbers the author tosses out in terms of "by the end of the year everyone will be doing 6-7+ GB/s" felt pretty staggering. Combined with the sudden leap forward in system bandwidth thanks to AMD, and after a fairly long period of stagnation around HDDs and the limits of SATA it feels like a huge amount of progress in storage is happening at an enormous clip. And that is leading to the discovery of bottlenecks elsewhere, like with ZFS Issue #8381 [1] where the ARC meant to improve performance actually becomes troublesome. AMD has really pushed available PCIe bandwidth up dramatically with EPYC 2 doing up to 128 GB/s, yet with drive numbers like those arrays could actually be made to get towards it already! As the article says that kind of IO becomes a real strain on valuable general purpose CPU time. So I wonder if we'll actually start to see regular PCs begin offloading again, reversing the generalize everything a bit with more support specialized silicon so that they can actually feed the beast. I could see that having real implications for a lot of future software and OS development too, particularly for OSS. If things go that way I hope some good open standards can get out ahead of it. ---- 1: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381
betoharres 6y ago
"all games and game engines are still designed to be playable off hard drives because current consoles and many low-end PCs lack SSDs" Saved you some time
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  that is not a fair characterization at all
Zedmor 6y ago
They need to change the title. It's an absolute disgrace to make fun of today's moment. Please share https://twitter.com/Zedmor/status/1271637729646915585 https://twitter.com/Zedmor/status/1271637729646915585
- bsagdiyev 6y ago
  I don’t get it, how is this related to anything going on? Because storage “matters” is somehow similar to black lives “matter”? I really actually don’t understand how you made that leap of logic.
- ladberg 6y ago
  How is the title political or joking in any way?
- nsxwolf 6y ago
  It’s just the word “matters”. If it followed the pattern “[adjective] [plural noun] Matter” I could see it looking like a tacky parody.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  You are outraged and your solution is to try to get people to share your own twitter saying you outraged?
CivBase 6y ago
My understanding is that what makes these new SSDs so special is the embedded decompression hardware. That sounds great... but I can't help but think back a couple generations to the PS3 and its cell architecture. Yeah, it was more efficient than x86, but few developers really managed to capitalize on it until the end of that generation. By that point, the PS3 was lagging far behind the 360 is US sales and had long since been eclipsed by PCs in terms of performance. Will we see something similar with these SSDs? Are devs actually prepared to take advantage of the special decompression hardware? Or will it be the stuff of dreams and tech demos for the first few years?
- sosborn 6y ago
  PS3 actually sold more than the the 360, but they both got smashed by the wii.
- wtallis 6y ago
  For starters, the compression hardware isn't part of the SSD. But more importantly, transparent decompression has been implemented many times on many systems; it's not a pipe dream. Developers don't have to do much of anything special to use the decompression hardware. They just have to use the platform's standard APIs for reading data from disk, and the OS or standard library takes care of routing it through the hardware offloads. From the application programmer's perspective, the decompression just shifts the performance characteristics of the storage a bit—higher latency, higher throughput, stronger preference for certain block sizes. The bigger question is whether developers will be able to make good use of high bandwidth storage, regardless of how that storage is provided. Replacing everything in RAM on a ~2 second timescale is pretty wild. Lots of game engines have systems to coordinate loading assets on the fly, and the scalability limits of those existing solutions are going to be tested.
- sgift 6y ago
  > Will we see something similar with these SSDs? Are devs actually prepared to take advantage of the special decompression hardware? Or will it be the stuff of dreams and tech demos for the first few years? Hard to say, but another big point in Cernys talk was developer productivity and why they don't try to use "revolutionary" hardware like the Cell architecture anymore: Onboarding time for new teams is just too long. We don't know yet if it is true, but he talked about an onboarding time of 1 month for a team of developers new to PS5 (but with game dev experience). The last time a team could be productive this fast was PS1. If that's true I think we have a decent chance of devs using all the tech provided from the start. More so for PS5 only titles than for multi-platform titles.
hyperpallium 6y ago
> The PS5's SSD can supply data at 5.5 GB/s. The RAM runs at 448 GB/s, 81 times faster. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps5-new-era-of-gaming/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps... SSD is compressed (by "Kraken"), giving 8-9GB/s typical. You could compress RAM too, but not worth the latency penalty.
- wtallis 6y ago
  Decompressing something to use during rendering of the same frame probably also isn't worth the latency penalty. Compression is fine for streaming data, but not so much for low-latency seeking around within data.
- MikusR 6y ago
  Textures are kept compressed in ram
  - mcraiha 6y ago
    Yes, but they have special formats (ETC, PVRTC, ASTC etc.) so GPU can use them directly, and the compression is lossy. e.g. PNG would not work in this situation because GPU cannot decode PNG textures fast enough.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
> 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.
- ladberg 6y 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.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    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.
MintelIE 6y ago
Every generation has seen the various console makers hyping some magic technical aspect of their machines. We had Blast Processing, Mode 7, polygons, MORE polygons, the Emotion Engine, RAMBUS, hyper futuristic Cell technology, and none of it solves the central problem for game designers - how to make a FUN game. I’d give up this ultra fast SSD in a heartbeat if it meant there wouldn’t be any pay to win or DLC to buy for a half completed but shipped anyway game.
jiggawatts 6y ago
A lot of people here don't quite seem to get what this is all about. Previously, a PC or a console might have 4-8 cores (or hyperthreads, or cell processors, or whatever). Typically, you'd want to be doing sequential I/O from just one of those processor cores, because more than likely be a mechanical disk. At most you could do asynchronous or threaded I/O so that the CPU core could also do other computation while waiting for textures to stream in (or whatever), but that's about it. More than one concurrent I/O at a time (even from other programs!) would cause the disk head to seek, killing your performance. You'd get stuttering in the game or texture popping as the I/O fell behind. You could budget on maybe 20-30 MB/s if you're lucky, or less than 5 MB/s random I/O if unlucky. It made no difference if you had a PC with an SSD, as zero games were written for it. So now, with SSDs in consoles as standard you would automatically assume, that we can finally utilise all the CPU threads and throw 8 cores worth of I/O at the SSD. Maybe increase the queue depth a bit more, have some asynchronous and overlapped I/Os or something. But that's crazy difficult. The models and textures being streamed in are actually used on the GPU, not the CPU. Each texture is typically mip-mapped, building up a "pyramid" of lower and lower resolution versions to prevent moire when viewed at a distance. The "currently used set" of each texture is a complicated angled 'slice' through this sort-of-3D texture 'volume'! This is used asynchronously by the GPU, and ideally you'd somehow want to track this, figuring out which parts are used by the GPU, which aren't, from which mip-map layer, etc.. and then predict ahead the next set of 32x32 tiles or whatever you'd want to load. In parallel. Across 8 CPU cores. While the GPU is doing its own thing. Just no. That's not happening. The synchronisation alone would be a nightmare. It's crazy talk. No human can write code like this, and certainly not optimally and efficiently. So the brilliant thing about the GPU on the PS5 is that the GPU can make direct I/O calls. No CPU involvement. Whatever it "needs", as and when it decides, it can simply directly fetch. It's not going to do this with 8 cores, or 16 threads. No, it's going to do it with thousands of cores. The I/O queue depths that used to be "exactly 1" for literally 100% of all previous games are not going to be 8. They're going to be tens of thousands! This is massive. This isn't "a couple of random I/Os done a little bit better", it's four or five orders of magnitude.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

125 points by xoa 6y ago

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.

walrus01 6y ago
In terms of overall console failure rates and unhappy end users, it has to be a huge relief to the xbox and ps5 hardware dev teams to remove anything with moving parts. The long term reliability and failure rates for rotating 2.5/3.5" HDDs vs NVME SSD will be very different. The limiting factor for SSD endurance is volume of writes, which can be very carefully controlled in a walled-garden console OS+app design. Ordinary consumers are already very unlikely to run into write-endurance issues with something like a samsung nvme m2.2280 512GB-1TB SSD in a desktop PC.
freeone3000 6y ago
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.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  Swapping the 5400 RPM drive with a SSD still makes sense even on SATA2. You'll go from 80ish M/s reads to 300.
pixl97 6y ago
Getting SSD reliably and cheap in console quantity has been the problem before now. Prices have fluctuated considerably in the past few years as other big buyers like data centers are up large amounts of the relatively small amount of ssd production.

walrus01 6y ago

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 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles. 1TB of SSD space is enough for maybe 12 or 14 games, maximum. "Serious" console gaming people buy many more games than that...

GuiA 6y ago
A friend really wanted me to play Destiny 2 with him. I was going to give it a shot during one of their free weekends, but didn't do it because my gaming laptop's hard drive is only 500GB, and I didn't want to delete half a dozen games or so just to install Destiny. I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually losing potential players because of it - if the download had been half the size, they certainly could have converted me.
- wmeredith 6y ago
  It took me five years and about 2000 hours to get the Destiny monkey off my back. Rarely have I been such an abusive relationship a piece of software. I’ll cut the rant short here, but it’s like their Skinner box was made for me. The questionable (to put it charitably) decisions made by the people running that game still boggle my mind.
christoph 6y ago
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"...
- tylersmith 6y ago
  That sounds like a lot more effort and time than just downloading 95gb.

wltprgm 6y ago

This article didn't talk deep enough about PS5 custom storage chip controller or I missed it. Reference: 1. https://youtu.be/4ehDRCE1Z38?t=480 https://youtu.be/4ehDRCE1Z38?t=480 2. https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1205112-i%E2%80%99ve-disappointed-and-embarrassed-myself/ https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1205112-i%E2%80%99ve-di...

wtallis 6y ago
I think you may have failed to notice that there's more than one page to this article. Page 1 covers the SSD hardware itself, and page 2 covers the other storage-related hardware that's not actually on the SSD itself.
- wltprgm 6y ago
  I really failed to notice that, yea they did talk about it in other pages

ardit33 6y ago

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 language: History has demonstrated that gamers don't give a f@ck on how fast is the SSD.... PS1 won over N64 even though it had huge loading times, compared to near instantaneous N64's loading screens.... I meant, personally, i think it is great, as PS4 loading time are bad, but just fast loading time it is not going to make me buy a game. Anyway, just a sad PR piece trying to get people exited for something that looks a small (but good) evolutionary improvement over the current PS4 Pro/Xbox X. Now if we had custom fast/ray-casting technology, than it would have been exiting. But it looks like if enabled, a game will either have to drop resolutions and cap frame-rates to barely playable 30fps. But, hey your SSD will be fast.....

devwastaken 6y ago
It's not just load times of maps. Think load times of assets in real-time. Traditionally youd store everything in ram because the disk storage was slow. This leads to obvious caps in how much you can have loaded at a time. But with fast enough storage you can rely on pulling assets from storage during game, not having to preload. This opens all sorts of flexibility that wasn't possible before.
colesantiago 6y ago
Yes, gamers don't give a toss about the tech details [0], and they shouldn't, Sony gave a presentation about all of the internals of the PS5 and all they got in response was "ZZzzZZZZZZ". They only want the console for the games, man, nothing else. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg
- PudgePacket 6y ago
  This was actually a really awesome presentation. I don't think the intended audience was their customers, perhaps more for the media & gamedevs.

duxup 6y ago

Are any of these magical load times and such going to actually happen? I feel like gaming companies really don't emphasize load times unless they have to and their energy goes into pretty graphics or other things. In theory couldn't they have ultra fast load times now if they just lowered the amount they needed to load to start? / Manage the amount of content they need to load to start? I wonder if they'll just focus on pushing any speed benefits into....load times for even more assets, pretty graphics or whatever they choose. In the meantime console announcement promises/ hype have a terrible history as far as accuracy goes...

_kbh_ 6y ago
The great thing about having these ultra fast SSDs and the associated software stacks is that you can get both faster load times and also more assets. One of the greatest benefits of these SSDs imo is that it tightens up how big your streaming pool has to be, freeing up a large amount of ram and allowing for on demand loading of assets just before they are needed. Additionally the huge bandwidth means that the consoles can fill their entire ram in between 3ish and 6ish seconds, which should reduce max loading times by a lot.

xoa 6y ago

This article of course focuses primarily on the consoles with an interesting gathering of some of the lower level details behind "fast SSD". But while it compares it to servers what it really brought to mind to me was mainframes, which often had not particularly impressive CPU specs at first glance but were kings of IO and offloading. It made me wonder if over the next decade we'll see yet another example of the cyclical nature of the tech industry in PCs. I haven't been following storage super closely for a bit, but it hasn't been that long yet the numbers the author tosses out in terms of "by the end of the year everyone will be doing 6-7+ GB/s" felt pretty staggering. Combined with the sudden leap forward in system bandwidth thanks to AMD, and after a fairly long period of stagnation around HDDs and the limits of SATA it feels like a huge amount of progress in storage is happening at an enormous clip. And that is leading to the discovery of bottlenecks elsewhere, like with ZFS Issue #8381 [1] where the ARC meant to improve performance actually becomes troublesome. AMD has really pushed available PCIe bandwidth up dramatically with EPYC 2 doing up to 128 GB/s, yet with drive numbers like those arrays could actually be made to get towards it already! As the article says that kind of IO becomes a real strain on valuable general purpose CPU time. So I wonder if we'll actually start to see regular PCs begin offloading again, reversing the generalize everything a bit with more support specialized silicon so that they can actually feed the beast. I could see that having real implications for a lot of future software and OS development too, particularly for OSS. If things go that way I hope some good open standards can get out ahead of it. ---- 1: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381

betoharres 6y ago

"all games and game engines are still designed to be playable off hard drives because current consoles and many low-end PCs lack SSDs" Saved you some time

gameswithgo 6y ago
that is not a fair characterization at all

Zedmor 6y ago

They need to change the title. It's an absolute disgrace to make fun of today's moment. Please share https://twitter.com/Zedmor/status/1271637729646915585 https://twitter.com/Zedmor/status/1271637729646915585

bsagdiyev 6y ago
I don’t get it, how is this related to anything going on? Because storage “matters” is somehow similar to black lives “matter”? I really actually don’t understand how you made that leap of logic.
ladberg 6y ago
How is the title political or joking in any way?
nsxwolf 6y ago
It’s just the word “matters”. If it followed the pattern “[adjective] [plural noun] Matter” I could see it looking like a tacky parody.
CyberDildonics 6y ago
You are outraged and your solution is to try to get people to share your own twitter saying you outraged?

CivBase 6y ago

My understanding is that what makes these new SSDs so special is the embedded decompression hardware. That sounds great... but I can't help but think back a couple generations to the PS3 and its cell architecture. Yeah, it was more efficient than x86, but few developers really managed to capitalize on it until the end of that generation. By that point, the PS3 was lagging far behind the 360 is US sales and had long since been eclipsed by PCs in terms of performance. Will we see something similar with these SSDs? Are devs actually prepared to take advantage of the special decompression hardware? Or will it be the stuff of dreams and tech demos for the first few years?

sosborn 6y ago
PS3 actually sold more than the the 360, but they both got smashed by the wii.
wtallis 6y ago
For starters, the compression hardware isn't part of the SSD. But more importantly, transparent decompression has been implemented many times on many systems; it's not a pipe dream. Developers don't have to do much of anything special to use the decompression hardware. They just have to use the platform's standard APIs for reading data from disk, and the OS or standard library takes care of routing it through the hardware offloads. From the application programmer's perspective, the decompression just shifts the performance characteristics of the storage a bit—higher latency, higher throughput, stronger preference for certain block sizes. The bigger question is whether developers will be able to make good use of high bandwidth storage, regardless of how that storage is provided. Replacing everything in RAM on a ~2 second timescale is pretty wild. Lots of game engines have systems to coordinate loading assets on the fly, and the scalability limits of those existing solutions are going to be tested.
sgift 6y ago
> Will we see something similar with these SSDs? Are devs actually prepared to take advantage of the special decompression hardware? Or will it be the stuff of dreams and tech demos for the first few years? Hard to say, but another big point in Cernys talk was developer productivity and why they don't try to use "revolutionary" hardware like the Cell architecture anymore: Onboarding time for new teams is just too long. We don't know yet if it is true, but he talked about an onboarding time of 1 month for a team of developers new to PS5 (but with game dev experience). The last time a team could be productive this fast was PS1. If that's true I think we have a decent chance of devs using all the tech provided from the start. More so for PS5 only titles than for multi-platform titles.

hyperpallium 6y ago

> The PS5's SSD can supply data at 5.5 GB/s. The RAM runs at 448 GB/s, 81 times faster. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps5-new-era-of-gaming/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps... SSD is compressed (by "Kraken"), giving 8-9GB/s typical. You could compress RAM too, but not worth the latency penalty.

wtallis 6y ago
Decompressing something to use during rendering of the same frame probably also isn't worth the latency penalty. Compression is fine for streaming data, but not so much for low-latency seeking around within data.
MikusR 6y ago
Textures are kept compressed in ram
- mcraiha 6y ago
  Yes, but they have special formats (ETC, PVRTC, ASTC etc.) so GPU can use them directly, and the compression is lossy. e.g. PNG would not work in this situation because GPU cannot decode PNG textures fast enough.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

> 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.

ladberg 6y 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.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  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.

MintelIE 6y ago

Every generation has seen the various console makers hyping some magic technical aspect of their machines. We had Blast Processing, Mode 7, polygons, MORE polygons, the Emotion Engine, RAMBUS, hyper futuristic Cell technology, and none of it solves the central problem for game designers - how to make a FUN game. I’d give up this ultra fast SSD in a heartbeat if it meant there wouldn’t be any pay to win or DLC to buy for a half completed but shipped anyway game.

jiggawatts 6y ago

A lot of people here don't quite seem to get what this is all about. Previously, a PC or a console might have 4-8 cores (or hyperthreads, or cell processors, or whatever). Typically, you'd want to be doing sequential I/O from just one of those processor cores, because more than likely be a mechanical disk. At most you could do asynchronous or threaded I/O so that the CPU core could also do other computation while waiting for textures to stream in (or whatever), but that's about it. More than one concurrent I/O at a time (even from other programs!) would cause the disk head to seek, killing your performance. You'd get stuttering in the game or texture popping as the I/O fell behind. You could budget on maybe 20-30 MB/s if you're lucky, or less than 5 MB/s random I/O if unlucky. It made no difference if you had a PC with an SSD, as zero games were written for it. So now, with SSDs in consoles as standard you would automatically assume, that we can finally utilise all the CPU threads and throw 8 cores worth of I/O at the SSD. Maybe increase the queue depth a bit more, have some asynchronous and overlapped I/Os or something. But that's crazy difficult. The models and textures being streamed in are actually used on the GPU, not the CPU. Each texture is typically mip-mapped, building up a "pyramid" of lower and lower resolution versions to prevent moire when viewed at a distance. The "currently used set" of each texture is a complicated angled 'slice' through this sort-of-3D texture 'volume'! This is used asynchronously by the GPU, and ideally you'd somehow want to track this, figuring out which parts are used by the GPU, which aren't, from which mip-map layer, etc.. and then predict ahead the next set of 32x32 tiles or whatever you'd want to load. In parallel. Across 8 CPU cores. While the GPU is doing its own thing. Just no. That's not happening. The synchronisation alone would be a nightmare. It's crazy talk. No human can write code like this, and certainly not optimally and efficiently. So the brilliant thing about the GPU on the PS5 is that the GPU can make direct I/O calls. No CPU involvement. Whatever it "needs", as and when it decides, it can simply directly fetch. It's not going to do this with 8 cores, or 16 threads. No, it's going to do it with thousands of cores. The I/O queue depths that used to be "exactly 1" for literally 100% of all previous games are not going to be 8. They're going to be tens of thousands! This is massive. This isn't "a couple of random I/Os done a little bit better", it's four or five orders of magnitude.

deleted 6y ago

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