10 ms·

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.

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.
  - greyskull 6y ago
    It was originally intended for the Game Developers Conference which was cancelled (postponed?). Sony didn't do the best job setting expectations ahead of time, but either way people were hungry for info. At the time, Sony had been fairly quiet.
- greyskull 6y ago
  IMO required viewing for any dev to form a more informed opinion on the SSD tech. Cerny talks about it fairly practically. Starting point on SSD: https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg?t=310 https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg?t=310 for about 20 minutes
jhack 6y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsnG-3-r6-Q
- nemothekid 6y ago
  Wow, I'm not going to believe that's realtime in my hands. I started the video thinking "whats so special about this", and when they started going interdimensional I realized either this is very cool or just hype.
  - resist_futility 6y ago
    Insomniac Games is pretty good about wysiwyg
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- freeone3000 6y ago
  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!
  - leddt 6y ago
    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.
    - tmpz22 6y ago
      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...
gameswithgo 6y ago
i think you have become way too cynical. of course we don’t have the huge leaps we used to. the marginal utility of twice as many polygons or pixels is much less now. the effort that goes into these advances we do get is much more than it was nonetheless, and borders on magic. amazing time to be alive for computing hardware power and great to see the consoles letting us fully leverage it
- heromal 6y ago
  Exactly. Moore's Law had to end at some point.
jimmaswell 6y ago
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?
- meddlepal 6y ago
  I seem to recall PS1 games being cheaper than N64 games which allowed kids to purchase more. Allowances in the 90s were on average between 5-20/wk. PS1 games were more like $40 compared to N64 games which were usually $60.
- snuxoll 6y ago
  The PS1 also had much more memory available for texture data - there was a set of trade offs for both consoles. Personally I loved both - but the PS1 turned out some really impressive game’s that weren’t possible on the N64 (at least not without looking like blurry messes) even discounting the benefits a CD-ROM had for storing large amounts of data.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  > What did everyone see in the PS1? Mod chips.
- serf 6y ago
  >What did everyone see in the PS1? storage space for CD quality audio, storage space for full-motion video, on-board full motion video decoders, cheaper media costs, easier media to deal with on development side, and most importantly a game library that catered more towards 'adultish' fans. I remember reading back when these consoles were current that the biggest draw for most consumers was the fact that full-motion-video was a first class citizen on the PS1, and it was a huge technical wow for people. FMV was difficult on the N64 due to size and codec constraints, so it was rarely done -- and when it was if was usually subpar compared to the PS1 version of the same game. Resident Evil franchise was notorious for this phenomenon.
  - 6y ago
resist_futility 6y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqV7BNoQEr4
- anamexis 6y ago
  It's a generational leap in game load times, but it's not a generational leap in gaming.
  - resist_futility 6y ago
    Launch titles rarely take full advantage of the new tech
  - Animats 6y ago
    Watch the UE5 demo. Realize what they're doing. They're loading the high-detail geometry into the GPU and letting the GPU do the mesh reduction. For that to work, huge amounts of geometry has to be loaded into memory the GPU can see. The PS5 is built for that. The GPU has access to the same memory (24GB) the CPU does, and, presumably, so does the SSD controller. So you can put vertex buffers in files and load them directly into the GPU if you want. On the PS5, a Blu-Ray type drive is optional. Are you going to have 100 GB downloads from the network? That's going to take a while. Even if you have a gigabit network connection, it's going to take 15 minutes or so to download a large game. Few people have that much bandwidth. Red Dead Redemption 2 needs 150GB of disk space now, so games are already that big. Games will have to have some starting level that keeps the user busy while the downloader pulls in content. But after that, performance should be impressive.
  - acidbaseextract 6y ago
    The whole storage architecture (not the SSDs alone) is a generational leap in gaming because it's a generational leap in game production economics. Asset cost has been skyrocketing for modern games, and the slate of storage technologies in these consoles directly addresses that. These improvements make assets reusable. SSDs + built in compression / storage co-processing + dynamic resolution makes it possible for small teams to plonk high res assets from libraries into games without spending crazy amounts of time doing asset performance optimization. It's also going to be a driver of 1440 and 4k gaming, because there will be more games that look good enough to make high res gaming worth it.
jasondigitized 6y ago
If Tim Sweeney says it’s a game changer I’m gonna say it’s probably a game changer.
ErneX 6y ago
Oh you just wait. Have you seen the Ratchet & Clank trailer? that's just the beginning.
Goronmon 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... These new SSD's are more of an upgrade then we've had in any console over multiple generations. Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4 were all pretty standard "mini-PC" consoles. PS3 had a different architecture that didn't really pay off until much later in the console's life-cycle and still didn't have a huge impact, hence the PS4 dropping Cell for the PS4.
ezconnect 6y ago
Mark Cerny explains it very well why they don't target revolutionary changes anymore in his presentation about PS5 technology.
013a 6y ago
There is a really critical component of having an SSD, and knowing you'll have an SSD (as a game developer) which is easily missed (the article may cover this, but just to reiterate). Lets say you only have 8gb of memory. Most importantly: You know you'll have 8gb (not more, not less). You build your game around having 8gb; textures are a specific size and quality, levels are designed around this, etc. With a hard drive (or disk), games don't just store what is "on-screen" in memory; they have to store everything which could reasonably be expected to appear on-screen within the next, lets say, 10 seconds. This is because disks are slow; if the player violently flips the camera around, they can't wait 30 frames to page in the textures for that wall behind them; it has to be stored, even if the player isn't using it, and may never use it. 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. So, wait: This means that 8gb of memory, which previously contained N% textures just used for what is being rendered, and M% textures which weren't being used, can now contain even more textures for what's just on-screen. Those textures can now be bigger! Higher detail. Bigger open worlds. The like. Second point: Series X and PS5 do have ray tracing (not just ray casting, which you seem to suggest they don't have?) The Ratchet & Clank video we saw during the PS5 press conference seemed to showcase this, as it had multiple scenes showcasing reflections that didn't seem possible with just screen-space reflections. These consoles can absolutely, 100%, do super-1080p rendering at 60fps with ray tracing. Maybe not 4k60, we'll see, but 1440p60 w/ ray tracing is clearly attainable, at launch. Third point, and this is critical, possibly the most critical: These consoles are all built with the same underlying technology that powered the previous generation; they just turned the dial to 12. This has, in the history of Playstation at least, never happened before. PS2 was very different from PS1. PS3 was a clusterfuck of technology that took developers years to get their heads around. But PS4 to PS5? Same platform tech. Developers know these platforms; the ramp up will be startlingly quick, and they'll be able to re-use and improve many of the very powerful game engines already there on PS4, like Decima, to make use of the new tech instead of starting closer to scratch like they did with PS4, PS3, and PS2. I really don't think you could be more wrong than your assertion that this generation isn't going to be big. I'll go one-further: The media is underhyping the impact these technological advancements are going to have, and this generation will be the biggest single-generation leap in technical performance since the Nintendo 64. Only one AAA cutting edge title that I'm aware of was capable of consistently hitting 4K60 on a previous generation console (Gears 5 on X1X), and really, most games looked more like Control or Fallen Order (barely hitting 1080p30, no impressive technical achievements on consoles). We're now entering an era where practically every game will be 4K60, with substantially increased graphical fidelity, with ray tracing, with 3D audio, and it wasn't enabled with some crazy technology like IBM Cell; its the same shit that everyone already knows.
ryuukk_ 6y ago
you too retarded to understand why it is a giant plus - increase developer iteration, no need to cook assets, you can feed them raw to the console, it'll be fast - more evergy efficient, you waste less energy and therefore earn money now go save microsoft, because they'll meet with industrial failure with the new xbox x series one x weird name
rubber_duck 6y ago
Umm - streaming data in to working memory at radically improved speed has the potential to provide techniques way more interesting/impressive than *tracing techniques. Who knows what geometry representation and handling this will enable.
iphone_elegance 6y ago
It seems like a pretty big quality of life improvement to me, I'm not sure why you're trying to frame it as a bad thing In the past you could choose between capacity or speed now you get both
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Agreed. Before that, you had to choose between exceptional graphics and short loading times. Now they can do both. I mean, it's nice, but it's not really revolutionary. It's a welcome incremental improvement, at best. But the PR machine worked really well.
jayd16 6y ago
Its not about making slow loads faster. Its about increasing what things we can stream from disk in real time. Massive textures, massive look up tables, massive geo, etc. A lot of techniques can use pre-baked data in interesting ways.
russli1993 6y ago
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 read the texture at the exact detail levels given by the amount of pixels covered by the texture. It gives a texture infinite mips level. The GPU can also place the texture data needed for the current frame in the GPU memory, GPU memory becomes more like a cache for textures. This reduce GPU memory usage. Imagine you want to render a camera flying through a forest. Before you need the texture for the trees and have multiple version of them for far away trees and nearby trees. As the camera flies over, you transition from the low detail texture to the most detailed texture. That is why you see the texture pop in in today's games. Going forward, you just need the most detailed texture, and have the GPU automatically sample the texture according to the pixel needs to be rendered. There will be no stepping in between, it will be continuous. This solves texture pop in at a fundamental level. Another benefit is reduce CPU involvement. Textures are fundamentally stored on disk, and GPU needs to access that data for rendering. Before we would have the CPU use OS's filesystem storage stack, read a file block, decode the texture in CPU memory, copy the texture to GPU memory using PCI-e, and ask the GPU to render with that data. This method allows the GPU directly read from a SSD, bypassing all of the steps in between. As SSD becomes faster and faster, OS's filesystem is becoming the bottleneck.
- brigade 6y ago
  > 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 definitely can’t assume shared memory. (actually I’m pretty sure discrete GPUs can generate page misses for mapped CPU memory, but I’m not certain which graphics APIs really let that happen)
  - 6y ago
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> 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 some kind of comprehensive model of humans and human experience, and more. We're not getting that soon.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  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.
  - asdff 6y ago
    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.
fullito 6y ago
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.

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.
- greyskull 6y ago
  It was originally intended for the Game Developers Conference which was cancelled (postponed?). Sony didn't do the best job setting expectations ahead of time, but either way people were hungry for info. At the time, Sony had been fairly quiet.
greyskull 6y ago
IMO required viewing for any dev to form a more informed opinion on the SSD tech. Cerny talks about it fairly practically. Starting point on SSD: https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg?t=310 https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg?t=310 for about 20 minutes

jhack 6y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsnG-3-r6-Q

nemothekid 6y ago
Wow, I'm not going to believe that's realtime in my hands. I started the video thinking "whats so special about this", and when they started going interdimensional I realized either this is very cool or just hype.
- resist_futility 6y ago
  Insomniac Games is pretty good about wysiwyg
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
freeone3000 6y ago
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!
- leddt 6y ago
  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.
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    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...

gameswithgo 6y ago

i think you have become way too cynical. of course we don’t have the huge leaps we used to. the marginal utility of twice as many polygons or pixels is much less now. the effort that goes into these advances we do get is much more than it was nonetheless, and borders on magic. amazing time to be alive for computing hardware power and great to see the consoles letting us fully leverage it

heromal 6y ago
Exactly. Moore's Law had to end at some point.

jimmaswell 6y ago

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?

meddlepal 6y ago
I seem to recall PS1 games being cheaper than N64 games which allowed kids to purchase more. Allowances in the 90s were on average between 5-20/wk. PS1 games were more like $40 compared to N64 games which were usually $60.
snuxoll 6y ago
The PS1 also had much more memory available for texture data - there was a set of trade offs for both consoles. Personally I loved both - but the PS1 turned out some really impressive game’s that weren’t possible on the N64 (at least not without looking like blurry messes) even discounting the benefits a CD-ROM had for storing large amounts of data.
nmfisher 6y ago
> What did everyone see in the PS1? Mod chips.
serf 6y ago
>What did everyone see in the PS1? storage space for CD quality audio, storage space for full-motion video, on-board full motion video decoders, cheaper media costs, easier media to deal with on development side, and most importantly a game library that catered more towards 'adultish' fans. I remember reading back when these consoles were current that the biggest draw for most consumers was the fact that full-motion-video was a first class citizen on the PS1, and it was a huge technical wow for people. FMV was difficult on the N64 due to size and codec constraints, so it was rarely done -- and when it was if was usually subpar compared to the PS1 version of the same game. Resident Evil franchise was notorious for this phenomenon.
- 6y ago

resist_futility 6y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqV7BNoQEr4

anamexis 6y ago
It's a generational leap in game load times, but it's not a generational leap in gaming.
- resist_futility 6y ago
  Launch titles rarely take full advantage of the new tech
- Animats 6y ago
  Watch the UE5 demo. Realize what they're doing. They're loading the high-detail geometry into the GPU and letting the GPU do the mesh reduction. For that to work, huge amounts of geometry has to be loaded into memory the GPU can see. The PS5 is built for that. The GPU has access to the same memory (24GB) the CPU does, and, presumably, so does the SSD controller. So you can put vertex buffers in files and load them directly into the GPU if you want. On the PS5, a Blu-Ray type drive is optional. Are you going to have 100 GB downloads from the network? That's going to take a while. Even if you have a gigabit network connection, it's going to take 15 minutes or so to download a large game. Few people have that much bandwidth. Red Dead Redemption 2 needs 150GB of disk space now, so games are already that big. Games will have to have some starting level that keeps the user busy while the downloader pulls in content. But after that, performance should be impressive.
- acidbaseextract 6y ago
  The whole storage architecture (not the SSDs alone) is a generational leap in gaming because it's a generational leap in game production economics. Asset cost has been skyrocketing for modern games, and the slate of storage technologies in these consoles directly addresses that. These improvements make assets reusable. SSDs + built in compression / storage co-processing + dynamic resolution makes it possible for small teams to plonk high res assets from libraries into games without spending crazy amounts of time doing asset performance optimization. It's also going to be a driver of 1440 and 4k gaming, because there will be more games that look good enough to make high res gaming worth it.

jasondigitized 6y ago

If Tim Sweeney says it’s a game changer I’m gonna say it’s probably a game changer.

ErneX 6y ago

Oh you just wait. Have you seen the Ratchet & Clank trailer? that's just the beginning.

Goronmon 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... These new SSD's are more of an upgrade then we've had in any console over multiple generations. Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4 were all pretty standard "mini-PC" consoles. PS3 had a different architecture that didn't really pay off until much later in the console's life-cycle and still didn't have a huge impact, hence the PS4 dropping Cell for the PS4.

ezconnect 6y ago

Mark Cerny explains it very well why they don't target revolutionary changes anymore in his presentation about PS5 technology.

013a 6y ago

There is a really critical component of having an SSD, and knowing you'll have an SSD (as a game developer) which is easily missed (the article may cover this, but just to reiterate). Lets say you only have 8gb of memory. Most importantly: You know you'll have 8gb (not more, not less). You build your game around having 8gb; textures are a specific size and quality, levels are designed around this, etc. With a hard drive (or disk), games don't just store what is "on-screen" in memory; they have to store everything which could reasonably be expected to appear on-screen within the next, lets say, 10 seconds. This is because disks are slow; if the player violently flips the camera around, they can't wait 30 frames to page in the textures for that wall behind them; it has to be stored, even if the player isn't using it, and may never use it. 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. So, wait: This means that 8gb of memory, which previously contained N% textures just used for what is being rendered, and M% textures which weren't being used, can now contain even more textures for what's just on-screen. Those textures can now be bigger! Higher detail. Bigger open worlds. The like. Second point: Series X and PS5 do have ray tracing (not just ray casting, which you seem to suggest they don't have?) The Ratchet & Clank video we saw during the PS5 press conference seemed to showcase this, as it had multiple scenes showcasing reflections that didn't seem possible with just screen-space reflections. These consoles can absolutely, 100%, do super-1080p rendering at 60fps with ray tracing. Maybe not 4k60, we'll see, but 1440p60 w/ ray tracing is clearly attainable, at launch. Third point, and this is critical, possibly the most critical: These consoles are all built with the same underlying technology that powered the previous generation; they just turned the dial to 12. This has, in the history of Playstation at least, never happened before. PS2 was very different from PS1. PS3 was a clusterfuck of technology that took developers years to get their heads around. But PS4 to PS5? Same platform tech. Developers know these platforms; the ramp up will be startlingly quick, and they'll be able to re-use and improve many of the very powerful game engines already there on PS4, like Decima, to make use of the new tech instead of starting closer to scratch like they did with PS4, PS3, and PS2. I really don't think you could be more wrong than your assertion that this generation isn't going to be big. I'll go one-further: The media is underhyping the impact these technological advancements are going to have, and this generation will be the biggest single-generation leap in technical performance since the Nintendo 64. Only one AAA cutting edge title that I'm aware of was capable of consistently hitting 4K60 on a previous generation console (Gears 5 on X1X), and really, most games looked more like Control or Fallen Order (barely hitting 1080p30, no impressive technical achievements on consoles). We're now entering an era where practically every game will be 4K60, with substantially increased graphical fidelity, with ray tracing, with 3D audio, and it wasn't enabled with some crazy technology like IBM Cell; its the same shit that everyone already knows.

ryuukk_ 6y ago

you too retarded to understand why it is a giant plus - increase developer iteration, no need to cook assets, you can feed them raw to the console, it'll be fast - more evergy efficient, you waste less energy and therefore earn money now go save microsoft, because they'll meet with industrial failure with the new xbox x series one x weird name

rubber_duck 6y ago

Umm - streaming data in to working memory at radically improved speed has the potential to provide techniques way more interesting/impressive than *tracing techniques. Who knows what geometry representation and handling this will enable.

iphone_elegance 6y ago

It seems like a pretty big quality of life improvement to me, I'm not sure why you're trying to frame it as a bad thing In the past you could choose between capacity or speed now you get both

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

Agreed. Before that, you had to choose between exceptional graphics and short loading times. Now they can do both. I mean, it's nice, but it's not really revolutionary. It's a welcome incremental improvement, at best. But the PR machine worked really well.

jayd16 6y ago

Its not about making slow loads faster. Its about increasing what things we can stream from disk in real time. Massive textures, massive look up tables, massive geo, etc. A lot of techniques can use pre-baked data in interesting ways.

russli1993 6y ago

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 read the texture at the exact detail levels given by the amount of pixels covered by the texture. It gives a texture infinite mips level. The GPU can also place the texture data needed for the current frame in the GPU memory, GPU memory becomes more like a cache for textures. This reduce GPU memory usage. Imagine you want to render a camera flying through a forest. Before you need the texture for the trees and have multiple version of them for far away trees and nearby trees. As the camera flies over, you transition from the low detail texture to the most detailed texture. That is why you see the texture pop in in today's games. Going forward, you just need the most detailed texture, and have the GPU automatically sample the texture according to the pixel needs to be rendered. There will be no stepping in between, it will be continuous. This solves texture pop in at a fundamental level. Another benefit is reduce CPU involvement. Textures are fundamentally stored on disk, and GPU needs to access that data for rendering. Before we would have the CPU use OS's filesystem storage stack, read a file block, decode the texture in CPU memory, copy the texture to GPU memory using PCI-e, and ask the GPU to render with that data. This method allows the GPU directly read from a SSD, bypassing all of the steps in between. As SSD becomes faster and faster, OS's filesystem is becoming the bottleneck.

brigade 6y ago
> 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 definitely can’t assume shared memory. (actually I’m pretty sure discrete GPUs can generate page misses for mapped CPU memory, but I’m not certain which graphics APIs really let that happen)
- 6y ago

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

> 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 some kind of comprehensive model of humans and human experience, and more. We're not getting that soon.

rowanG077 6y ago
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.
- asdff 6y ago
  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.

fullito 6y ago

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.