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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 co

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.

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.