4 ms·

Yes, a lot of people commenting here should really go watch the talk Mark Cerny gave [0]. It's clear there's no "big technological breakthrough". SSDs are grea

by slx26 6y ago

Yes, a lot of people commenting here should really go watch the talk Mark Cerny gave [0]. It's clear there's no "big technological breakthrough". SSDs are great but have been around for a while already, we simply had to wait for the technology to mature enough. What we are seeing is that we can't just keep slapping better CPUs and GPUs to the machines, because the improvements nowaday are not that impressive anymore, so at least for the PS5 they have switched and started focusing on the architecture, removing bottlenecks, removing major pain points, and using additional hardware to handle tasks like compression and freeing resources for other purposes. Some people might say these improvements happen because they were lazy before and never focused properly on dev needs and bottlenecks and the specific needs of game development. I partially agree, but the SSDs really don't just improve disk speed, they allow a completely different set of architectural optimizations. [0] https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg

013a 6y ago
Right; this isn't a Nintendo 64 situation where the jump is so technologically huge that it enables fundamentally new experiences because of the jump. Its a situation where all the pieces were already out there, and now they're just integrated in a way that is developer-focused and standardized such that products can be built to rely on those pieces. Putting an SSD in a PS4 is not interesting. You can go do it today. Hardcore gamers and streamers will do it, because it does reduce load times by maybe 20% or so. But, until the entire pipeline, from SSD to hardware decompress to system memory to platform libraries to everything, is aware of that SSD and built around it, we wouldn't get the 10x benefits. This generation is where that's happening. When I think about the PS3 to PS4 generation jump, I didn't get that excited. Sure, games looked better, but they're still 30fps by-and-large, they're still using rendering tricks all over to speed things up instead of truly awesome new tech like ray tracing, we're still waiting minutes for many games to load. The PS4 to PS5 jump (and similar jump on X1, don't want to leave out those players) will be far more transformative, in ways that actually matter to players and developers alike. It sucks that some people are still so jaded as to think "I have an SSD in my computer, its nice but its not huge"; they're missing the bigger pictures, and that bigger pictures is what people like Mark Cerny and Phil Spencer spend their entire lives thinking about.

by slx26 6y ago

013a 6y ago

Right; this isn't a Nintendo 64 situation where the jump is so technologically huge that it enables fundamentally new experiences because of the jump. Its a situation where all the pieces were already out there, and now they're just integrated in a way that is developer-focused and standardized such that products can be built to rely on those pieces. Putting an SSD in a PS4 is not interesting. You can go do it today. Hardcore gamers and streamers will do it, because it does reduce load times by maybe 20% or so. But, until the entire pipeline, from SSD to hardware decompress to system memory to platform libraries to everything, is aware of that SSD and built around it, we wouldn't get the 10x benefits. This generation is where that's happening. When I think about the PS3 to PS4 generation jump, I didn't get that excited. Sure, games looked better, but they're still 30fps by-and-large, they're still using rendering tricks all over to speed things up instead of truly awesome new tech like ray tracing, we're still waiting minutes for many games to load. The PS4 to PS5 jump (and similar jump on X1, don't want to leave out those players) will be far more transformative, in ways that actually matter to players and developers alike. It sucks that some people are still so jaded as to think "I have an SSD in my computer, its nice but its not huge"; they're missing the bigger pictures, and that bigger pictures is what people like Mark Cerny and Phil Spencer spend their entire lives thinking about.