4 ms·

Part of this is having to design for an amorphous target, whereas a console is a very known quantity for tuning resource usage (far beyond what you can put in a

Part of this is having to design for an amorphous target, whereas a console is a very known quantity for tuning resource usage (far beyond what you can put in a settings menu). The other side of this is that the consoles have technology far in advance of PC’s that people are unaware of because for whatever reasons they wrongly chose a long time ago to decide that GPU’s were all that matters. As one example: the PS5 (Kraken) and XS (Velocity) have dedicated decompression and storage access hardware that allows access to the NVME without chewing up CPU cycles. This is massive for resource loading and not something that currently exists in the PC world. Even where some amalgam of it might exist soon via DirectStorage, it’ll not be ubiquitous, so it can’t be designed in to the core of PC versions of games because not everyone will have it. This is a pretty critical difference when you see it in a game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart or Spiderman 2. There’s no equivalent that would allow those games to be ported to PC without significant compromises. Even texture streaming is dramatically faster than on the highest end PC. I can dig out the tests on this if anyone cares to see it, but reading from a gen 4 NVME at 7GB/s takes something north of 80% CPU usage on a 5800x if memory serves. Talk starts at 4 minutes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4

nullindividual 3y ago
Games can absolutely have a happy path for DirectStorage. Not sure why you believe incorrectly that DS cannot be incorporated “in the core”. Forspoken does use DS on Windows. No need to wait for the future.
- highwaylights 3y ago
  They really dont have a happy path. Incorporating an API is not at all the same as being able to base the product around that feature. Forspoken can’t base the design around instant load times, because most PCs don’t have DirectStorage over ultra-fast NVME drives. Even those that do, don’t have coprocessors to read from the drives, meaning they’re eating up massive amounts of compute to read that fast. Not even a little bit the same as the situation on the PS5.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    An API is designed for a developer to build a product with the API determining the interaction with the "base product". Developers of games don't have to think about the "base product". Yes, the PS5 has a special chip -- because it's CPU is too anemic to decompress the data that fast. But DF has shown Forspoken to load faster with an adequate CPU + NVMe than PS5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8_HcLb4ajY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8_HcLb4ajY
    - highwaylights 3y ago
      You're mistaken I'm afraid. If you look at this video it makes the case better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VODSVVkKRD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VODSVVkKRD4 Forspoken is a game that's not built with rapid loads in mind - it's designed to work on a range of hardware that will in the worst case include spinning hard disks (or more realistically, basic SATA SSD drives). That it can load assets relatively quickly on a high end machine with DirectStorage completely misses the point - the pipeline just isn't there to load assets at a consistent fast pace like it is with the PS5 architecture (and the XS architecture). In the example above from Rift Apart (which to the best of my knowledge is not using DirectStorage to be fair), the frame-rate dives hard on any asset loading task. DirectStorage is more efficient with this, but it still chews cycles to move the data in the absence of dedicated hardware - there's just no way around this logically, and that's the point. The developer is constrained to designing a game in a way that will work consistently across hardware. Faster loading screens are better than slow loading screens, but they're not better than no loading screens at all. Likewise, having games introduce elevators to nowhere or tunnels of nothingness to allow assets to be loaded is not a problem that you can work around on current PC titles - it fundamentally limits how the game is designed, not just how well it performs. The PS5 CPU is far from anaemic, and buying a really expensive CPU for a PC with double the core count to get less real-terms performance doesn't seem like a great trade-off.

nullindividual 3y ago

Games can absolutely have a happy path for DirectStorage. Not sure why you believe incorrectly that DS cannot be incorporated “in the core”. Forspoken does use DS on Windows. No need to wait for the future.

highwaylights 3y ago
They really dont have a happy path. Incorporating an API is not at all the same as being able to base the product around that feature. Forspoken can’t base the design around instant load times, because most PCs don’t have DirectStorage over ultra-fast NVME drives. Even those that do, don’t have coprocessors to read from the drives, meaning they’re eating up massive amounts of compute to read that fast. Not even a little bit the same as the situation on the PS5.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  An API is designed for a developer to build a product with the API determining the interaction with the "base product". Developers of games don't have to think about the "base product". Yes, the PS5 has a special chip -- because it's CPU is too anemic to decompress the data that fast. But DF has shown Forspoken to load faster with an adequate CPU + NVMe than PS5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8_HcLb4ajY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8_HcLb4ajY
  - highwaylights 3y ago
    You're mistaken I'm afraid. If you look at this video it makes the case better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VODSVVkKRD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VODSVVkKRD4 Forspoken is a game that's not built with rapid loads in mind - it's designed to work on a range of hardware that will in the worst case include spinning hard disks (or more realistically, basic SATA SSD drives). That it can load assets relatively quickly on a high end machine with DirectStorage completely misses the point - the pipeline just isn't there to load assets at a consistent fast pace like it is with the PS5 architecture (and the XS architecture). In the example above from Rift Apart (which to the best of my knowledge is not using DirectStorage to be fair), the frame-rate dives hard on any asset loading task. DirectStorage is more efficient with this, but it still chews cycles to move the data in the absence of dedicated hardware - there's just no way around this logically, and that's the point. The developer is constrained to designing a game in a way that will work consistently across hardware. Faster loading screens are better than slow loading screens, but they're not better than no loading screens at all. Likewise, having games introduce elevators to nowhere or tunnels of nothingness to allow assets to be loaded is not a problem that you can work around on current PC titles - it fundamentally limits how the game is designed, not just how well it performs. The PS5 CPU is far from anaemic, and buying a really expensive CPU for a PC with double the core count to get less real-terms performance doesn't seem like a great trade-off.