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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

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.

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.