All Future Sony first-party PlayStation games coming to PC

[chris1515]

Am I the only one remembering that ps4 Hdd peaks around 40 MB/s? A modern drive can destroy that performance. Also on console you’ll have cpu and gpu contending for bandwidth. Having a blazing fast drive streaming into RAM will have practical limits. If anything it might make more sense to focus on compression, decompression and burst performance than worry about having fast sustained speeds for transferring large files.

And a SSD 2GB/s NVMe is nowhere near even 2GB/s of performance in real-world game performance on PC.

 

[goonergaz]

lol, what? It does fit the Sony people, no loading times actually means very high performance, or?

who said no loading times?

 

[PSman1700]

who said no loading?

Think it was a poster over at resetera sharing a dev's twitter comment/post. I have no idea how credible the source is.

 

[BRiT]

Think need another message for more slide image inclusions...




And they saved 8GB of space by executing things in real-time and not shipping them on disk:





And one slide on HDD Seek Latency during typical gameplay --

 

[Scott_Arm]

And a SSD 2GB/s NVMe is nowhere near even 2GB/s of performance in real-world game performance on PC.

I don’t know what this means.

 

[chris1515]

who said no loading times?

https://twinfinite.net/2019/05/ps5-...ada-share-their-impressions-and-expectations/

Harada(Tekken team) compared it to arcade loading

The second part of the interview is all about Harada-san, who mentions that he is also a hardcore PC gamer. When it was mentioned that the bandwidth would be wider than a PC he had guessed that the new console would have a fast custom-made SSD that is also cost-efficient.

If both the storage and the cache are solid-state, this will be somehow reminiscent of the arcade board era between the eighties and the nineties, when the data of games was light and chips were based on ROM and RAM.

When he used the arcade board System 12 jointly developed with SIE for Tekken 3, the loading screen after the VS display was displayed only for 0.3 to 0.5 seconds. Streaming from an SSD can at times even overtake the processing performance of the hardware, but since it’s important to have a middleware that can compress and deploy data more efficiently, he’s looking forward to seeing how this is supported.

 

[JoeJ]

very convincing arguments here for the need for modern compression/decompression.

Yeah, i think storage space (not speed) is THE upcoming limitation, with more impact than performance.
Did not start to research the topic yet, but this seems very useful, in case anyone missed it: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/05/google-and-binomial-partner-to-open.html
But it's far from enough.
If anyone has an idea what could give really large lossy compression factors let me know....

 

[chris1515]

I don’t know what this means.

I said I talk about speed reach in game not theoretical speed of the SSD like currently on PC.

 

[PSman1700]

I don’t know what this means.

PS5 faster then anything else, no one touch their exclusives. Its what the topic is about

 

[chris1515]

PS5 faster then anything else, no one touch their exclusives. Its what the topic is about

Xbox will maybe be faster than PC too on I/O side.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Am I the only one remembering that ps4 Hdd peaks around 40 MB/s?

Yeah, that's about the speed of the stock drive but because you can slot in any drive, including crappy slow drives, and allowing for the other demands on the drive by the OS, Insomniac's streaming solution for Spider-Man banked on half that (20 Megabytes a second).

A modern drive can destroy that performance. Also on console you’ll have cpu and gpu contending for bandwidth. Having a blazing fast drive streaming into RAM will have practical limits. If anything it might make more sense to focus on compression, decompression and burst performance than worry about having fast sustained speeds for transferring large files.

On PC your HDD/SSD is using filesystem not optimised for your data and reads that using a [Windows] I/O subsystem not optimised for your game's streaming needs. That data is dropped in main RAM. If this data is different things bundled together, e.g. textures, audio, geometry, AI, shaders etc, the CPU will probably want to split it up first. If this data is packed (and it usually is) and not in a compressed format immediately usable by the CPU and/or GPU, it then needs unpacking first and anything for the GPU then needs to be copied to VRAM before it can used. Once the game has all the raw data, it also needs to generate the game environment, so building/creating the game worlds, all of the environment and potentially hundreds if not thousands of items in that environment, which may have their own physics and/or other behaviours. Then all the 'living' things with AI need their systems creating. There are dozens other smaller things/jobs that need to happen after the data is read off your drive, before your game is ready to rock.

This is why openworld games like GTA V and Witcher 3, even on fast PCs with fast GPUs with lots of RAM and fast SSDs, still takes an age to load.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I said I talk about speed reach in game not theoretical speed of the SSD like currently on PC.

so what was the table you posted? I

I said I talk about speed reach in game not theoretical speed of the SSD like currently on PC.

But pc games are currently developed to run off mechanical hdds. Are we lumping in software optimization differences with hardware performance?

 

[PSman1700]

Xbox will maybe be faster than PC too on I/O side.

Yeah and MS will not do any games like PS5, right? And those games ofc wont ever see the light on pc either, cause you know, it will be lagging behind.

 

[chris1515]

For example Star Citizen load in 19 seconds with a SSD on PC. There is a possibility than Xbox and PS5 will be able to load games faster than this.

 

[Xbat]

You need to wait till games are optimised for that.

I'm not sure how optimising the game will help loading? How? What can they possibly do to improve loads from a software perspective?

The Star Citizen example is about using a SSD for streaming and not catering for a mechanical drive (not holding back the game so it works properly on a mechanical drive).

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yeah, that's about the speed of the stock drive but because you can slot in any drive, including crappy slow drives, and allowing for the other demands on the drive by the OS, Insomniac's streaming solution for Spider-Man banked on half that (20 Megabytes a second).



On PC your HDD/SSD is using filesystem not optimised for your data and reads that using a [Windows] I/O subsystem not optimised for your game's streaming needs. That data is dropped in main RAM. If this data is different things bundled together, e.g. textures, audio, geometry, AI, shaders etc, the CPU will probably want to split it up first. If this data is packed (and it usually is) and not in a compressed format immediately usable by the CPU and/or GPU, it then needs unpacking first and anything for the GPU then needs to be copied to VRAM before it can used. Once the game has all the raw data, it also needs to generate the game environment, so building/creating the game worlds, all of the environment and potentially hundreds if not thousands of items in that environment, which may have their own physics and/or other behaviours. Then all the 'living' things with AI need their systems creating. There are dozens other smaller things/jobs that need to happen after the data is read off your drive, before your game is ready to rock.

This is why openworld games like GTA V and Witcher 3, even on fast PCs with fast GPUs with lots of RAM and fast SSDs, still takes an age to load.

but none of these games are architected for fast drives. They were designed to run of very slow hdds. I imagine engine optimization can extract huge performance gains on pc.

 

[chris1515]

so what was the table you posted? I


But pc games are currently developed to run off mechanical hdds. Are we lumping in software optimization differences with hardware performance?

The table I post is what is needed for being able to load data between 1 GB/s and 20 GB/s from the ARM CPU performance, to the ASICs decompressor performance and so on .

 

[DavidGraham]

My NVME drive barely performs faster than my old 860 Evo SATA SSD in game loading when it should be 5-6 times faster, why is that?

And a SSD 2GB/s NVMe is nowhere near even 2GB/s of performance in real-world game performance on PC.

Games on PC are not limited by storage speed, fire up a decade old game and watch it load in a slightly faster way than before. Games loading times on PC are often limited by CPU speed for compression/decompression or by shader compilation.

On PC your HDD/SSD is using filesystem not optimised for your data and reads that using a [Windows] I/O subsystem not optimised for your game's streaming needs.

How exactly is the filesystem not optimized for game streaming? the filesystem works for sporadic access and sequential access, are you telling me that games need something else other than these two? What is the filesystem that is "optimized" for streaming games? please describe it to me.

That data is dropped in main RAM. If this data is different things bundled together, e.g. textures, audio, geometry, AI, shaders etc, the CPU will probably want to split it up first. If this data is packed (and it usually is) and not in a compressed format immediately usable by the CPU and/or GPU, it then needs unpacking first and anything for the GPU then needs to be copied to VRAM before it can used. Once the game has all the raw data, it also needs to generate the game environment, so building/creating the game worlds, all of the environment and potentially hundreds if not thousands of items in that environment, which may have their own physics and/or other behaviours. Then all the 'living' things with AI need their systems creating. There are dozens other smaller things/jobs that need to happen after the data is read off your drive, before your game is ready to rock.

That's the fault of the game data design and packaging, not the filesystem's fault or the CPU or the I/O or anything else. Any game that has it's files properly packed in a way to take advantage of NVMe drives will load significantly faster on PC.

 

[PSman1700]

There is a possibility than Xbox and PS5 will be able to load games faster than this.

There is a possibility. There is also a possibility that it might not, SC is a very demanding title with huge amounts of assets and details, all need to be loaded, its a stuttery mess playing without an SSD/NVME. Optane gives performanc improvements over both. DF will come with another video about SC/SSD subject.

The Star Citizen example is about using a SSD for streaming and not catering for a mechanical drive (not holding back the game so it works properly on a mechanical drive).

Performance suffers greatly playing on a mechanical hdd.

The table I post is what is needed for being able to load data between 1 GB/s and 20 GB/s from the ARM CPU performance, to the ASICs decompressor performance and so on .

SSD's on pc could come with onboard controllers/CPU's for the decompression. I think there already has been something like that?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'm not sure how optimising the game will help loading? How? What can they possibly do to improve loads from a software perspective?

The Star Citizen example is about using a SSD for streaming and not catering for a mechanical drive (not holding back the game so it works properly on a mechanical drive).

games store their data on disc. The layout, the frequency and the size of the reads is all controlled by the engine. They would be designing to the lowest common denominator, which is slow mechanical drives, especially the ones in current gen consoles.