Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]
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DF Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-hellblade-series-x-series-s-upgrade-tested
Hellblade's Xbox Series upgrades deliver the best console experience yet
Performance boosted, rays traced, PC ultra settings exceeded.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice left quite an impact when it released some years ago. Developer Ninja Theory delivered an exceptional game within a limited budget, combining beautiful audio-visuals with solid technical underpinnings provided by Unreal Engine 4. Its powerful exploration of mental health challenges made it stand out from the crowd - and with over six million copies sold, the game was a tremendous success, scaling beautifully from high-end PCs down to Nintendo Switch. And now, Hellblade returns, looking better than ever before thanks to an Xbox Series console upgrade.
This new revision of the game may have come as something of a surprise, but it's certainly welcome - it's a great way to re-introduce gamers to the original before the sequel completes development, while at the same time, Hellblade continues to attract new players on Xbox Game Pass, so why not revise the title for a generation of users? The first surprise is that the upgrade for Series consoles isn't actually by Ninja Theory itself specifically. QLOC - who handled the impressive Switch port - take point here, with the studio promising updated materials, particles, pushed out draw distances, new frame-rate options and hardware-accelerated ray tracing reflections.
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Hellblade's Xbox Series upgrades deliver the best console experience yet
Performance boosted, rays traced, PC ultra settings exceeded.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice left quite an impact when it released some years ago. Developer Ninja Theory delivered an exceptional game within a limited budget, combining beautiful audio-visuals with solid technical underpinnings provided by Unreal Engine 4. Its powerful exploration of mental health challenges made it stand out from the crowd - and with over six million copies sold, the game was a tremendous success, scaling beautifully from high-end PCs down to Nintendo Switch. And now, Hellblade returns, looking better than ever before thanks to an Xbox Series console upgrade.
This new revision of the game may have come as something of a surprise, but it's certainly welcome - it's a great way to re-introduce gamers to the original before the sequel completes development, while at the same time, Hellblade continues to attract new players on Xbox Game Pass, so why not revise the title for a generation of users? The first surprise is that the upgrade for Series consoles isn't actually by Ninja Theory itself specifically. QLOC - who handled the impressive Switch port - take point here, with the studio promising updated materials, particles, pushed out draw distances, new frame-rate options and hardware-accelerated ray tracing reflections.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
Interesting that a high end NVME SSD with heatsink outperforms the internal SSD slightly in Ratchet and Clank, not to mention BC titles. Also interesting is that at least with the Samsung NVME drive, there is some drive throttling if there isn't a heatsink to help dissipate the heat from the drive as indicated by the heatsink versus no heatsink loading times.
With the Samsung drive, the advantage with heatsink is relatively minor, but I wonder if higher speed drives in the future will afford much better performance than the internal drive. That means that if you have a fast enough NVME drive, then install all your games to that drive instead of the internal to save wear and tear on the non-replaceable internal drive which should help extend the life of the console.
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snc
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7bs/s + hw kraken decompression is faster than 5.5gb/s + hw kraken decompression
all of this function with additional ssd (beside custom flash controller of course)
Well, not unexpected using faster than stock SSD. But this also means the main bottleneck seems to be on the SSD and interestingly the I/O complex custom hardware, the heart of PS5, seems very fast as it's able to keep pace even with 7000MB/s SSD. But it goes in both sides and logically some games could have problems in some cases using slower than 5500MB/s SSDs (and we already know from Insomniac than slower SSD will mean slower I/O process).
cheapchips
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It's August 2021. Rich is such a slacker! 
perfect machine to access a whole catalogue, but the best games in gamepass are going to run well on Series S anyway. Looking at all the indies!
Hades and Curse of the Gods has been addictive as hell itself! The type of games that really brings me back to older console release titles before the cinematic experiences started showing up. Ascent also incredible!
Going to try out some Art of Rally.. then go back and wrap the 3 titles above somehow. Hades is exceptionally beautiful little title at higher resolution. Incredible artwork. Same VA from the netflix castlevania series.
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7bs/s + hw kraken decompression is faster than 5.5gb/s + hw kraken decompression
all of this function with additional ssd (beside custom flash controller of course)
Wasn't there a tweet posted here a while back from Rad Game Tools that basically said most of that stuff is just standard for an SDD with the only real custom bits being the hardware decompression and the cache scrubbers?
I'm not sure it does tell us that as we're not seeing a perfect scaling with SDD speed, which granted could be down to many different factors. However the hardware decompression unit was after all designed with the limitations of the internal drive in mind and while we know it can handle some corner cases much faster, there may be examples of more complex decompression jobs that push it near it's limits at 5500MB/s and thus don't see much benefit on faster drives.
As it was Insomniac that worked with Sony to arrive at the 5500MB/s recommendation it's likely that any potential speed increases they envisage in the future would come through software optimisation as opposed to as yet untapped potential of the PS5 internal drive that wouldn't translate to external drives.
sure but that would be problematic in the future for people using say 3500MB/S SSDs
snc
Veteran
haven't seen (would like tough), and even if rgt(which sounds strange that sony make complex io system when its standrad for ssd's, standard ssd has 2 coprocessors etc ?) is right hard to say its only hw decompression and cache scrubers imo
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Would have been shut down early on if true, people were quite happy to crap all over the PS5 limitations but I certainly don’t recall anything about the IO setup being ‘fairly standard’.
Cerny even went into what was holding things back and why just sticking in an SSD wouldn’t be fast enough.
Riddlewire
Regular
Two lanes for the internal drive and two for the expansion drive.
Forgive the newb question here, but could you install a game to both and interleave the data streaming for greater performance?
Or it could be an indication the interal SSD is just underperforming. You dont need a 7gb/s drive to match or exceed the internal one. Anyway, as others have noted, the PS5 IO tech aint all that fancy anymore these days seeing whats available, its quite much surpassed. When it was announced it was 'future tech', but thats a given aswell since it was announced as a future console at that time.
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