xbox1/ps4 - any basic level loading improvements?

[sebbbi]

I absolutely do not mind increased load times even if they were 500% longer than currently if it means we'll finally have some real advances in texture quality, texture variety, asset quality, asset variety, etc. in games.

A real world example: I bought my PS3 (at launch) for the next iterations of Tekken, Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy. All of them were several years late. The biggest disappointment of them all was Gran Turismo 5. And the main reason was the track loading times. It took almost a full minute to load tracks, and almost the same to load back menus after the track. I just got bored really fast, and didn't play the game for more than a few months. I seriously even considered buying a SSD drive for the game to my PS3 (many GT5 players did). Long loading times (more than 20 seconds) are a definite show stopper for me. I definitely wouldn't even consider buying GT6 if it had 500% longer (5 minute) loading screens before & after every track. I am a married man now, and I don't have infinitely much time to play games (especially if the playing is basically waiting for loading).

Our players (Trials Evolution) are complaining (in our forums) about the 15 second loading screen every time you change to a different DLC game world. Our level loading times are 3-5 second long (we stream pretty much everything all the time). That keeps the players happy and gives them less opportunities to think about other things they might want to do instead of keep playing

 

[Arwin]

Maybe mini-games during initial loading will be back! Even Rayman Origins on vita does a real nice job of hiding loading by displaying your character running on a silhouette background, not necessarily a mini-game but while you control your character, you forget the game is even loading.

I think Namco did this for Ridge Racer 6 or 7? Was quite fun.

Anyway, performance for 2.5" drives seem to be doing quite well these days ... As I estimate the PS3's HDD at not much above 10MB/s with the slow encryption overhead, we could see as much as a 10x increase vs launch PS3 units?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive-review,3270-8.html

(My own laptop 2.5" gets about 90 MB/s sustained read when copying for instance a (multi-file) VMWare. )

GT5 is a nice case for optimisations, by the way - load times have improved a lot over time (partly because it would load the track, and show the track, and then load in the cars while you are already in the pre-race menu). GT6 takes that still further by having far more efficient menus that can either stay in memory or better.

You can rest assured that this issue is on the eye of next-gen console designers, because the whole 'suspend to disc' feature that the next gen consoles have was designed for this purpose of reducing load-times.

 

[novcze]

What about SSHD? ... extra $50 on 1TB SSHD shouldn't be problem for 64MB cache + 8GB Flash, it can speed up loading of the most used files, e.g. while booting or loading your favourite game

 

[Silent_Buddha]

A real world example: I bought my PS3 (at launch) for the next iterations of Tekken, Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy. All of them were several years late. The biggest disappointment of them all was Gran Turismo 5. And the main reason was the track loading times. It took almost a full minute to load tracks, and almost the same to load back menus after the track. I just got bored really fast, and didn't play the game for more than a few months. I seriously even considered buying a SSD drive for the game to my PS3 (many GT5 players did). Long loading times (more than 20 seconds) are a definite show stopper for me. I definitely wouldn't even consider buying GT6 if it had 500% longer (5 minute) loading screens before & after every track. I am a married man now, and I don't have infinitely much time to play games (especially if the playing is basically waiting for loading).

Our players (Trials Evolution) are complaining (in our forums) about the 15 second loading screen every time you change to a different DLC game world. Our level loading times are 3-5 second long (we stream pretty much everything all the time). That keeps the players happy and gives them less opportunities to think about other things they might want to do instead of keep playing

Oh I agree for something like races, where you certainly wouldn't want the loading time to be 1/2 or even 1/4 of the actual time spent racing. I was thinking more in terms of gametypes where you spend a significant time in a level.

But yes, 500% is a bit of an exaggeration. Noone wants to endure something like that, especially if you have relatively frequent load instances. But for myself, I'm so sick of having so little progress in that area, that I'd be willing to bear it until storage subsystems hopefully caught up. As long as there was a real improvement and real advancement in those areas regarding asset quality and variety (especially textures, but that goes for world geometry and character geometry as well as many other things).

Regards,
SB

 

[gurgi]

Sadly, load times might be what prompted Sony to emphasise the 'suspend' functionality of the power button.

It might take a long time to load a game, but once you're in it and playing, you can push the power button several times before needing to really load again (or maybe you're streaming anyway).


Some games, like racing ^^, or fighting games or anything that needs to load frequently are a different story.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Sadly, load times might be what prompted Sony to emphasise the 'suspend' functionality of the power button.

It might take a long time to load a game, but once you're in it and playing, you can push the power button several times before needing to really load again (or maybe you're streaming anyway).

Which only helps assuming you ever only play one game at a time. I can see that for someone that only plays single player games, but for people that like to play multiplayer games, I see them swapping games somewhat frequently.

Regards,
SB

 

[Lalaland]

prior quote about loading screen games... I think Namco did this for Ridge Racer 6 or 7? Was quite fun.

I think Namco have a patent on that, it's been there since the original Ridge Racer on PS1

What about SSHD? ... extra $50 on 1TB SSHD shouldn't be problem for 64MB cache + 8GB Flash, it can speed up loading of the most used files, e.g. while booting or loading your favourite game

I'm quite sceptical of these both because the actual flash area on these drives is quite small (smaller than your Win7 install) and I would have to imagine that the caching algorithims are specifically tuned to Windows habits. Besides in an era of 8GB RAM I'm willing to bet that any one game on your console hard drive will be far in excess of the 8GB flash.

 

[joker454]

Which only helps assuming you ever only play one game at a time. I can see that for someone that only plays single player games, but for people that like to play multiplayer games, I see them swapping games somewhat frequently.

I dunno I think suspend is actually really useful, I frequently use it on pc. If I'm in the middle of a game and need to bail I just hit the power button and the pc instantly sleeps. Then later when I feel like playing again I wake the machine and 2 seconds later I'm right back in the game where I left off. It's quite fast and convenient really, one of those features that is tough to live without once you've gotten used to it. I think the console folk will really dig suspend when they get that feature next gen.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I dunno I think suspend is actually really useful, I frequently use it on pc. If I'm in the middle of a game and need to bail I just hit the power button and the pc instantly sleeps. Then later when I feel like playing again I wake the machine and 2 seconds later I'm right back in the game where I left off. It's quite fast and convenient really, one of those features that is tough to live without once you've gotten used to it. I think the console folk will really dig suspend when they get that feature next gen.

Oh absolutely, it's a great feature to have. I was just speaking to the notion that it would negate load time woes over a course of multiple days and multiple stop/start cycles. Unless someone is focused on finishing a single player game and nothing else until it is done, it's highly unlikely that they wouldn't switch to another game in those X number of days/Y number of start/stop cycles.

Regards,
SB

 

[Boglin]

Have either Sony or Microsoft released info on which SATA revision they are using?

 

[KongRudi]

I'd expect that new PlayGO system will do pretty good things for load- and installation-times, on PS4. It's also on disks, not just downloads, so it would be quicker installations of games aswell, compared to PS3.

 

[Colourless]

The larger address space and purely just having a lot more memory may help initial titles. They may be able to leave a lot of data in memory across level loads. So initial load may be slow, but subsequent ones can be a lot faster.

 

[sebbbi]

What about SSHD? ... extra $50 on 1TB SSHD shouldn't be problem for 64MB cache + 8GB Flash, it can speed up loading of the most used files, e.g. while booting or loading your favourite game

8 GB SSD cache (in the Seagate hybrid drives) is not enough to be an efficient additional memory hierarchy level for devices that have 8 GB of RAM (next level in memory hierarchy needs to be enough larger to provide significant gains). It shows some gains on PC, because most PC users are just loading Windows, internet browser, Skype and maybe one or two other small programs (that are all less than 1 GB in size). If you are instead switching between multiple blu-ray games (50 GB each), you will trash the 8 GB SSD cache (in the Seagate drive) very quickly.

For that $50, you could actually buy an 64 GB SSD (consumer price $69, cheaper than $50 to build). That would be enough to keep approximately two 50 GB (blu-ray) games fully cached from HDD (assuming all games have some extra data for very seldom used scenarios, like localized voice overs, different ending FMVs or tutorials). If the cache drive would have highly tuned cache policies (LRU with some prioritization based on measured latency gains), it would help a lot even in scenarios where the player is swapping frequently between 3-4 games. And that would be enough for huge majority of players. But in real world, that $50 extra price for a console might be too big price for HW manufacturer's (and many consumers) to swallow, as the consoles are already giving us a very good bang for our buck (compared to currently sold PCs with similar specs). But of course we can hope to get a future "Elite" model with this kind of setup (and a 2 TB hard drive) for us hardcore users

 

[novcze]

8 GB SSD cache (in the Seagate hybrid drives) is not enough to be an efficient additional memory hierarchy level for devices that have 8 GB of RAM (next level in memory hierarchy needs to be enough larger to provide significant gains). It shows some gains on PC, because most PC users are just loading Windows, internet browser, Skype and maybe one or two other small programs (that are all less than 1 GB in size). If you are instead switching between multiple blu-ray games (50 GB each), you will trash the 8 GB SSD cache (in the Seagate drive) very quickly.

For that $50, you could actually buy an 64 GB SSD (consumer price $69, cheaper than $50 to build). That would be enough to keep approximately two 50 GB (blu-ray) games fully cached from HDD (assuming all games have some extra data for very seldom used scenarios, like localized voice overs, different ending FMVs or tutorials). If the cache drive would have highly tuned cache policies (LRU with some prioritization based on measured latency gains), it would help a lot even in scenarios where the player is swapping frequently between 3-4 games. And that would be enough for huge majority of players. But in real world, that $50 extra price for a console might be too big price for HW manufacturer's (and many consumers) to swallow, as the consoles are already giving us a very good bang for our buck (compared to currently sold PCs with similar specs). But of course we can hope to get a future "Elite" model with this kind of setup (and a 2 TB hard drive) for us hardcore users

I don't think we will see SSHD in consoles SKU, it was more like thinking about what one can do to speed-up loading ... for same prize I can get 1.5TB HDD, 1TB SSHD or 128GB SSD and 128GB is not enough with services like PS+

 

[Arwin]

Like I said earlier, if we can get HDDs into the next-gen consoles that achieve about or close to 100MB/s, that's already a good enough improvement to not make things worse than last gen. And the suspend to disc features are quite good too, especially as they can continue when you've shut the system off. I wonder if we'll be allowed multiple game states. Probably not, but it would be cool. Let's say you need a maximum of 7GB to suspend to disc, and we do get about 100MB/s, then that only takes 70 seconds saving and loading that game state.

 

[hesido]

@Arwin: You mean suspend to RAM? Games will be kept in RAM, I don't think it's like "hibernate" on windows. In the low power state, RAM will be kept alive.

As for shortening load times, given the amount of RAM, games may attempt to load core assets during menus, for example. Of course it will not help when user jumps straight into the game, but it would be a nice boost if the user spends some time in the menus.

 

[milk]

All I've heard from their game suspending system had in fact to do with keeping the game's data in RAM on a low-power mode, which does not touch the HDD and is more similar to widow's sleep mode than it's hibernate one. Knowing that, I do wish they also copy that data into the HDD while the system is off so the game state can be preserved even when the console is unplugged from it's power-source. Would be usefull for situations where you wanna quickly take your console to another room and resume play without too much pain. As if you were playing on the living room, and other people wanna come in and have some sort of social life (never understood that) and you take your console to your basement and go back to playing ASAP.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

All I've heard from their game suspending system had in fact to do with keeping the game's data in RAM on a low-power mode, which does not touch the HDD and is more similar to widow's sleep mode than it's hibernate one. Knowing that, I do wish they also copy that data into the HDD while the system is off so the game state can be preserved even when the console is unplugged from it's power-source. Would be usefull for situations where you wanna quickly take your console to another room and resume play without too much pain. As if you were playing on the living room, and other people wanna come in and have some sort of social life (never understood that) and you take your console to your basement and go back to playing ASAP.

I'd be really surprised if the Xbox One doesn't automatically write to disk when you suspend to RAM (this is the default behavior for sleep mode in both Windows 7 and Windows 8). Not sure whether Sony would be doing this as well, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Suspend to disk would also give some advantages to loading up a game as that would mean you have a single contiguous linear read. Meaning that you get the full sequential read speed of the HDD when resuming from disk, as opposed to loading a level directly from game assets which will almost invariably involve random reads.

Although that isn't necessarily a direct win for loading a game. As while you'll load the data faster with the sequential read speed, you may end up reading in more total data at start than you would starting a game traditionally and loading a specific level.

Regards,
SB

 

[betan]

I'd be really surprised if the Xbox One doesn't automatically write to disk when you suspend to RAM (this is the default behavior for sleep mode in both Windows 7 and Windows 8). Not sure whether Sony would be doing this as well, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Hybrid mode (suspend to memory AND disk) is definitely not the default for windows 7 sleep. I highly doubt it's for win 8.
In fact, hibernation with 8 GB mem is a nightmare for both writing and reading.

Suspend to disk would also give some advantages to loading up a game as that would mean you have a single contiguous linear read. Meaning that you get the full sequential read speed of the HDD when resuming from disk, as opposed to loading a level directly from game assets which will almost invariably involve random reads.

Although that isn't necessarily a direct win for loading a game. As while you'll load the data faster with the sequential read speed, you may end up reading in more total data at start than you would starting a game traditionally and loading a specific level.

All true.
But the point of suggested hybrid mode is to be able to recover the complete state after power outage. And since with the coprocessor it's basically free (at least on PS4), I don't see why it would be omitted unless there is a significant wear and tear concern.

 

[eastmen]

I don't think we will see SSHD in consoles SKU, it was more like thinking about what one can do to speed-up loading ... for same prize I can get 1.5TB HDD, 1TB SSHD or 128GB SSD and 128GB is not enough with services like PS+

If the gen goes on long enough we will see it. 128 gig ssd's are already $100 and less and 256 are under $200 sometimes as low as $150 .