Baseless Next Generation Rumors with no Technical Merits [pre E3 2019] *spawn*

[manux]

There is ~order of magnitude performance difference between regular(sata) ssd and fast nvme ssd. Sadly on pc there is very little practical difference, almost any ssd will do for gaming.

Will be tremendously interesting to see what optimizing for really fast ssd does for gaming on ps5.

Assuming ps5 ssd indeed is faster than pc we probably can assumes hundreds of thousands of operations per second and raw read speed in excess of 4GB/s. Ps4 hdd probably does something like 100MB/s and seek times limit heavily data access.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Mutliplats will have to limit themselves to the lowest console denominator: the cheap Lockhart with allegedly no SSD inside (well, it's supposed to be cheap). You can thank MS.

In terms if critical realtime performance, yes. But when it comes to things like loading times or things like the time it takes to switch between the protagonist and eagle in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, or textures reacting to LOD detail in rapidly moving camera movements, you can play fast and loose. People with slower hardware just wait a little longer are get a, marginally, inferior experience.

But as with everything in life, you won't miss what you never had.

 

[AlNom]

Will be tremendously interesting to see what optimizing for really fast ssd does for gaming on ps5.

@Graham would say it would be unreal.

 

[Jay]

Anthem is a simple example where if the game had next gen storage it would offer a different experience, and may have been able to create even more diverse levels which could go through at speed.
I could see those loading screens limiting the actual design of the game.

 

[Jay]

Mutliplats will have to limit themselves to the lowest console denominator: the cheap Lockhart with allegedly no SSD inside (well, it's supposed to be cheap). You can thank MS.

Of the top of my head this is where I think they could make savings without impacting anaconda.

Depending on resolution target 40-60% less CU's
Slightly lower clocked cpu
Slight reduction in memory and speed
Cheaper cooling due to reductions in spec of soc
Possibly smaller pcie3 ssd size
For lowest priced sku disk less.
$100-150 price difference
If BOM doesn't cover it maybe slightly higher loss compared to anaconda.

Funnily enough it would work in Lockharts favour if ps5 is priced same as anaconda.
If it fell in the middle it would make reduction in Lockhart to maintain a big enough price gap harder.
So will be interesting to see prices of them all.
One of the reasons I'm team ps5 priced in the middle is because it makes it more interesting to me

 

[RobHT]

PC user:
...
Everything pc can meet or scale currently easily apart from storage.

This is where the biggest difference will be for Sony 1P. They don't need to worry about pc.
MS will, even if you say min req is ssd, thats just not close enough to not impact possible game design. Unless ms storage solution is primative SSD set up.
updating game to take advantage of supper fast storage would be pretty easy.

How long will it be before pcie3 ssd is common enough to be able to be considered essential in a pc game?

Suppose they could make console and cloud exclusive game, but I wouldn't be surprised if pressure would be to not to do that.

Multi plats will limit themselves to pc ssd.

It would seem that the additional system RAM likely on board a PC capable of playing these games could take care of the majority of corner cases where a slower SSD would break some essential gameplay element.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

It would seem that the additional system RAM likely on board a PC capable of playing these games could take care of the majority of corner cases where a slower SSD would break some essential gameplay element.

It depends how much solid state RAM the next PlayStation has and even then, the PC architecture is going to strain pulling gigabytes of data across the I/O into system RAM, then over the bus to the GPU VRAM when everything else in the game is still happening at x frames per second.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This has got to be obvious, hasn't it?

Well yes, and I expect MS to have an SSD. My point was only that out of the details presented, the only one MS probably could act upon was mention of an SSD. That doesn't mean they have to act upon it. And that point was mostly in support of the notion that not giving info to your competition is a good idea.

That said, Sony talking about their stack and getting the load speeds so low, performance is potentially way better than just putting in a fast SSD. There's a tiddly amount of potential there for MS to look at their low SSD load times and think, "I wonder if we can get some more if we don't access it the Windows way and instead come up with a leaner XBox way?" or somesuch.

 

[iroboto]

"I wonder if we can get some more if we don't access it the Windows way and instead come up with a leaner XBox way?" or somesuch.

Part of the marketing around the word 'CUSTOM', is pretty much what I expect custom to reflect. Some board members take it to be some sort of performance enhancement, when in reality I'm just looking at MS customizing their hardware very specifically to support the VM stack, the OS, streaming, and server requirements. I would hope a leaner xbox way would consider how to make loading faster.

Even looking at Scorpio, they have discussed the ability for developers to leverage the additional memory (4GB) for faster loading times if they wanted to. I've yet to see a developer do that though.

MS can't be that behind the curve when it comes to this if they were already thinking about these things when designing scorpio.

Check out this old marketing bit:

Remember that original Xbox One games are built on consoles that only give devs access to 5GB of RAM, and Scorpio gives devs access to 8GB of its 12GB GDDR5 system memory, so developers can actually use that extra 3GB of memory as an IO cache to further improve loading times.

"We have a hard drive in Scorpio that provides about 50% more throughput than the existing Xbox. And that's because we didn't want load times to be terrible when you're loading these big 4K textures," Microsoft senior director of console marketing Albert Penello said in a recent Major Nelson podcast. "So we did a lot of work on a custom hard drive on the console."

Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/57047/project-scorpio-custom-hard-disk-load-4k-textures/index.html

it would be quite a shame if they just stopped working on this front

 

[MrFox]

Well yes, and I expect MS to have an SSD. My point was only that out of the details presented, the only one MS probably could act upon was mention of an SSD. That doesn't mean they have to act upon it. And that point was mostly in support of the notion that not giving info to your competition is a good idea.

That said, Sony talking about their stack and getting the load speeds so low, performance is potentially way better than just putting in a fast SSD. There's a tiddly amount of potential there for MS to look at their low SSD load times and think, "I wonder if we can get some more if we don't access it the Windows way and instead come up with a leaner XBox way?" or somesuch.

I'm curious if it could be similar to the way they added an I/O cache on the south bridge on the ps4, but this time flash memory in addition to ddr3.

They could have 4x pcie 4.0 which is more than enough bandwidth. (ps4 had 4x pcie 3.0?)

What if they didn't use any ssd controller, no sector abstraction, and no file system, just direct mapping of paralllel flash, block aligned. Simple allocation and caching and wear levelling, failed blocks remapping, entirely in software. There's an opportunity to go as far as memory map through pcie. This is not possible on PC except with something like a FusionIO card which cannot be used without an api support in professional softwares.

 

[iroboto]

I'm curious if it could be similar to the way they added an I/O cache on the south bridge on the ps4, but this time flash memory in addition to ddr3.

They could have 4x pcie 4.0 which is more than enough bandwidth. (ps4 had 4x pcie 3.0?)

What if they didn't use any ssd controller, no sector abstraction, and no file system, just direct mapping of paralllel flash, block aligned. Simple allocation and caching and wear levelling, failed blocks remapping, entirely in software. There's an opportunity to go as far as memory map through pcie. This is not possible on PC except with something like a FusionIO card which cannot be used without an api support in professional softwares.

Would a lot of memory cost more? I mean, we can see today that 4K games can fit well in 12GB of memory. Move to 24GB and you've got a lot of room to work with as long as developers continue to contain the program into a smaller footprint, they can use the additional memory for things like caching. But this doesn't sound like what Sony has done if we're talking about fast travelling locations.

 

[bgroovy]

We don't know what size or type of cat is in what bag. The widely-adopted assumption is that PS5 will include a big (for many games) and fast SSD because the quote strongly implied it was very fast. Sony could just be slotting in 64Gb of fast solid state cache in front of the HDD which virtually eliminates loading once the data has been read once, but continues to use a HDD for mass storage. There is a lot of neat trickery in the way PS4 games are packaged to let you play before the whole game had installed or downloaded; maybe PS5 has an evolution of this.

I don't know how anyone could come to that conclusion when Cerny's entire presentation was predicated on the transformative nature of guaranteed, high speed storage. A hybrid solution blasts a hole completely through that premise. Instead of making games when you always know you can load assets at 4GB/s+, you have to build on the assumption that at the moment the game might be streaming from the mechanical hard drive at a tiny fraction of that speed.

 

[iroboto]

I don't know how anyone could come to that conclusion when Cerny's entire presentation was predicated on the transformative nature of guaranteed, high speed storage. A hybrid solution blasts a hole completely through that premise. Instead of making games when you always know you can load assets at 4GB/s+, you have to build on the assumption that at the moment the game might be streaming from the mechanical hard drive at a tiny fraction of that speed.

He's putting out some ideas, I don't see anything wrong with it. Cerny's entire presentation was nothing more than, look at PS4 load Spider Man, looking it loading Spiderman now. It wasn't an entire presentation on storage technology, it was a part of his presentation.

The Wired article was not exactly enough to make assumption that Sony has transformative _guaranteed_ high speed storage. You don't even know how SpiderMan does it loading from a software perspective. How do you know what was demoed is applicable across the board for all titles, or future titles? or titles with larger asset footprints that we would come to expect from next gen.

Without knowing how it works, people are free to speculate and bring up ideas for discussion. That's the whole point of this part of the forum.

 

[BRiT]

Wasn't sure to put this here or in the baseless rumor thread. Have at it what you will...

"All this means is next year is going to be AMAZING for fans of both."

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1118646585087471617

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/04/18/xbox-ps5-next-gen-more-powerful/

Bowden notes that his sources are "known sources" and have provided accurate leaks for years. In other words, he isn't hearing this from some random 4chan poster. That said, as Bowden points out, it's not that surprising the next Xbox will be more powerful than the next PlayStation, as Microsoft has recently been chasing the all-mighty title of the world's most powerful console. This began with the Xbox One X, and Microsoft has said it plans to continue this pursuit into next-gen.

That said, it's unclear how the next Xbox could be more advanced than the PS5, which boats 8k graphics, insanely fast load times, ray-tracing, 3D audio, and basically everything you'd find in a high-end PC at the moment. In other words, if the next Xbox is indeed more advanced technically, then it will have to be quite the piece of hardware, which suggests a hefty price-point, unless Microsoft is willing to eat some big losses up front.

 

[Nesh]

Wasn't sure to put this here or in the baseless rumor thread. Have at it what you will...

"All this means is next year is going to be AMAZING for fans of both."

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/04/18/xbox-ps5-next-gen-more-powerful/

Well as someone who has been with PS since the first one I d be disappointed to know that I might be in a dilhemma between buying the most powerful XBOX or the next Playstation for my fav franchises and previously purchased PS games.
The little Playstation kid within me hopes that Sony would surprise us with PS5 like PS4. But yes I am curious, maybe MS is going for more memory and faster CPU? Maybe they are planning to release later?

 

[MrFox]

Wasn't sure to put this here or in the baseless rumor thread. Have at it what you will...

"All this means is next year is going to be AMAZING for fans of both."

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/04/18/xbox-ps5-next-gen-more-powerful/

Source is unknown, no track record whatsoever. How is this not baseless?

And we're talking about cerny's official specs in the baseless discussion, I think we made a mess.

(not that I think it's false, it's just not proven credible at all and I distrust anything without a track record, specially at this point in time where 99% is BS)

 

[BRiT]

Source is unknown, no track record whatsoever. How is this not baseless?

(not that I think it's false, it's just not proven credible at all and I distrust anything without a track record)

Added more to the original post ... specifically: "Bowden notes that his sources are "known sources" and have provided accurate leaks for years. "

 

[MrFox]

Added more to the original post ... specifically: "Bowden notes that his sources are "known sources" and have provided accurate leaks for years. "

Bowden is not a proven credible source, so saying he has good sources means nothing.

 

[BRiT]

Bowden is not a proven credible source, so saying he has good sources means nothing.

K. Moved to the other thread it is then. :smile:

 

[iroboto]

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/04/18/xbox-ps5-next-gen-more-powerful/

interesting baseless rumour...
hmm.
the word 'advanced' I think might be used incorrectly by the author, i wasn't expecting to see the word advanced, I would certainly believe in powerful. There are multiple methods in which that reality could be true; something as simple as just costing more for instance or finding a way to get more power for cheaper (ie binning for lockhart, azure servers, anaconda)

Advanced... hmmm... I'd have to think on that go back and see if I missed anything.
I suppose they can keep some features hidden in DX etc as the console version has specific calls to xbox hardware.

or

the more obvious route is that navi doesn't fully support the 'newest' shader model or the latest feature levels of dx12.
and that MS somehow managed to push it for xbox.

but as great as that may come across as marketing, it's unlikely for 3P mutliplatforms to take advantage of that, and even on PC that type of support might be limited.

hmm..