Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]
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Tkumpathenurpahl
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They said dual output in the early days, but they walked that back fairly quickly. I can't remember exactly when, but I think it was when the dual Cell design failed them and they had to turn to Nvidia.
1080p and 120fps were claims that were fulfilled, but not by anything graphically impressive. Plenty of indie games were 1080p. Anything in 3D was 120fps.
But yeah, hollow hype for the most part. I certainly think the 8K claim will be much like the PS3's 1080p claim. Or the PS4 Pro's 4K claim
Sounds unreal.
I wanted that tech demo so badly but it wasnt available in my demo diskIt doesn't really matter for me, i liked those days with much of hype, tech demos and all that. The PS2 in special, the hype was so cool back then, the tv commercials, tech demo discs (who remembers 'FInd my own way''??)
Still have that demo disc, booting it once in a while
I think it was probably a reimagination of the PS1 tech demo:
15:00 into the video.
It has faces similar to the PS2 tech demo.
You could add any music CD you wanted and the visuals would respond accordingly
edit: mind you the PS1 visualizer could also be manipulated by the user
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I wanted that tech demo so badly but it wasnt available in my demo disk
I still have it on CD, and it's the only way to enjoy it. PCSX2 doesn't play the find my own way demo very well. Quite amazing how you can 'control' the demo, pause, zoom in, rotate etc. The particles where something else for the time. even though the tech demos for the PS2 where amazing, i think later PS2 games matched or outdid them. ZOE2 kinda did that 'find my own way' tech demo, in a game, running at 60fps (mostly).
Ok cool never seen that one
PS2 has an optical drive that reads 5.25MB/s and has 32MB of system memory. Most every game shipped on a single layer DVD, so storage space shouldn't be an issue, and therefore assets would likely be store in hardware friendly formats, and in sequential chunks to reduce seek time. In sustained reads, it should be able to fill system memory in just over 5 seconds. Some games also allow you to install to the HDD. Even those don't load in 5 seconds. Even if you scatter the assets all over the disc, you would assume that a 12x increase in time (1 minute) would be a maximum. Stuntman for PS2 take nearly 2 minutes to load.The longest load time you could get should be time to populate all the RAM. If 24 GBs (high ball) and 5 GB/s transfer speed (medium prediction) that'll be 5 seconds. Seek times add considerably to that when trying to load off HDDs, but these are tiny with SSD and a bespoke filesystem (we hope!). So the only other thing that could slow you down would be decompressing assets which shouldn't be used (aggressive packing is used for the download, which is unpacked to hardware friendly formats).
There's nothing for the devs to 'get more' out of the hardware that could slow this down. Things that slow down loading from HDD just won't impact an SSD system. What could they be wanting to do to take 1 minute getting a game off a 5 GB/s drive? Hell, that'd be 300 GB of data which is larger than the entire game!
The math you are proposing make sense in theory but I can't think of a single time it's been a reality in the history of video games.
N64 load games very fast, cartridge was a thing before optical disk.
D
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Sony have not claimed anything yet, everything is predicated on what Mark Cerny said in his Wired interview and accounts of the tech demo. Like you, I am skeptical of the complete obviation of loading times but..
Not forgetting that what is populating RAM is not data loaded from from a disc/drive but generated by the game engine. Where everything is, dynamic object creation - everything in motion that can be interacted with, AI behaviours and pathing etc. It's the load times you experience on any PC RPG/RTS where you save and load; the game is usually not not re-loading all the game assets, it's loading a the save state from a typically small (a few megabytes) save file and regenerating the dynamic world around that.
We've only heard of people seeing Spider-Man but my guess would be this large open world game have a fair amount of this world generation and movement was fast. We'll probably still see a pause for initial game loading, even with faster SSD-to-RAM transfers and smarter file systems.
Yes my friend who told me the CPU will help but he said for example an open world need 2/3 RAM to be full current gen to be ok in RAM but he knows some open world where the RAM can fully be filled two times before the game boot from scratch because of setting up the game engine even if the SSD speed is off the roof. I expect cold boot to be a few seconds a least maybe more 10+ seconds. He said we will see many 3D menu for accelerating the cold boot.
Both Sony and MS are talking up SSD - hell at least Sony are keeping their talk in check, MS claim 40x faster loading!
While I totally get there will be an element of loading time, I really do expect just a few seconds.
Both MS and Sony have made claims that are technically true but not always happens (or if it does it's very rare). As stated, the PS3 had 1080p games (as an example). However, in this case it's a big drive (pardon the pun) both are making and they've been actively talking about it and showing it off...Spiderman is the ideal example as it allows them to show the limitation current technology imposes and what the new tech allows.
While I totally get there will be an element of loading time, I really do expect just a few seconds.
Both MS and Sony have made claims that are technically true but not always happens (or if it does it's very rare). As stated, the PS3 had 1080p games (as an example). However, in this case it's a big drive (pardon the pun) both are making and they've been actively talking about it and showing it off...Spiderman is the ideal example as it allows them to show the limitation current technology imposes and what the new tech allows.
This is a different argument.
On these machines, all things were slow to load because peek transfer was a small part of the loading process with other weaker links in it. We're talking about a PS5 with games that do load in seconds, and then your theory that over time that the 'bandwidth will get pushed', some games will take longer and longer to load. If the machine is capable of loading a game in a few seconds, what can devs do differently to slow it down? Only procedural content generation. I suppose at this point we're arguing semantics on what we mean by 'load'.
I guess to answer this on a more technical level, we'd need to look at the processing overhead of creating in-game content from storage-based assets. Objects aren't instantly converted from disc data to game data in RAM. The assets are loaded and assembled into RAM objects, scripts initialised, and whatnot. I guess that's what you mean in which case, yeah, I'm wrong, although that's not an issue of bandwidth which you suggested would be the limiting factor. Some super RPG might do loads of processing of content in world-building ahead of the player being able to play, which'll take time.
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Which SNES and N64 games did that?!? I wanna punch them in the face!
Shadow man on N64 had loading times. I think because everything had to be decompressed as it was a big games with plenty of cutscenes with dialogues which were great, like the whole game. It had also great musics. I highly recommend that game, but beware, it can be a really spooky game (and not in a funny way).
"Did you see the movie The Matrix? Same interface. Same concept. Starting from next year, you can jack into The Matrix!" -- Ken Kutaragi, regarding the PS2.
Out of This World/Another World on the SNES had long load screens. I think SNES Earthworm Jim had load times about the same as or longer than the Sega CD version. On the Genesis cartridge version, these could be shortened by mashing start. Quake 2 on N64 had load screens, and Perfect Dark had very long black screens between maps.
I played it on emulator eyears after I didn't own an actual 64 anymore, and indeed it is a gem in the console's library, but I could not finish it because it's labirynthian map is just too much of a chore for modern me. What I digged the most was the throwback to that patented 90's breed of edgy horror aesthetic the game serves as exemple of so well.
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