Probably many, as a storage drive, besides the SSD. I for the life can't find any PC being sold with a spinning mechanical drive since 2018 anymore.
Current Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]
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Probably many, as a storage drive, besides the SSD. I for the life can't find any PC being sold with a spinning mechanical drive since 2018 anymore.
eventually the SSD will need to become part of the requirements somewhere down the line I suspect.
You won a lifetime furniture of toilet paper.Nailed it!
Well one thing that PC gamers can do is probably just add a USB 3 or better external SSD since there is no speed comparison between a hard drive and even an external SSD
Mine will! I've got Terrabytes of 3.5 inch drives that are all faster than PS4Bone drives, and they're ample (though not optimal) for many games I'm yet to buy.
Gonna have to bite the bullet on a big nvme drive next year though, for new stuff. I've also got 32 GB of ddr3 just ripe for caching too...
Mihailjones
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Probably many, most gaming pcs arent the cutting edge ones. On steam survey 50% still have 4 core cpu and 64% uses fullHD. No idea about SSDs but I would guess that many still use them for OS and hdd for games, or hdd for both if their system is +5 years old budget pc.
How many will use fast nvme SSD at 2021? Who knows but certainly not 100%. And many can still use sata-SSDs too
So maybe devs have to design games to run on slower disks if they have PC version as goal.
What is sure is that making game for PS5 only doesnt have this limitation, no need to think about PC owners with slow disks.
Surely data transfer requirements should be highly scalable. They can reduce texture resolution, reduce LOD levels, animation quality, etc.... that combined with typically larger system memory and the use of additional loading screens if required should give a lot of leeway in scaling down to slower storage solutions. Whether it's enough to scale all the way down to a mechanical drive I don't know, but I'd imagine even SATA SDD's could be easily accommodated. And asking for an SSD as a minimum spec in a next gen game that's probably going to require at least a high end quad core and high end Pascal to even start probably isn't too outrageous.
I'm not the brightest with regard to this tech, but if the XBSX SSD is at most twice as slow than PS5's SSD then the XBSX only needs to keep the next 1-2 seconds of gameplay in RAM. No?
Tommy McClain
True, scaling has never been this amazing as this gen, and i suppose that only gets better. Hell, even the switch runs the highest end games. And if rumors are true, xsx has tech to mititage the difference in read speeds anyway. No reason to worry
Sure, but what will be the average PC configuration? Not everyone has the budget to "ultra-compensate".
Most PCs have 8 or 16 GB + GPU memory only, though, and Windows + apps usually eating more than console OS. It will take time for >16GB gets common enough, 16GB has barely overtaken 8GB today, so you can't really count on having spare memory for caching for the next few years, at least not more than on a console.
Games make different decisions on how they handle lights and shadows. You're describing an effect that isn't based in screen space, so the culling decision for the screen would be separate from the pass the game uses for the shadows. In existing games, geometry can be submitted multiple times or other techniques can be used to generate coverage information from those other angles.
How BVH construction in the console space will be handled isn't clear at this point, but Nvidia entrusts that process to the driver. Whatever resources the driver utilizes would be using a more global set of primitive data, and the structure wouldn't be culling based on the screen since it would be built before the current frame and accessed by rays going in very different directions than the screen.
The OS could be stored on the SSD and then loaded into memory at startup. It may also be the case that there's a bit of NAND somewhere else that is used as a fallback OS in case of problems. In operation, there's going to be RAM where the OS and a good chunk of code is running. Like in current systems, there can be services or routines paged out or left inactive until needed if they aren't commonly used or aren't time critical.
Running the OS from NAND doesn't sound like a good idea. The OS performs services and is the interface between the game's partition and the system/world. Making all those internal actions make round-trips to NAND would reduce the responsiveness of the system. If we're going by the Sony SSD patent as an example, there's a buffer of memory in kernel address space (OS) that all data first moves to before decode and copy to the user side. That doesn't make much sense if that kernel space is on the SSD.
The OS buffers and signals can be barriers to progress in the system, so latency can matter a lot when they are in use. Since the OS controls a lot of the data movement or needs to validate the data, that's also a continuous stream of write traffic. Most of the discussion for the SSD is about read traffic. Writes should be much better as well, but the systems are going to try to minimize that traffic since writes will be more difficult to handle and can produce more expensive disk operations due to wear leveling and remapping. An OS running every buffer there is through the SSD can also compromise the longevity of the drive.
@3dilettante Thanks for the explanation! Already thought the NXgamer video was rather far off from the truth.
My notebook has 8GB of ram, and it's hard to find one with less ram.
A gaming pc in 2021 will have at the very least 8GB of the main ram, probably 16.
If you are on a budget for your gaming pc, and can't spend for memory or ssd, don't whorry: you probably have a very low end gpu, so high end future games are out of discussion, maybe at very low setting that fitt comfy on the gpu memory.
I think that pc will not drag console development, maybe at the beginning of the new generation, but not when we will have engines built with this in mind.
8GB was kinda normal in 2011/12. 16GB main ram is way too small for a current build in my eyes. 32GB main ram, with 8 to 11GB for vram.
Enthusiasts easily get disconnected from reality
Even with it's flaws in certain areas, Steam Hardware Survey should give quite realistic picture of gaming machines on easily measurable factors like installed memory amounts.
Currently 16GB is barely more popular than 8GB, under 7 % of machines has more than 16GB of RAM.
8GB VRAM is more realistic, it's 2nd after 6GB, but under 4% have 11GB, even 3GB is more popular than that, not to mention 4, 2 and 1 GB options which are the next most popular amounts after 6 and 8 GB.
Does anyone else think that when DirectStorage comes to PC's we'll start getting "DirectStorage certified SSDs" with special hardware to reduce the CPU I/O overhead??
DirectStorage could be a way for MS to easily indicate SSD hardware requirements and standards.
DX12U certified clearly indicates a min featureset your GPU supports and sets a standard
DirectStorage certified clearly indicates SSD features/capability and sets a standard
DirectStorage could be a way for MS to easily indicate SSD hardware requirements and standards.
DX12U certified clearly indicates a min featureset your GPU supports and sets a standard
DirectStorage certified clearly indicates SSD features/capability and sets a standard
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