At that point in time, the PCI-e4.0 SSD fast enough for the PS5 should hopefully be relatively cheap so people will be buying expanded storage i.e. 2TB or 4TB.
Aye, hopefully. My PS4's 4TB external HDD filled up much quicker than I expected, so I'll be wanting a sizeable SSD at a sensible price ASAP.
So if you need that fast streaming from SSD, how does that lineup with added latency of streaming from the net?
Sorry, I don't know if I've made my prediction properly clear. Just to ensure we're singing from the same hymn sheet: I predict that there will be a game which is rendered on a PS5, and predominantly streamed via PSNow. It will predominantly be streamed via PSNow because the installation size of the game will be so large that it will be prohibitive for most gamers.
The speed of the SSD will be heavily utilised for rendering. Latency introduced by streaming will be the same as it is on PSNow. Owing to that latency, it won't be a fast paced twitch shooter, but rather, something akin to the pace of TLoU2.
Also deduplication of assets on the storage will save a bunch of space. Unless you expect it to go onto the storage uncompressed?
That's true, and for the most part we'll see two things:
- Games of this generation's scope, fidelity, and asset variety will have a smaller installation size.
- Games of this generation's installation sizes will have some combination of greater scope, fidelity, and variety.
But an SSD that, with compression, can stream between 8-20GB/s will IMO really shine when it's able to stream unique assets of varying LoD's.
Asset duplication won't exist in the same sense - that of having to have the same tree in multiple places on the HDD so it can be streamed into memory at a reasonable speed. It will take on a new form of that same tree existing in 20 different levels of detail so that it can be streamed into and discarded from memory as is appropriate for its distance.
There will be developers who come up with all kinds of ingenious forms of compression. But there will be at least one group of mad hatters out there who will build something like a city where every building is unique, has 10 states ranging from pristine to destroyed, and each of those states has 20 LoD's. Extrapolate that same madness out through character textures, models, and animations.
There was a lot of interesting discussion around this very matter in the Unreal Engine 5 thread, in which it was generally determined that the solved problem of geometry will necessitate large amounts of storage for sizeable games. That said, one of the UE5 developers made mention of the fact that they've done some interesting stuff with compression, but they're not yet ready to share.
So I could be way off in my prediction. But I'm sticking to it anyway.
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