I mean, that's the problem... go peruse the PS5 subreddit and you find plenty of people conflating the benefits of having a fast SSD with rendering performance.
Next-Generation NVMe SSD and I/O Technology [PC, PS5, XBSX|S]
- Thread starter Shortbread
- Start date
Read irobotos post, he agrees ssd’s dont enable superior rendering and/or performance.
This forum is not ps5 subreddit. No need to argue/discuss it here. Typically discussion here tries to and reaches higher quality bar.
It's all fanboy passive aggressive behavior. One side can't admit the XBSX GPU is impressive and the other side can't admit the PS5 SSD/IO is impressive. But what do you expect from fanboys...
I mean, if I'm wrong I would love for someone to explain why beyond "Cerny said this".
I don't mean to be jerk, but here it goes. Watch the presentation below. Then consider how much easier it would have been for developer to use ssd. And then consider how much more even ps4 hardware could have done if it wasn't limited to roughly 20MB/s streaming speed and abysmal seek times. Then consider what it means if engine can pull massive amounts of data in 1s instead of having to plan 30s ahead. Gone are the mass effect elevators and narrow corridors present in plethora of games that player had to endure to mask the loadtimes.
Then once you are done with that consider unreal5 which is fully streaming based. This developer does pretty good job on explaining what is going on in layman terms
Same developer on the ssd
Then consider why are big players hopping into ssd bandwagon. Microsoft has their DirectStorage for console and pc. Nvidia showed their rtx io solution which runs on top of DirectStorage. Sony has their thing. Both try to solve same problem. Problem being that game assets are much larger than ram sizes. And even just adding more ram is not great as it would mean load times didn't get solved. SSD is elegant solution and it's about time they get used and become baseline.
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Ssd speed can improve performance as assets streaming issues often induce stuttering in games.
I've seen all these before. I also never meant to imply that these SSDs aren't a big deal. They will obviously make developer's lives easier and increase performance. I understand all this.
All I meant to say was that I don't think (based on my very limited and ignorant understanding) that Cerny's example of streaming in all the data from the SSD as you turn your character's view seems realistic in real world. That little demonstration always came off to me as Cerny trying to prove a point about the speed of the SSD to people who might not even know what "SSD" even stands for and not Cerny saying "hey developers, this is how you'll make games now!"
Nanite is kind of a weird example since we have Epic already telling us that it isn't really reliant upon IO bandwidth (above a certain point obviously) and is more reliant on latency. Isn't the entire point of virtual texturing or whatever Nanite is using to reduce the bandwidth required for streaming data?
Is there not a limit to how many assets can be streamed in before you negatively affect rendering performance? Like, there's a balance, right?
Everything that you see on display needs to be rendered somewhere somehow yes.
Yes exactly. Some scream all day the PS5 SSD is superior to what MS has come up with. That is something we have no idea about yet, they seem to achieve the same performance in totally different ways.
The SDD combats the lack of cost reduction that RAM has traditionally enjoyed.
We went from 64 MB of RAM on the Xbox to 512 MB on 360 to 8 GB of RAM on the One. So in the past we got 8-16X more RAM when moving to a new gen. This gen we are only getting 2X because it’s too expensive to offer 32-64 GBs of RAM.
VRAM affects rendering performance. A 3080 RTX with only 1 GB of VRAM doesn’t offer the same performance as a 3080 RTX with 10 GB. The bigger the data set the more that 1 GB becomes a bottleneck.
The SDD enables a more robust virtual VRAM solution. Since you have SDDs and decompression schemes that offer 5-14 GBps of data bandwidth (vs. 20-100 MBps), you aren’t forced to be as aggressive with prefetching data to RAM. So while we only get twice the RAM, it’s used more efficiently leading to greater performance than 16 GB and a HDD would have provided.
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Next gen data transfert speeds won't magically solve all bottlenecks but it will still vastly improve games.
Well explained.
There is no denying nothing. Both Microsoft and Sony have targeted specific areas of their respective hardware(s) in different fashions. So there will be "raw performance" advantages in those targeted areas. So there is no need to downplay either systems advantages. It is what it is...
Yes same as in 2013, we got to do accept with what we got in hardware terms. And so far we don't have any facts of what SSD solution is 'better'. They might end up being equal anyway in real world scenarios.
When you see UE5 demo with nearly one polygon per pixel, one texel per pixel, 20 millions displayed polygons, 8k textures, 16k shadow maps texture, assets is not the limitation. The demo is running at 30 fps* because of lumen the GI system and they will not be able to have the same quality of assets in a game because the size of assets is too big for the SSD.
*Target is 60 fps
EDIT: Limitation will be size of games and variety of assets
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if you push it so far that the streaming speed of your drive is incorporated into the rendering pipeline, yea you'll negative affect your rendering performance. No developer would do this though, you'd wouldn't design anything around the slowest bottleneck of the system.
But you might design choices like not having to cache car/building interiors in ram. Interiors in game like gtav could be loaded into ram while opening a door. There is a lot of opportunity to stream and cache less in ram.
Microsoft secret sauce that was patended as sampler feedback gathering misses is pretty directly integrated into rendering. Though I maintain it's not a magic bullet. But can fix efficiently the last 10% where traditional approaches for predicting what to cache/preload fail.
What I really would like to see is someone try to tackle texture streaming and predicting what is needed with neural networks.
The SSD tech in consoles/pc should have been standard since 2013 generation, even though i understand that would have been costly. Ive had SSDs in my gaming pc since the x58/first i7 days, over eleven years ago. Due to costs this storage tech has been behind for much too long.
Very important hardware part, but the GPU, and then the CPU are most certainly the most important aspects still when it comes to just about anything gaming. In special considering GPUs are responsible for so much these days. Ram still plays a bigger role still too, i can imagine. It's where everything needs to go through, since ram leaps have stagnated alot (2x jump), nvme drives somewhat have to mitigate for that.
It's in my opinion that SSD tech (for Xbox, PC, PS5) is alot of overhyped, yes they are going to make a huge difference in loading times, quick resume/save states, and allow for smaller install sizes, probably also more assets. But they don't change games so significiantly as some claim.
The UE5 demo, one of the most impressive showcasings), apparently didn't require so much storage speeds.
DF even mentioned that the CPU is the biggest leap over the last generation of consoles, with a real cpu this time, i think devs can do much more intresting things with that then the SSD.
Also dont forget ray tracing, just about any next gen game has it, theres where the real changes in visuals seem to originate. It's the GPU thats the most important there.
SSDs were too expensive in 2013. Compression should have been in 2013 though. That would have been a large benefit.
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