Current Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

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The DDR4 chip dedicated to the SSD controller is 4Gb (512MB): K4A4G085WF-BCTD


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It seems the loading time of multi-platform games on the new consoles aren't significantly faster than PC versions with high-end SSD.

Sony 1st-party games are few examples which show incredible results of extremely fast loading.
 
Most of it comes down to API usage or lack of it.

There are a handful of titles that had low-hanging fruit style patches, where graphic options were tweaked and thats about it. Where I/O was not switched over to the new APIs, nor were the resources repacked to make use of the faster decompression engines.
 
Most of it comes down to API usage or lack of it.
I'm not sure if it's even this, at least not on PS5. In Road to PS5 Mark Cerny said: "The best thing is as a game developer when you read from the SSD you don't need to know any of this you don't even need to know that your data is compressed, you just indicate what data you'd like to read from your original uncompressed file and where you'd like to put it and the whole process of loading it happens invisibly to you and at very high speed."

Xbox is a similarly closed platform and I imagine that the situation is very similar on Series S and X.

What I think we're seeing is devs are not putting much effort into changing how all their data is packaged so the data for nextgen console versions is the same as that for PC and current gen consoles data all mixed up requiring a load to RAM, the CPU pulling it apart, then putting it where it needs to be. This is the worst case scenario for nextgen accelerated storage solutions.

We have Spider-Man taking 6-7 seconds to load and Demon Souls taking 20 seconds. Then Valhalla at double that on PS5 and on Series X slower because for some reason they chose to shove in some extra splash screens during load(!) :runaway:

Nextgen is still massively faster than the equivalent games on current gen consoles but we're not seeing anywhere near what they're capable of if games are packages for this new storage paradigm.
 
Roughly speaking any load time over 3 seconds on PS5 or 6 seconds on Series X means that the game is unoptimized, doing something on the network, idly showing splash screens, or doing some kind of calculations or housekeeping.

Because filling the 16GB RAM (minus OS) should normally never take more than that at 5.5GB/s or 2.5GB/s respectively.
 
Roughly speaking any load time over 3 seconds on PS5 or 6 seconds on Series X means that the game is unoptimized, doing something on the network, idly showing splash screens, or doing some kind of calculations or housekeeping.

Because filling the 16GB RAM (minus OS) should normally never take more than that at 5.5GB/s or 2.5GB/s respectively.

Excepting QuickResume, there is more to having a game run than just loading data into RAM. E.g. in Spider-Man, the point in the city where Spider-Man spawns will need the geometry and textures of the surrounding areas loaded at high detail levels, with lower and lower detail levels the further away you can see depending on your line of sight. The game world will be empty by default and needs filling with city stuff; like generating dozens/hundreds of AI pedestrians, with some randomness in appearance and clothing, they'll be doing something like walking from somewhere to somewhere, or engaging in a solo or group idle animation, like two people have a discussion or argument. Likewise the traffic lights all need to operate predictably and sensibly so the traffic works. Then the streets themselves need filling with dozens/hundred of cars with sufficient variety and purpose. Pigeons also need generating, like pedestrians what are they doing or where are they going? The animation of objects like trees, other foliage, flags all needs initialising. If you're running in fancy pants mode, the BVH maps may need loading and setup as well.

It's a ton of small details that all need to be in train so that when the screen fades up, it's like you were in the middle of a bustling metropolis that was also bustling two minutes ago. The vast majority of this will be generated on the fly, rather than a fixed set of data that is just loaded in and ready to go.
 
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
Very damning for Series X 87% @ 60fps versus 97% for PS5 !
Narrow and fast clearly winning here.
Source: Vgtech's
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Too bad we can't have in game console performance monitoring. Would be curious to find out why XBSX is spending over 10% of the time between 16-33ms maybe asset streaming? Could explain the huge maximum frame time spike.
 
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