Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*

[Shifty Geezer]

You've missed a couple of points. Are you adding the m.2 drive in addition to an HDD for an added $50+ BOM, or instead of and only shipping with 512 GBs? And what about the decompression etc. that Silent_Buddha was talking about which prevents SSDs that are 3x faster than HDDs actually performing 3x faster in real games? Does an m.2 NAND drive in your PC result in linearly faster game load speeds?

 

[function]

Scorpio is going to need a minimum of a 1TB drive or be utterly gimped at launch.

It would need a whole bank of SD card slots on the machine, and the ability to pull a single game off multiple SD cards, to make it remotely workable as an alternative solution. That's not an attractive proposition for MS or for customers.

Scorpio has to ship with a mechanical HDD as SSD costs are too high. One can only hope for a small SSD/flash buffer (probably not happening) or a 3.5" 7200 mechanical drive (much more likely, but still not actually likely).

 

[bunge]

Scorpio with 375 GB of RAM confirmed:

https://arstechnica.com/information...ptane-ssd-375gb-that-you-can-also-use-as-ram/

 

[Orion]

I honestly doubt that pc gpus are going to be capped at under 20GB for the following decade. And if they can make use of more, so too can consoles. Though I expect 16 or up to 32 GB for next gen.

That said, optical can reach a petabyte of space using the same wavelength as dvd, with bluray wavelength it should be able to reach multiple petabytes at low cost of cents. Don't see any other technology scaling as well in the coming decades.

Though quartz is said to possibly last for billions of years, so if a storage medium around that could be made would be excellent so as to not have to buy the games again.

 

[eastmen]

You've missed a couple of points. Are you adding the m.2 drive in addition to an HDD for an added $50+ BOM, or instead of and only shipping with 512 GBs? And what about the decompression etc. that Silent_Buddha was talking about which prevents SSDs that are 3x faster than HDDs actually performing 3x faster in real games? Does an m.2 NAND drive in your PC result in linearly faster game load speeds?

I'd replace the laptop drive and just put in a bigger m.2 . As for performance I doubt anyone has optimized for ssd performance esp at the higher speeds. Its also been a long time since I've seen proper benchmarks. Moving to an ssd drasticly dropped my game load times and I would wager the same would happen when I switch over to a fast m.2 drive.

Scorpio is going to need a minimum of a 1TB drive or be utterly gimped at launch.

It would need a whole bank of SD card slots on the machine, and the ability to pull a single game off multiple SD cards, to make it remotely workable as an alternative solution. That's not an attractive proposition for MS or for customers.

Scorpio has to ship with a mechanical HDD as SSD costs are too high. One can only hope for a small SSD/flash buffer (probably not happening) or a 3.5" 7200 mechanical drive (much more likely, but still not actually likely).

what to replace the multiple bluray drives on the xbox one ?

Right now if you buy physical you have to install to a hardrive and still keep the disc in the drive if you want to change games. So any game changing would be the same with an SD card.

The beauty of the SD card is that there are sd cards that work at 300MB/s the bluray drives are what 20MB/s right now. The 300MB/s would be faster than the mechanical hardrives already used. Also they take a fraction of the space that a bluray drive would take. You could in theory put a bank of 4 SD card slots in the a tenth of the space you would need for a bluray drive. In the xbox one original your going to gain back about 30% of the internal case space by removing the bluray drive. In a xbox one s you'd gain back half or more.

You could also ship with a smaller ssd like 512 gigs for DD content since you wouldn't have to install games to the drive anymore when you buy physical

 

[eastmen]

Scorpio with 375 GB of RAM confirmed:

https://arstechnica.com/information...ptane-ssd-375gb-that-you-can-also-use-as-ram/

That's interesting tech when the price comes down but at this point they could just throw in DDR4 LV at slow speeds as a buffer and call it a day. It be cheaper too since they could get 4-8 gigs for as low as $20 bucks

I honestly doubt that pc gpus are going to be capped at under 20GB for the following decade. And if they can make use of more, so too can consoles. Though I expect 16 or up to 32 GB for next gen.

That said, optical can reach a petabyte of space using the same wavelength as dvd, with bluray wavelength it should be able to reach multiple petabytes at low cost of cents. Don't see any other technology scaling as well in the coming decades.

Though quartz is said to possibly last for billions of years, so if a storage medium around that could be made would be excellent so as to not have to buy the games again.

we already have 12GB gpus at the high end so I doubt we will stay under 20GB till 2027.

Optical is cheap for storage but terrible for read speeds. I doubt we will bluray continue forward in consoles , esp as it becomes less and less of a force in home video sales.

 

[MrFox]

@eastmen, do you think scorpio will have a bluray drive?

 

[function]

what to replace the multiple bluray drives on the xbox one ?

Right now if you buy physical you have to install to a hardrive and still keep the disc in the drive if you want to change games. So any game changing would be the same with an SD card.

Many customers don't change disks as they buy DD. The industry is moving in that direction. Forcing all users to move to switching physical media per game would be a retrograde step.

SD cards cost vastly more per MB of data stored than BR or mechanical HDD. Game costs would increase massively for both physical and DD purchases.

SD cards come in predetermined sizes. An 80 GB game would need a 120 GB SD card. Games would waste huge amounts of SD storage. You would need to juggle SD cards to squeeze games on where you can, or to reduce waste by partially installing across multiple SD cards and access them all at once through a bank of SD slots. Due to file sizes Scorpio games would be a massively worse fit than < 16GB Switch games, only with no benefit to portability as with the Switch.

Relying on SD cards for Scorpio would be a huge mistake, of even greater than "Reveal Tent" proportions.

 

[Jay]

Scorpio is going to need a minimum of a 1TB drive or be utterly gimped at launch.

I think they will go for 1tb but I don't think it would be gimped at lower.
simply because lots of gamers who has external drives will continue to use it, and for them it would be perfect/not a problem

 

[phoenix_chipset]

When there's a ps5, it needs to ship with an ssd and be designed to make full use of it. Games should ship on 100gb blu ray discs. Or 50gb discs for smaller games.

In a perfect world, cartridges that were complete games and didn't need patches (except for online multiplayer components/games) would be best. Downloading is the future.

 

[Orion]

Optical is cheap for storage but terrible for read speeds. I doubt we will bluray continue forward in consoles , esp as it becomes less and less of a force in home video sales.

I imagine if the petabyte per disc tech can be perfected, perhaps not for next gen but perhaps for next next gen, it will have substantially faster read speed.

 

[eastmen]

Many customers don't change disks as they buy DD. The industry is moving in that direction. Forcing all users to move to switching physical media per game would be a retrograde step.

SD cards cost vastly more per MB of data stored than BR or mechanical HDD. Game costs would increase massively for both physical and DD purchases.

SD cards come in predetermined sizes. An 80 GB game would need a 120 GB SD card. Games would waste huge amounts of SD storage. You would need to juggle SD cards to squeeze games on where you can, or to reduce waste by partially installing across multiple SD cards and access them all at once through a bank of SD slots. Due to file sizes Scorpio games would be a massively worse fit than < 16GB Switch games, only with no benefit to portability as with the Switch.

Relying on SD cards for Scorpio would be a huge mistake, of even greater than "Reveal Tent" proportions.

So ? Consumers can still buy DD but now it would be on an SSD or a comparably fast SD card / external drive. Nothing changes for the consumer except the consoles get smaller , cheaper and load times decrease

SD cards do cost more but not significantly more. There would also be savings via packaging and shipping costs. Along with other things like not needing a hardrive to install to and savings on the console itself.

Why would you need to install across multiple sd cards ? SD cards are capable of 300MB/s far greater than the current mechanical drives in the xbox one or ps4 . They can be 8 gigs all the way up to 256 gigs. Current games are less than 50gigs in the majority of cases so they would fit on a 64gig card easily. As the generation goes on nand prices will continue to decrease as it does everytime we discuss this. Except blurays will still have the same limits and same horrible speeds. The only advantage is the shrinking cost to GB ratio.


If people want a high end console and scorpio comes with 12 gigs of ram then load times will only increase if they go bluray and mechanical drives again. That's not a high end experience.

 

[eastmen]

I imagine if the petabyte per disc tech can be perfected, perhaps not for next gen but perhaps for next next gen, it will have substantially faster read speed.

shouldn't we wait until its a viable tech. I would have loved holographic discs too and I argued for them but we saw that nothing became of them. I think as we move forward interested in optical tech even for archiving will reduce in scope.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

SD cards do cost more but not significantly more. There would also be savings via packaging and shipping costs. Along with other things like not needing a hardrive to install to and savings on the console itself.

That's a theory, but the only evidence we have is Switch games costing significantly more. Of course they are launch prices so we'll have to see what they settle down. However, these aren't bleeding-edge 300 MB/s cards either, so the actual cost is still going to cost more.

Why would you need to install across multiple sd cards ? Current games are less than 50gigs in the majority of cases so they would fit on a 64gig card easily

You buy a 64 GB card and download a 40 GB game - it fits. You then want another 40 GB game, so buy another card. In total you've 128 GBs and 80 GBs of data. You then want another 40 GB game. You have the spare capacity but still need to buy another 64 GB card because you can't split games across cards. However, you probably could split games with a fancy file system, while large cards would reduce wastage.

As the generation goes on nand prices will continue to decrease as it does everytime we discuss this. Except blurays will still have the same limits and same horrible speeds. The only advantage is the shrinking cost to GB ratio.

Except that isn't quite happening. It's been 9 years of 'closing the price per GB' gap and NAND is nowhere near as cheap as optical discs, especially as you add performance to the NAND to make use of its speed advantage. NAND is faster, not cheaper.

 

[function]

So ? Consumers can still buy DD but now it would be on an SSD or a comparably fast SD card / external drive. Nothing changes for the consumer except the consoles get smaller , cheaper and load times decrease

Costs change pretty damn massively for the consumer. 1~2 TB of SSD space is going to add a couple of hundred dollars onto your console price. That's a pretty huge change in price to play PS4Pro games.

SD cards do cost more but not significantly more. There would also be savings via packaging and shipping costs. Along with other things like not needing a hardrive to install to and savings on the console itself.

DRAM exchange is currently showing $4.89 session average price for a measly little 16 GB SD card. And these aren't super fast 300 MB/s cards. The cost of having a 128GB card for the likes of Master Chief collection, and another for Forza Horizon 4, and another for Halo 6, and another for Gears of War 5, and another for .... etc etc are horrendously significant.

And those DRAM exchange prices don't include the cost of installing games to the cards and then validating the installs.

On top of this, the console will still need at least 32 GB, or more likely 64GB GB for dashboard and minimum functionality for saves, dash updates, game patches etc. So that's immediately a chunk of your savings on having no HDD lost, and lost DLC / DD sales opportunities (as not everyone will immediately want to shell out on SSDs and external caddies.

Finally, protecting retail will mean DD games rise in price in line with the now $10+ more expensive retail games.

Why would you need to install across multiple sd cards ? SD cards are capable of 300MB/s far greater than the current mechanical drives in the xbox one or ps4 . They can be 8 gigs all the way up to 256 gigs. Current games are less than 50gigs in the majority of cases so they would fit on a 64gig card easily. As the generation goes on nand prices will continue to decrease as it does everytime we discuss this. Except blurays will still have the same limits and same horrible speeds. The only advantage is the shrinking cost to GB ratio.

As Shifty said, the only way to avoid huge amounts of wasted space on your SD cards is to spread across multiple cards. So you do that or you accept the huge amounts of wasted space. Many games with patches are already over 50 GB and increased assets quality will only see games sizes increases.

An SD based Scorpio would be absolutely dead on arrival and a disastrous misstep. The high cost of SD cards, the huge sizes of AAA console games, and a requirement of additional purchases of external SSDs as the only way to play DD games without juggling SD cards render such an idea unworkable in practice.

I was keen on the idea of a flash based console a few years back, but ongoing realities and ballooning games sizes mean it's simply not an economically viable proposition.

 

[MrFox]

A problem with flash price comparisons is that as a distribution media it's not a generic NAND chip. Macronix makes special ROMs with copy-protection and they provide the data copy service. They can also add whatever Nintendo wants on the silicon. While at the core it's similar to 3D TLC, it's not in a competitive market like the generic NAND productions, and they can't have the same volume. They also don't upgrade their fabs at the same pace as the gigantic memory producers. To be fair they also might have access to a lot of shortcuts on the silicon since they need to write it only once.

Another issue is BC. The vast majority of console gamers buy physical games and they'll want BC for their existing library. So if BC needs a bluray drive anyway, then adding a different media while having to keep the drive would be a bit weird.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

BC's a whole other can of worms! For reference, Switch doesn't support DS or 3DS carts. And even having an optical drive, PS3 didn't support PS2 mostly and PS4 doesn't support PS3. So changing format wouldn't be suicide for a platform. It's been argued, and I agree, that BC is more about the download library.

 

[phoenix_chipset]

Ps5 really should have full BC. Sony has much less excuse than they did with the ps3 and ps4 ; we know they'll go x86 again and most likely have an all amd system. In nintendo's case with the switch they didn't have much of a choice. Maybe they could've done 3ds BC but the games would look atrocious blown up anyway.

I don't think Sony or MS should make a console that doesn't play older games anymore, new consoles should be a part of the same ecosystem they started in 2013. Nintendo on the other hand needed to let go of some very dated tech.

 

[eastmen]

That's a theory, but the only evidence we have is Switch games costing significantly more. Of course they are launch prices so we'll have to see what they settle down. However, these aren't bleeding-edge 300 MB/s cards either, so the actual cost is still going to cost more.

Right so we have to wati and see , however from testing they seem to be about the same speed at 90 Mb/s mirco sd cards which until recently were the fastest micro sd cards

You buy a 64 GB card and download a 40 GB game - it fits. You then want another 40 GB game, so buy another card. In total you've 128 GBs and 80 GBs of data. You then want another 40 GB game. You have the spare capacity but still need to buy another 64 GB card because you can't split games across cards. However, you probably could split games with a fancy file system, while large cards would reduce wastage.

why put it on an sd card and no just put it on the ssd that comes with the system ? I said I would include both the ssd and the sd reader or a custom cart like the switch. The sd card or custom cart would be sold in stores with the game on it. If you want DD you just download it to the drive .

Except that isn't quite happening. It's been 9 years of 'closing the price per GB' gap and NAND is nowhere near as cheap as optical discs, especially as you add performance to the NAND to make use of its speed advantage. NAND is faster, not cheaper.

Oh I don't know. I can get a 64 gig SD card with a 80MB/s for $20. These capacities didn't exist 5 years ago and when they were introduced cost hundreds . I can go up again to a 128GB SD card that offers a 150MB/s and pay $60. These are of course prices after amazon and Lexar in the case of the cards I looked at get a cut and oh at least shipping from Lexar to amazon to me is factored in. Bluray tops out at 72MB/s at 16x but I believe the xbox one and ps4 have a 6x speed 27MB/s drive. The internal hardrive would top out at around a 150MB/s with the average speed around a 100MB/s


I would agree that cost would have to go up a bit if we switch to carts again for a console. But I think we differ in what the cost would be. I believe we could go about $5 more for a 64gig cart. Perhaps $10 for a 128 gig. Doing so would improve the experience for everyone. Going with a 150MB/s read on the cart would replace the need for installs , no more big plastic discs taking up room you don't need and wasting hardrive space. Going to 300MB/s would improve load times over this gen . You would also get a lowered priced console without the optical drive or a more powerful console for the same price. Also a smaller console without the optical drive.

 

[eastmen]

A problem with flash price comparisons is that as a distribution media it's not a generic NAND chip. Macronix makes special ROMs with copy-protection and they provide the data copy service. They can also add whatever Nintendo wants on the silicon. While at the core it's similar to 3D TLC, it's not in a competitive market like the generic NAND productions, and they can't have the same volume. They also don't upgrade their fabs at the same pace as the gigantic memory producers. To be fair they also might have access to a lot of shortcuts on the silicon since they need to write it only once.

Another issue is BC. The vast majority of console gamers buy physical games and they'll want BC for their existing library. So if BC needs a bluray drive anyway, then adding a different media while having to keep the drive would be a bit weird.

MS wouldn't need this however. They can create their own software copy protection something like bit locker or the like and MS would buy up a ton of nand as they can use it for their other product lines too. It would be interesting to see whats up


@MrFox I would hope it didn't and they went with flash or DD only . However i'm sure they will have a 4k bluray drive most likely due to supporting past xbox one/360 games for BC