Baseless Next Generation Rumors with no Technical Merits [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

[AlNom]

My main complaint of current gen is not necessarily load times, though they can get on my nerves, but downloading to play times. The time it takes to just get in the game from start of download is excruciating. I've been beating the drum for years that Microsoft needs to start looking at Numecent's Cloudpaging. It uses some kind of virtual machine voodoo to make downloading apps fast. What's the point of playing different games, from say something like Game Pass, if it takes forever to even download the game? Yes, load times are important, but with games getting larger & larger I think download times are more important for the mainstream audience because we're so use to instant streaming of content. Fix the download times first & then we can talk about load times next.

Tommy McClain

They ought to just have Cloud Streaming for playing a game instantly while it downloads. Maybe.

 

[JPT]

They ought to just have Cloud Streaming for playing a game instantly while it downloads. Maybe.

Because streaming does not take a hit when you download in the bacground with everything in the network tagged with best effort priority.

 

[AlNom]

Because streaming does not take a hit when you download in the bacground with everything in the network tagged with best effort priority.

Play instantly, download when you're not playing.

Or if you want to bugger off, bugger off.

 

[zed]

A couple of seconds of load time vs 3 TFs of raw compute power, I hope it does not come down to this. Of course that's assuming if Github is the bullet.

You don’t get it, yes faster load times is nice and all, but it’s not the biggest reason why super fast storage can be beneficial
It opens up the possibility to have way more detailed worlds, streaming the data on the fly.
Now ask yourself Would you prefer highly detailed levels with larger areas or medium detailed levels and smaller areas, but running at 30% higher resolution?

 

[N2O]

You don’t get it, yes faster load times is nice and all, but it’s not the biggest reason why super fast storage can be beneficial
It opens up the possibility to have way more detailed worlds, streaming the data on the fly.
Now ask yourself Would you prefer highly detailed levels with larger areas or medium detailed levels and smaller areas, but running at 30% higher resolution?

Pretty sure both console can do the former.

 

[mpg1]

Would the faster CPU and the SSD give a bit of boost to downloads? Or is it 100% network?

 

[BRiT]

Now ask yourself Would you prefer highly detailed levels with larger areas or medium detailed levels and smaller areas, but running at 30% higher resolution?

What does 7500 MBps bring that 3700 MBps doesnt bring when both are improving from 20 MBps? What can a 375x bring that 185x improvement doesnt?

 

[AlNom]

1.4x resolution (2x XY data)?

 

[BRiT]

1.4x resolution (2x XY data)?

Remember, you still need to fit all that data on a physical disc to sell your game so you're still limited to under 50 GB or 100 GB if you go two discs or move onto UHD media. So increasing details by 375x might be too much, and even a 185x increase might be pushing it too.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Remember, you still need to fit all that data on a physical disc to sell your game so you're still limited to under 50 GB or 100 GB if you go two discs or move onto UHD media.

100Gb discs were confirmed for PS5 in Wired's October article. When streaming you can be loading and re-loading data over and over.

 

[BRiT]

100Gb discs were confirmed for PS5 in Wired's October article. When streaming you can be loading and re-loading data over and over.

That's great to hear, but at most a 2x increase for all resources available. And many games already hitting the 100GB size because of digital downloads on current-gen.

I just dont see see the speed of streaming on next-gen being a game breaker when currently some of the best looking current-gen games are designed around 20 MBps. There is so much new potential available that if we only see a 100x improvement on next-gen games, I will still be grateful and amazed at the results.

 

[AlNom]

Remember, you still need to fit all that data on a physical disc to sell your game so you're still limited to under 50 GB or 100 GB if you go two discs or move onto UHD media. So increasing details by 375x might be too much, and even a 185x increase might be pushing it too.

I suppose I'm a little less clear about more advanced virtual texture paths or if lol-huge shadow/lightmap atlases will be a thing.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

That's great to hear, but at most a 2x increase for all resources available. And many games already hitting the 100GB size because of digital downloads on current-gen.

Part of the reason for this, as stated in the same Wired interview, is the amount of duplicate data that games come packaged with and some some assets are duplicated hundreds of times. Again, same interview, Mark Cerny states PS5 will have more fine-grained control over data meaning you only need download what you want/need and what you do need will be smaller. The storage and I/O solution is designed to facilitate this.

I just dont see see the speed of streaming on next-gen being a game breaker when currently some of the best looking current-gen games are designed around 20 MBps. There is so much new potential available that if we only see a 100x improvement on next-gen games, I will still be grateful and amazed at the results.

Spider-Man looks great even on base PS4 but it does lack in variety and this is a consequence of each tile being limited in size. Why should each tile of New York be limited to 20mb worth of variety? Shifty was highlighting the limits of variety over in the What to expect from next-gen graphics [XBSX, PS5] thread. How much designer and artist time do you save by removing these limits, or at least kicking them so far into the stratosphere they are meaningless?

Instead of fussing about picking and bundling assets into no more than 20mb packages of data, just have the artists put what they like from the entire asset library anywhere they like and leave the filesystem to sort out the details of reading it. That's how I read it.

 

[BRiT]

Right, forgot about data deduplication, so maybe we'll be seeing an overall 4x increase in resources assuming an extremely aggressive shrinkage. Maybe some improvements can come from compression improvements over the LZW44 that offered 4x shrinkage at fast enough decompression performance.

Every little bit of improvement helps and adds up.

 

[AlphaWolf]

That content creation won't be free. I'd keep expectations low.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

That content creation won't be free. I'd keep expectations low.

Not having to audit, review and manage what goes in every asset pack will save time. This probably won't impact third party games though as presumably dev still still need to do this for other versions of their games. But maybe GTA VI on PS5 will have fewer duplicate cars and pedestrians than other versions.

 

[Remij]

Ultimately, we will just have to wait and see which of the machine is more balanced.

Surely you would think Sony would have a good reason for pushing their storage bandwidth and RAM quantity to whatever they end up going with. If saving money on the GPU side and putting it towards the SSD and Memory config can provide experiences that they couldn't do otherwise, then it could be the right call.

I'm just wondering how tangible of a difference 5GB/s is over say, 3GBs? I guess in general my mind struggles to come up with game scenarios where what is done on one couldn't be done on the other. Obviously that's true for 9TF vs 12TF as well but I would think getting those "performance wins" would count for something early on in the generation.

 

[MrFox]

Just like with PC they won't get the peak bandwidth specs with real world access patterns. We might see for example 2GB/s on the 3700MB/s drive (xbsx using phison) and 3.5GB/s on the 6500MB/s drive (sony using the latest samsung controller).

I do expect a much much bigger technical challenge getting this data decrypted/decompressed/formatted correctly in memory at that speed, but if it's fast enough maybe it could allow fetching data just in time between frames. If you only need to keep in memory what's in front instead of a full circular area, it increases dramatically the effective memory available.

 

[fehu]

Level Up!
What's better? More ram and slower ssd, or less ram and faster ssd?
Just some random numbers: 16GB and 7GB/s vs. 24GB and 3,5GB/s.

 

[Rangers]

Ultimately, Sony will charge what they think as idiot day-one adopters will pay. And they'd be stupid not too.

Yes, remember that Xbox One, KInect, weakling, 499 and all, basically sold all they could build its first holiday. It was only January when the bottom fell out, and they quickly did a price cut.

Methinks MS may remember this in releasing a possible higher end console first. They know the first 2 million are going to sell even at $500-$600. There's a way to take advantage of tha early adopter tax.