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

[chris1515]

If we could have a dream storage so fast in latency and GB/S that you can load the next frame assets into RAM, we would only a few hundred MB of RAM. In RAM you need the data needed for the current frame*, we have more than that because the storage can't keep up with RAM speed and we need to preload data in RAM but the faster you can load data in RAM the less RAM size you need.

*I consider data coming from previous frames like for TAA inside the RAM or everything procedurally generated.

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

You were told why those numbers were not valid and you ignored it. Your link doesn't support the 71% increase. It supports rising prices, which is widely acknowledged. However, the contracts may already be in place, leaving it irrelevant.

No, they are valid. He is calculating GDDR6 price based in DDR4 price and unknown clocks, I am calculating it based on actual difference between GDDR6 and GDDR5 prices, on top of difference between prices that were reported by Digitimes back in 2017 for GDDR5 (remember, in 2017 GDDR5 was old tech, much older then GDDR6 is now).

Also, we are using prices for chips that are 14Gbps, and these by all accounts wont end up in PS5, but perhaps down clocked 18Gbps, which will be significantly more expensive.

 

[PSman1700]

Having 32 GB of GDDR6 is not useful

32gb + ssd is sure even better. However you put it, you can't replace dram yet, maybe in the future we won't need gddr or dram anymore, just a disk drive.

Choose for example between 16 GB of HBM2 2.4 gbps three of four stacks and 32 GB of GDDR6 in next-gen consoles knowing the speed of SSD, I took the 16 GB of HBM2 because of the memory bandwidth.

Both consoles are going to be end up having gddr6, you can't choose.

 

[chris1515]

32gb + ssd is sure even better. However you put it, you can't replace dram yet, maybe in the future we won't need gddr or dram anymore, just a disk drive.



Both consoles are going to be end up having gddr6, you can't choose.

Better for what? Find me a use case? it will not help you have better assets on screen. I just say than more than take the stupid decision to have 32 GB of expensive GDDR6 I would prefer to have 16GB of HBM2 3 or 4 stacks and this is probably cheaper currently because of the price of HBM2 fall of a cliff. I don't talk about what we will have in next-gen consoles because it will be 16 GB of GDDR6. But if we could choose I think with a fast SSD 16 GB of fast HBM2 is better than 32 GB of GDDR6.

https://semiengineering.com/whats-next-for-high-bandwidth-memory/

Three years ago, HBM cost about $120/GB. Today, the unit prices for HBM2 (16GB with 4 stack DRAM dies) is roughly $120, according to TechInsights. That doesn’t even include the cost of the package.

It continues to be an expensive memory but I am sure 16 GB of HBM2 is now competitive with 32 GB of GDDR6 and with much more memory bandwidth.

 

[PSman1700]

You most likely will get GDDR6 and you will be happy about it Besides that, no-one can tell me you can have too much ram, just too little Example 32GB ddr4/5 is going to be faster then a portion of an SSD. I'm not saying it is going to be hampering, but we arent far enough to replace dram. The SSD is more of a compromise for the high prices of dram.

 

[chris1515]

You most likely will get GDDR6 and you will be happy about it Besides that, no-one can tell me you can have too much ram, just too little Example 32GB ddr4/5 is going to be faster then a portion of an SSD. I'm not saying it is going to be hampering, but we arent far enough to replace dram. The SSD is more of a compromise for the high prices of dram.

The SSD is some storage, this is mandatory. You need it to store data when the computer or consoles is not power on. This is as simple as that. You can have too much RAM when it is not needed inside a cost sensible console knowing it will not improve the quality of the asset. You seem to not understand something simple here SSD will not replace RAM but there is never have only the data for one frame not with an HDD or an SSD latency and speed are too slow. You need to have enough data for the 4k resolution here having a texel per pixel is possible at 4k. it means more RAM will not improve texture quality for example.

The most important in the 16 GB of GDDR6 in the next-gen console will be the memory bandwidth.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You most likely will get GDDR6 and you will be happy about it

Chris already said that. Howveer, he's challenging your view that more RAM is the best option, and given a choice between 32 GB fast RAM, or 16 GBs super-fast RAM, he thinks super-fast RAM is the better options

Besides that, no-one can tell me you can have too much ram, just too little

16,000 GBs of RAM isn't too much?

Example 32GB ddr4/5 is going to be faster then a portion of an SSD. I'm not saying it is going to be hampering, but we arent far enough to replace dram. The SSD is more of a compromise for the high prices of dram.

The moment the storage is fast enough to serve the RAM population needs, more RAM is no use. Given a certain GPU and CPU, there's only so much data you can process, which'll require that much RAM. If you can't populate that fast enough from storage, you want additional RAM to cache data from loading. If you can populate that fast enough from storage, extra RAM doesn't nothing, whereupon more bandwidth for the processors is all the more important.

That goes the other way round too, once you have enough bandwidth, more doesn't help; but we're far further from that situation than then storage bottleneck. With RTRT, there's no knowing what the realistic upper bounds of bandwidth and low-latency on storage is. I wouldn't be at all surprised if RAM progress starts to look more at speed than capacity.

 

[PSman1700]

The SSD is some storage, this is mandatory. You need it to store data when the computer or consoles is not power on. This is as simple as that. You can have too much RAM when it is not needed inside a cost sensible console knowing it will not improve the quality of the asset. You seem to not understand something simple here SSD will not replace RAM but there is never have only the data for one frame not with an HDD or an SSD latency and speed are too slow. You need to have enough data for the 4k resolution here having a texel per pixel is possible at 4k. it means more RAM will not improve texture quality for example.

The most important in the 16 GB of GDDR6 in the next-gen console will be the memory bandwidth.

Another reason midgen consoles are a thing of the past, as we will never exceed 16gb of ram.

Chris already said that. Howveer, he's challenging your view that more RAM is the best option, and given a choice between 32 GB fast RAM, or 16 GBs super-fast RAM, he thinks super-fast RAM is the better options

It probably is better with faster memory yes, but arent both consoles supposed to get gddr6 ram? In that sense, a PS5 Pro might just have 4 or 8GB very fast ram.

16,000 GBs of RAM isn't too much?

If the PS5 can have 32gb hbm3, instead of 16gb hbm3, the first option would be more desirable?

The moment the storage is fast enough to serve the RAM population needs, more RAM is no use. Given a certain GPU and CPU, there's only so much data you can process, which'll require that much RAM. If you can't populate that fast enough from storage, you want additional RAM to cache data from loading. If you can populate that fast enough from storage, extra RAM doesn't nothing, whereupon more bandwidth for the processors is all the more important.

That goes the other way round too, once you have enough bandwidth, more doesn't help; but we're far further from that situation than then storage bottleneck. With RTRT, there's no knowing what the realistic upper bounds of bandwidth and low-latency on storage is. I wouldn't be at all surprised if RAM progress starts to look more at speed than capacity.

Ok, i understand the SSD's basically aren't fast enough yet, the storage solution (ssd) is still the weakest link in the whole process.

 

[disco_]

I know they will get it lower, because if they didnt, 16GB of GDDR6 (14Gbps) would be 186$. But I still dont think its right, you are looking at 71% increase of price for GB going from GDDR5 to GDDR6 (for 2000 pieces).

Obviously dealing with million units price will be going down, but not infinitely, and that price hike over over GDDR5 still says they will be paying more per million modules vs GDDR5.

Here is digitimes report from 2017 on prices of GDDR5.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3032-vega-56-cost-of-hbm2-and-necessity-to-use-it



So this would result in price of 78-102$ for 12GB (6.50$ and 8.50$ per module).

And GDDR6 price is higher per GB then it was for GDDR5 back in 2017, and you have 4-8GB more RAM. I dont see how price for RAM will be flat. In fact, nothing points in that direction.

Keep it in mind they wont be buying low clocked chips, lowest they will go is 14Gbps, and from what it looks - PS5 might go fot 16-18Gbps.

Those dumdums at sony could've just saved money by going with 16gb hbm2 and calling it a day.

 

[manux]

Ok, i understand the SSD's basically aren't fast enough yet, the storage solution (ssd) is still the weakest link in the whole process.

Fastest available ssd's are really, really fast but they go unused as no games are optimized to take real advantage. Some pci4 nvme ssd's have somewhere around 5-6GB/s read speeds. Pair that with good compression and the amount of raw data that can be read per second is really great. But getting that performance requires rethinking IO games use. Likely the console first party games do something that no game has done before as they can assume a fast ssd and not really care about the legacy drives present in old consoles/many pc's.

 

[PSman1700]

Fastest available ssd's are really, really fast but they go unused as no games are optimized to take real advantage. Some pci4 nvme ssd's have somewhere around 6GB/s read speeds. Pair that with good compression and the amount of raw data that can be read per second is really great. But getting that performance requires rethinking IO games use. Likely the console first party games do something that no game has done before as they can assume a fast ssd and not really care about the legacy drives present in old consoles/many pc's.

SC is making use of SSD though, basically unplayable without one. With the arrival of the new consoles we will indeed see games really taking use of SSD tech, instead of the old mechanical spinning drives, 5200rpm at that

 

[manux]

It's really cool how new console gens push the minimum bar up. It's kind of funny to think pc gamers as peasants until pc can catch up. I just can't wait what for example horizon zero dawn sequel will look when optimimized for ps5 or what next grand theft auto would look like if next gen console technology like fast ssd, ray tracing and 8 fast cpu cores is minimum bar. PC version anyway will take years to come after console version so gta next might be crazy enough to raise minimum bar.

 

[PSman1700]

It's really cool how new console gens push the minimum bar up. It's kind of funny to think pc gamers as peasants until pc can catch up. I just can't wait what for example horizon zero dawn sequel will look when optimimized for ps5 or what next grand theft auto would look like if next gen console technology like fast ssd and ray tracing is minimum bar. PC version anyway will take years to come after console version so gta next might be crazy enough to raise minimum bar.

PC already has caught up to PS5 and XSX for two years ago A pc version of GTA would release 6 months after the console versions, if it's released at a later date. GTAV released winter 2014, spring 2015 on pc. And yes, consoles have always been the ones that set the minimum spec each year, atleast PS and Xb.
Not all console gamers are upgrading though, most of those 200 million users will be stuck on their 2013 low end hardware for a while, just like most pc users won't be on 2080 level gpu's all at once.

 

[manux]

PC already has caught up to PS5 and XSX for two years ago A pc version of GTA would release 6 months after the console versions, if it's released at a later date. GTAV released winter 2014, spring 2015 on pc. And yes, consoles have always been the ones that set the minimum spec each year, atleast PS and Xb.
Not all console gamers are upgrading though, most of those 200 million users will be stuck on their 2013 low end hardware for a while, just like most pc users won't be on 2080 level gpu's all at once.

It originally game out 2013 for ps3/xbox. 2014 was the ps4 release and 2015 pc. It's probably comfortably 1-2 years after console release that pc version comes out. And it's not like gta next is going to come out any time soon so pc will have plenty of time to catch up if rockstar decides to make things like ray tracing/fast ssd mandatory

 

[Scott_Arm]

SSDs are fast relative to HDDs, but incredibly slow relative to RAM. RAM is very slow relative to cpu and gpu caches. SSDs are still by far the weakest link.

 

[manux]

I'm not so sure if fast nvme ssd+compression would be such a big bottle neck in reality. The super high quality asset anyway is needed only for small part of game data on per frame basis. Basically only for things that are very close and visible. That should be streamable. Consider cases like closeup in madden/nhl/fifa game. It would just be wasteful and stupid to have to keep all data in ram all the time. But it's a matter of having to rethink engine to support "extreme" streaming. We might go from something like 100MB/s to 6GB/s and hugely better random access time allowing much finer granularity access. Just thinking what fast nvme ssd can do to streaming is mindblowing.

A lot of the ram is consumed by data structures created in computational fashion not as something that gets loaded from disk.

 

[BRiT]

Despite storage being the weakest link, I'm not concerned with next-gen storage speeds seeing what's possible with a streaming engine designed around a mere 20 M/s in Spider-Man on PS4. Next-gen has several order of magnitude improvements for data accessibility. They also have real CPU cores, so nothing should be anemic.

Most likely the only thing I'll be able to complain about is the OS/Dashboard UI if they use the current-gen designs -- every current-gen console has horrible UIs. Not a single one of them has it figured out -- Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, Valve.

 

[anexanhume]

Despite storage being the weakest link, I'm not concerned with next-gen storage speeds seeing what's possible with a streaming engine designed around a mere 20 M/s in Spider-Man on PS4. Next-gen has several order of magnitude improvements for data accessibility. They also have real CPU cores, so nothing should be anemic.

Most likely the only thing I'll be able to complain about is the OS/Dashboard UI if they use the current-gen designs -- every current-gen console has horrible UIs. Not a single one of them has it figured out -- Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, Valve.

What’s an example of a good interface?

I like PS4 and Xbox 360’s last interface personally.

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

For me PS4 is really good. If they can make it snappy and smooth, dont ser what else you can do to make it better.

 

[BRiT]

What’s an example of a good interface?

I like PS4 and Xbox 360’s last interface personally.

That's part of the trouble, being able to clearly formulate what the perfect UI would be. They all seem to be counter-intuitive on use for the first week or so. It's not until you've spent enough time using them that you can get around. It's only because it becomes muscle memory that it doesn't seem horrible. However, try explaining or walking a new user through navigating the system to do what's needed. At that point you realize how unnatural it all is. They still have moments of "How do I do this?" / "Where did they put this at?"