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

[Tkumpathenurple]

Does it still seem most likely that this solution will be soldered to the board, or is there scope for something removable/replaceable?

If removable - even if custom - there would be a revenue stream for Sony to replace the memory cards from the PS1/PS2 era. If soldered, that's presumably cheaper to manufacture.

I've read that NVME PCIE 4 can reach 8GB/s. Are there innate bandwidth benefits to soldered flash, or could NVME PCIE 4 suffice - albeit using a custom controller and proprietary SSD's?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Does it still seem most likely that this solution will be soldered to the board, or is there scope for something removable/replaceable?

A bus holding the solid-state unit accessible to the user through a panel, much like PS3 and PS4 HDDs, would allow Sony to sell larger capacity solid state capacity. I'm not convinced that the solid state storage is the only storage in PS5. I think it more likely that it'll support a traditional 2.5" HDD-install so it's capacity and needing to upgrade it, may not be a market Sony can tap into.

I think it more likely that the solid state storage will only be around 128Gb, maybe less, and be where the critical parts of the install reside for the currently played game.

 

[Globalisateur]

A bus holding the solid-state unit accessible to the user through a panel, much like PS3 and PS4 HDDs, would allow Sony to sell larger capacity solid state capacity. I'm not convinced that the solid state storage is the only storage in PS5. I think it more likely that it'll support a traditional 2.5" HDD-install so it's capacity and needing to upgrade it, may not be a market Sony can tap into.

I think it more likely that the solid state storage will only be around 128Gb, maybe less, and be where the critical parts of the install reside for the currently played game.

No. Some games are already bigger than that. Any new game would need to be installed at each start from 20MB/s speed storage ? hello PS3 gaming in 2020. So devs will have either 5GB/s or 20MB/s storage depending of the size of their game ? And they'll have to fully take care of managing the 2 very different storage speed, Wow. PS5 super hard to develop for ? Hello PS3 development in 2020.

Nope. That would be incredibly unbalanced. A standard 1TB PC SSD (like probably what will be in Scarlett) would be much better than this hybrid solution. If their solution is as fast as they claim, the can't rely anymore on super slow HDD speeds, in any case.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

No. Some games are already bigger than that. Any new game would need to be installed at each start from 20MB/s speed storage ? hello PS3 gaming in 2020. So devs will have either 5GB/s or 20MB/s storage depending of the size of their game ? And they'll have to fully take care of managing the 2 very different storage speed, Wow. PS5 super hard to develop for ? Hello PS3 development in 2020.

20MB/s read speeds? Only if PS5 uses HDDs from ten years ago. There is a lot of data that doesn't benefit from taking up expensive solid state storage. Do all of the audio scores need to be in SSD? How about FMV? There is a lot of data that is only loaded in very predictable circumstances and which can be loaded JIT from slower storage.

Nope. That would be incredibly unbalanced. A standard 1TB PC SSD (like probably what will be in Scarlett) would be much better than this hybrid solution. If their solution is as fast as they claim, the can't rely anymore on super slow HDD speeds, in any case.

If by 'better' you mean improving/simplifying performance at any cost, I agree. Otherwise, no. Even a terabyte SSD is going to hold what? 7 or 8 of these new games that won't fit into 128Gb solid state storage? I don't see this as a great selling point, this is a step backwards from where we are now as you can hook massive HDDs to current consoles. Not everybody has gigabits of fibre to re-download games on whim when you fancy playing them.

Solid state storage is cheaper than it ever (about ten cents per gigabyte) but it's still way more than a HDD and that doesn't negate that for a few generations the relative cost of the storage solution in consoles, relative to the cost of all of the other components, has been relatively small. Even just 1Tb would balloon this disproportionately. I can't see Sony wanting to go with more than a $€£399 price point but I reckon they would swallow a six-month launch price of $€£450 on the basis that early adopters have more money than sense. If you want 1-2Tb of SSD, something else is going to suffer. Will that be the CPU, GPU or RAM, sir?

 

[MrFox]

A bus holding the solid-state unit accessible to the user through a panel, much like PS3 and PS4 HDDs, would allow Sony to sell larger capacity solid state capacity. I'm not convinced that the solid state storage is the only storage in PS5. I think it more likely that it'll support a traditional 2.5" HDD-install so it's capacity and needing to upgrade it, may not be a market Sony can tap into.

I think it more likely that the solid state storage will only be around 128Gb, maybe less, and be where the critical parts of the install reside for the currently played game.

Yeah I agree with that. From dramxchange, the cost of flash is not dropping fast enough to allow a standard 2TB ssd/nvme on a reasonably priced console. And 1TB will be much too small unless it's expandable without breaking the bank, and still a crazy hit on the BOM. So we keep going back to an ssd+hdd hybrid.

Copying tens or a hundred GB from an HDD to the internal flash would take a while though, even with good algorithms, there's always corner cases like restarting a saved game in an open world. There's a lot of initial data to resync. The PS4 games that installed in 60 secs from a bluray were only single player first time play. This doesn't work when continuing a game in the middle, after you deleted the game. Maybe it could work if the game is segmented with much more granularity.

What I'm hoping for is the flash being a replaceable 128GB or 256GB nvme, plus a sata drive. Giving a lot of opportunities to power users.

But I wouldn't be surprised if they soldered it for cost reasons, to skip the controller completely. The custom south bridge could be doing all the work.

 

[turkey]

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Yeah I agree with that. From dramxchange, the cost of flash is not dropping fast enough to allow a standard 2TB ssd/nvme on a reasonably priced console. And 1TB will be much too small unless it's expandable without breaking the bank, and still a crazy hit on the BOM. So we keep going back to an ssd+hdd hybrid.

Copying tens or a hundred GB from an HDD to the internal flash would take a while though, even with good algorithms, there's always corner cases like restarting a saved game in an open world. There's a lot of initial data to resync. The PS4 games that installed in 60 secs from a bluray were only single player first time play. This doesn't work when continuing a game in the middle, after you deleted the game. Maybe it could work if the game is segmented with much more granularity.

What I'm hoping for is the flash being a replaceable 128GB or 256GB nvme, plus a sata drive. Giving a lot of opportunities to power users.

But I wouldn't be surprised if they soldered it for cost reasons, to skip the controller completely. The custom south bridge could be doing all the work.

I still think we will have a setup similar to the OG Xbox, a partition of fast ram will be semi permanent game state, this will allow "near instant loading". This will rotate the oldest game out and store 10 games say.
Then the slow storage will fill the fast storage with the meat of the game, you can have menus, dev animation to fill the gaps and probably algorithms to load what it thinks you will need, ie current single player level of multiplayer lobby and character assets.

I would think with good contiguous assets on the disk they should load in pretty fast given the game will already be running from fast storage and the slow HDD will be contention free .

Current drives have to serve the OS, game streams, apps and all sorts of other tasks as well as run the game, in PS4 example it's both installing to the HDD whilst reading it to play.

Also from the talk on how the Xbox has a security processor that does all IO to keep all data outside the CPU encrypted, I suspect all data will also be compressed and there will be hardware decompression to try and reduce the size which will make the most use of the HDD space at hand.
I am sure the PS4s arm processor does something similar and they will lean on this more.

 

[Globalisateur]

@DSoup upgrade-able HDD automatically means possible 20MB/s speed. Asks Insomniac their enjoyable experience with a console allowing upgradeable HDDs.

How many games do you think most people have ? Not everybody buy every games that got released every week or so ! ;-) 7 or 8 big games or 15-20 small games are enough for most people. Hey they still sell 500GB consoles now.

Anyways I think Sony will have 2TB of nand ram (they can afford it as they buy cheaper parts separately) which will resolve capacity problems for 95% of players.

And besides, with the SSD many games will actually be smaller than now (or not bigger at least) because currently the data is duplicated to allow for faster loadings. Also Cerny talked about partials installs that will improve things. I think the storage predicament could even be better on PS5 than now with 500GB HDD.

 

[BRiT]

I have 459+ games with another 180 not installed yet from Game Pass. You mean everyone else doesnt have the same numbers?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Copying tens or a hundred GB from an HDD to the internal flash would take a while though, even with good algorithms, there's always corner cases like restarting a saved game in an open world. There's a lot of initial data to resync. The PS4 games that installed in 60 secs from a bluray were only single player first time play. This doesn't work when continuing a game in the middle, after you deleted the game. Maybe it could work if the game is segmented with much more granularity.

I think people are way over-estimating what Sony will deliver with the solid state storage really means for gaming. I genuinely hope to be pleasantly surprised but they chose to show a demo of Spider-Man, a opeworld game we know can take 15-20 seconds loads between fast travel and loads. They didn't show a game loading in 2 seconds, they showed moving through an open world super fast. That's all I'm taking from it because that's all they showed.

What I'm hoping for is the flash being a replaceable 128GB or 256GB nvme, plus a sata drive. Giving a lot of opportunities to power users.

I'd happily shell out more for a launch pro versions with better scope for improved performance. Loading times are what keep me buying games on PC.

@DSoup upgrade-able HDD automatically means possible 20MB/s speed. Asks Insomniac their enjoyable experience with a console allowing upgradeable HDDs.

Can you give me a hint, some googling revealed nothing. I frequently use a an external drive caddy to read/write a variety of 2.5" and 3.5" HDDs and none of the 5400rpm 2,5" SATA drives I have are anywhere near as slow as 20MB/s.

How many games do you think most people have ? Not everybody buy every games that got released every week or so ! ;-) 7 or 8 big games or 15-20 small games are enough for most people. Hey they still sell 500GB consoles now.

The last attach rate for PS4 I saw was 9.6, which means some people have less and some people have more. You can easily expand PS4's storage currently, if your only option is super fast solid state storage then you're in shit-out-of-luck town for PS5. Like a said, this feels like a big step backwards.

And besides, with the SSD many games will actually be smaller than now (or not bigger at least) because currently the data is duplicated to allow for faster loadings.

It was you that claimed PS5 games wouldn't fit into 128Gb of solid state, now you're saying they'll be smaller! I don't disagree with the storage being used better but I've yet to experience any progression in gaming where games became smaller over time so I'll believe that one when I see it!

 

[Globalisateur]

It was you that claimed PS5 games wouldn't fit into 128Gb of solid state, now you're saying they'll be smaller! I don't disagree with the storage being used better but I've yet to experience any progression in gaming where games became smaller over time so I'll believe that one when I see it!

Where do think Sony will store their (probably bloated with useless features) OS ?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Where do think Sony will store their (probably bloated with useless features) OS ?

If PS5 OS is around PS4-sized, the SSD. A few hundred meg won't make much of a dent in 128Gb of solid state.

Can you elaborate on the Insomniac thing please? I'm very interested.

 

[BRiT]

Let me try to dig up the Insomniac streaming thing. We referred to it a bit before when I was putting absolute numbers around their "Fast Spiderman Demo".

 

[BRiT]

And here it is... https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2066103/

There are no need to speculate about "reasonable ranges" when we know the actual ranges.
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps4/Harddrive
PS4 HDD has random read speed of ~40MB/s [sequential is not that useful for games, since they load lots of small files], and devs even have to take in account that users can put crappier drive into the console.

Insomniac talked about Spidey storage streaming limitations at this years GDC [that 40MB/s limit really pushed them to re-configure a lot of their tech]. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026496/-Marvel-s-Spider-Man


I presume that many devs arround the world cheered when Cerny confirmed SSD. Even if it was not "top of the line" SSD, it would still introduce big change.

 

[Globalisateur]

My bad it's 40MB/s, somehow I remembered 20MB/s.

EDIT: No I did read 20MB/s which was reported in forums. I haven't watched the stream.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

And here it is... https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2066103/

Fantastic, this my evening viewing. A quick audio scan hits around the 18 minute mark where they express concerns of people putting in crappy slow HDDs running around half the speed of the PS4's default drive, hence their budget of 20MB/s.

This is not an unsolvable problem. Firstly we don't know if PS5 will have a HDD (although I anticipate it will), nor if it would be upgradable (I anticipate it will). The solution is simple, have PS5 validate/test new HDDs and reject ones that are slower than the default drive. Job done.

 

[Xbat]

I feel 256 GB would be the minimum fast storage they would launch with.

 

[Globalisateur]

Fantastic, this my evening viewing. A quick audio scan hits around the 18 minute mark where they express concerns of people putting in crappy slow HDDs running around half the speed of the PS4's default drive, hence their budget of 20MB/s.

This is not an unsolvable problem. Firstly we don't know if PS5 will have a HDD (although I anticipate it will), nor if it would be upgradable (I anticipate it will). The solution is simple, have PS5 validate/test new HDDs and reject ones that are slower than the default drive. Job done.

Nice one. I can already see their new slogan: "PS5, for the HDD testers"

And it rhymes with players.

 

[BRiT]

That's what Microsoft successfully used during the X360 days for external USB devices.

 

[bgroovy]

I just don't see a hybrid approach. The limitations are a total anathema to the promises Sony has made about the SSD and its impact. External/expansion storage can easily be supported as a way to archive games so they can be reinstalled to the SSD as needed far more quickly than relying on downloading or reinstalling from Bluray. Copying a game install will let you use basically use the max speed of whatever external drive you are using. And by allowing games to be divided up and installed in section like Sony has described it will be even faster to get the mode you want back on the SSD. The inconvenience of copying back the multiplayer mode only for a game taking a few minutes is much preferable to losing the effect of being able to assume high speed SSD access will have on game/engine design.

 

[Globalisateur]

20, 40 or 50 MB/s, whatever. It's basically the same thing. It doesn't matter. We are talking about more than one order of magnitude faster with custom SSDs. From 10 to maybe 20 times faster. HDDs are a thing of the past. those relics of the past are over and don't belong to 21st century console gaming anymore.

EDIT: ...except for archival purpose of course