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

What have Sony promised? I've only seen the Wired interview and they promised nothing at all.

 

They have shown a working example of what their custom storage implementation can do. It doesn't read like a "promise" of anything universally used in all games, just a taste of the new tech in ps5.

It's worth looking at PC loading benchmarks with a thousand dollars of nvme in raid (the loading time still sucks). What sony is doing here requires the devs to design their storage layer accordingly, I expect it won't be a magical switch to turn on.

 

I don't think they will expect people willing to always install games from USB before they can use them. IMHO only a transparent cache solution makes real sense to me here.

 

Exactly, they promised nothing specific. They've demonstrated a specific example of where their technology could speed up a traversal through a densely-populated open world city like in Spider-Man, or virtually (0.8 second) remove loading times between moderately-close points which share a lot of common assets, both textures and geometry. That's not a huge amount to go on. Could this have achieved this with 32gb to 48Gb solid-state storage if the core data was organised differently and stored on an SSD? Probably.

I'm waiting to see what they actually deliver.

 

Their entire pitch has been about no load times and immediate access to different parts of the game from the dashboard. The retrofit of Spider-Man was never supposed to be the apex of what is possible. It was a "look how big a change you get just by dramatically increasing drive speed with no other changes" example.

 

No.

And what he said is clearly supported by PC benchmarks with super expensive nvme arrays. Just putting faster drive doesn't accomplish much.

At the very least, they need hardware codecs that will decompress at that speed without bogging down the CPU, so all data need to be using that codec. Then maybe a custom efficient file system, nvme with direct IO, and maybe they can DMA into memory without needing the engine to reshuffle the data in a different way. If this is not the full install data but instead a smaller cache area with uncompressed data and memory mappable, then it definitely needs a full API for this. It remains to be seen what their exact technique is, but there is both software and hardware involved which we haven't seen on PC yet (well, not in PC gaming).

 

So you think they did all that for Spider-Man? Doubtful. More likely the results in those demos are just from a faster drive. That's actually my point, games built from the ground up to take advantages of everything the new platform offers to enhance storage access will be far more dramatic.

 

ITT: People emotionally attached to mechanical hard drives not willing to let go.
j/k

2.5" are most probably over in the console space. Like all mid to high end modern notebooks of any size, consoles will transition M.2 because SATA is too slow and unnecessarily large (in actual volume, not capacity).

1TB of a fast PCIe 4x 4.0 SSD might be plenty.
Developers have already come on record saying next gen games don't need to replicate portions of the same data over and over to keep all files in a loading session perfectly sequenced, to avoid searches like they had to with mechanical drives.
Expect games to actually become smaller.

 

And yet on PC, where SSDs are more common, games are not becoming smaller. You know I think they'll do with the space they saved from duplication? Cram in more stuff they otherwise couldn't, higher quality/less compressed everything.

In the second Wired article from last month, they talk about more 'fine grained' control of data including allowing people to only install single player or multiplayer assets. Or both then delete single player when the campaign is over. Sony would't even have invested in this if they didn't envisage space being a problem months/years out from launch.

If your console has plenty or space, or storage is is easily expanded, you would have spent your engineering effort on something else.

 

Because some PC users still use HDDs, namely a lot of lower-end gaming laptops with a small SSD for OS and HDD for storage, so there's little incentive to do anything other than copy/paste the assets from one platform to the other.

Regardless, some of the most recent games are indeed becoming smaller while asking for humongous amounts of RAM. Jedi Fallen Order is such an example.

What else are they going to cram in? Larger textures are getting small ROIs already. Shadowmaps may be getting replaced with raytraced shadows in a bunch of scenes.
We should be getting denser geometry and more shaders, but AFAIK those aren't very demanding in storage.

Or they consider space being a problem right now, and not having to occupy 50GB of storage in a single player content that you effectively don't use if you're only playing multiplayer is always a good thing.

 

Content diversity. Rather than the same few assets repeated constantly because that's all that can fit into RAM, having more RAM means more variety of assets. If assets aren't going to improve in complexity and variety, there's no for more RAM than XB1X which is enough for a 4K framebuffer.

 

Many PC games have long included a variety of different quality assets for higher settings. Do PC version of games on console really include the duped-up asset packs of the console version?

Sure there are small games, there are larger one too. RDR2 on CP is 150Gb, Modern Warfare is 175Gb. The trend for game installs does not feel like it's getting smaller and it is a plant surprise when a game comes in at less than 50Gb.

It is a problem now, but with PS5 boosting the supported Blu-ray data format to 100Gb, I'm not convinced we're going to be seeing many smaller games compared to PS4.

 

At this point I would much of that have to come procedurally, we must be getting close to the limit of art budgets.?

 

Heck, we're still seeing games on PC with large installs have options to increase the install size even more with higher resolution asset packs. Gears 5, for instance.

The next gen consoles will have the resources to utilize those larger asset packs. I wonder if we'll see similar optional higher quality asset packs on consoles next generation as we see on some games on PC?

Regards,
SB

 

SC is said to load 11 times faster, removes stuttering during gameplay and enables fast travel. Only one example but nvme has potentiomal if devs optimize.

 

I'vr brrn trying to make sense out of these apparently contradictory statements:

a "Navi" GPU based on next-generation Radeon™ RDNA gaming architecture including hardware-accelerated raytracing.

a next generation GPU based on the Radeon RDNA gaming architecture including hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

I think

RDNA2 = RDNA1 + hardware RT.

But how can "navi" GPU be a next generation GPU? Maybe Navi GPUs with RDNA2 were so different from regular "navi" that AMD decided to consider them next genration GPU instead.

 

How are they contradictory? One mentions a brand name 'navi' while the other doesn't. Besides that, they are identical in content. A next-gen GPU using 'RDNA' (a broad family, like GCN) with hardware-accelerated RT.

It may have been a misrepresentation in the PR language. It may be that Navi is an internal codename that's going to be applied to future RDNA devices. It may have just been called 'navi' in the absence of any other name. Ultimately, it's immaterial. Both statements say exactly the same as I outline above.

 

Mine is gone