Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2022] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]
- Thread starter BRiT
- Start date
Game loads are quite often not just loading statically pre-computed files from disks. I think the PS5 hype has made people for get that with the hyper focus on the SSD. A load can mean there is world set up, proc gen seeds, AI routines etc. and more that need initialisation and computation on GPU and CPU. The SSD on PS5 is probably loading here exactly as it should using the low level IO (in fact it is based upon some obvious things other outlets have not even talked about), but other aspects of the PS5 are NOT 100x faster than PS4 or PS4pro: CPU, GPU, Memory speed.
Cynicalking
Regular
Some people need to understand that loading a game doesn't just mean reading data off a disk.
The CPU is at least 3 to 4 times faster. There is another cross gen open world where this is much better maybe help by the job they did during the developement of Ratchet and Clank, Spiderman Remastered and Miles Morales.
This loading doesn't look normal nor with CPU power or SSD loading.
Working on a data set or world density that might be XX amount larger. It is not an parity load here at same settings. PS5 is loading a different and denser world.
As DF has said, this game could be a different beast. Its not just read from the SSD on the fly, things need to be processed by the CPU and GPU aswell.
I agree it doesnt look all that great, but it has been said that, keep expectations in check. Their clearly doing alot more here then the usual tech demo, its a large open-world with alot of simulations going on. If they could add RT at the current fidelity, they probably would have. GT7 doesnt have it either (ingame).
Its one of the first open-world games with alot of trees, nature etc going on, for the PS5. Spiderman isnt really doing the same things, and it shows.
Indeed, when looking at new hardware, its going to be very impressive when looking at older-gen games and software. New hardware teamed to new software will dminish that ofcourse.
But the CPU and GPU are not. Everything else needs to hang on too, if these things need to be processed that your loading in.Blame for storage media to have been stuck on the same capabilities since 2001 (OG Xbox with its 5400rpm drive). SSD's came to consoles quite late.
Unless SSD's start rendering whats on display, your very correct.
You have no idea what FW is doing compared to Spiderman and Rift Apart. Clearly, FW is doing more in whats going on-screen. And yeah, the CPU is XX times faster then the PS4's, but its also going to run games that require XX times more processing power.
At the end PS5 needs to load 12 GB of data they can't go higher because this is the RAM available to game against 5.5 GB for PS4 Pro. PS5 need only to load 2.1 more data than a PS4 Pro. The map is cut by zone and I suppose the zone size is the same on PS5 and PS4 Pro with more density on PS5 side it means there is absolutely no reason the much powerful CPU and much faster storage load and treat the data only two times faster than the PS4 Pro out of not enough time to optimize the PS5 version.
When I thought the loading times were a tad disappointing I hadn’t seen the PS4 and Pro times yet. 12s vs 64s is a big difference. This is an impressive open world. So right now we can guess there is at least some CPU bottleneck in the world generation etc. But we’ll see.
The game does look pretty impressive regardless. The quality of the PS4 version shouldn’t distract too much from how good the PS5 version is too.
I think this is ok. I saw faster loading on other part of the game for Ps5 maybe this is just an outlier and much slower loading on Ps4 side.
Didn't the first Horizon use the GPU to place grass in rubble in the world?
We can't be sure of the why yet. We can only be sure of the is. There is a reason it loads only 2x faster.
Things don't always scale exactly as you would expect. "4x faster" doesn't mean that everything is 4x faster. If instructions that only perform twice as fast are required, maybe it's only twice as fast. We don't know how many threads they are using during loading to perform whatever tasks that need to be done, and the variable clocks on PS5 mean we don't know how fast those threads are going to execute. Perhaps the Jaguar's clock disadvantage isn't that far behind in this case, perhaps it's single threaded (twice the per thread performance and twice the threads is 4x, after all, but only 2x in single threaded operations). And are they still performing tasks on the GPU like they did in the first Horizon? Is there any latency between the CPU and GPU tasks that could help to account for the longer than expected loading on PS5? What if the PS5 is loading 2x as much stuff that needs to be processed before the game starts. Even if you are 4x as fast, you have 2x as much work, so it will still take you half the time. What if they are storing data in a PS5 favorable format, transferring and decompressing almost instantly but they still need a few seconds for ruble and grass placement, calculating things for the lighting an AO, etc. It's still fully leveraging the PS5's IO because the loading part of the loading is basically instant, it's the rest of the stuff that takes time.
Thinkso, FW probably does aswell.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
And out of that do you actually know how much time is spent loading assets off the drive? 10 seconds for Pro and 1 second for PS5? 5 seconds for Pro and .1 seconds for PS5? Hell pick some numbers. Whatever you pick likely isn't the time spent just like the numbers I posted aren't likely the actual numbers.
Depending on when a load is happening there can be a LOT of non-I/O tasks being done by the system concurrently with I/O. Those tasks can take multiple seconds regardless of how quickly you load in data off the drive.
If the game is an open world game that tracks persistent state change across the world (like say Skyrim) then that non-I/O workload is going to be extremely high compared to the I/O workload of a linear game. I doubt HFW does anything that extensive, but it is still a large detailed world. And that world, outside of assets needs to be instantiated (created) in memory. The more large and detailed a world is, the more work the CPU and GPU will need to do before a game is loaded.
Regards,
SB
I've actually always wondered about game loading and just what exactly it's doing at specific times vs others. For example, on PC you can use RTSS and view the frametimes of course, and most games will show the frametimes go erratic and stall, and then continue through at fast framerates, then settle down.
During these loading screens, there will often be an animated logo spinning or some other kind of visual flourish, or a loading bar to show progression. And these animations almost always stutter, or hitch, as the frametimes do.. of course. If the main/render thread/s are stalled waiting for some process to complete, obviously. But what processes actually makes it stall? Shader compilation? CPU asset decompression? Moving decompressed texture/geometry data to VRAM? All 3 probably and more probably.. However, I always wondered why developers "tied" that spinning logo, or animated flourish, with the main thread. I don't know why, but it always bothered me lol.. Like.. why can't they just have a logo spinning nicely, and do the loading in the background without having it tied to the loading so that it doesn't stutter.
That always annoyed me haha. And I've noticed that in consoles it will happen sometimes, but not too often. On PC it happens far more often and it can be distracting. I'm wondering if it's a result of the memory setup of PC having split pools maybe?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Not all developers do this. Some developers just implement an animated "status" thingy to let people know something is happening and that's all the effort they put into it. Some developers go to the trouble of ensuring that the animation is smooth and not tied to whatever else the engine is doing while loading/instantiating, etc. stuff. Some developers even go so far as to have interactive "loading screens" (Warframe, Gears 5 and God of War 2018 are some examples) where you the player is still moving through the environment of the "loading screen" or loading section.
Regards,
SB
Memory latency is also a factor. It’s one of the most important aspects of cpu performance. PS5 has more cache, but I don’t know how much improved latency to ram is.
Similar threads
- Locked