Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]
- Thread starter BRiT
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Not sure that is fair. Sony isn’t barred by such things and they continue to arrive to the same conclusions at the same time.
That’s one way to look at it. The other angle would be if not for Microsoft we wouldn’t have this cooperation between all vendors and DS wouldn’t existed. DS could have been implemented years ago by whom? I don’t see PC gaming flourish on Linux or Mac
The major changes that enable DirectStorage are in the Windows I/O stack so Microsoft presumably could have made strides here a long time ago. Certainly back when PCIe SSDs became a thing and maybe even earlier than that.
Our understanding of technologies changes as the understanding of game technologies change. They know the future is streaming so they have to accommodate for that now. Previously with HDDs being so slow, you couldn’t count on them to perform what is being asked of them today.
Hind sight is 20/20. I can go back 10 years ago on this forum when SSDs were definitely mainstream, where was everyone clamouring for direct storage then ?
It could have been implemented by Microsoft themselves? Is it a coincidence that it only gained traction when the Series X entered the scene? SSDs and nvme drives had been available for years and Microsoft didn't care in the slightest. 2020, their new consoles using fast storage shows up, and suddenly, fast storage becomes important on PC too.
They've been porting their games to PC since 2016.
Not sure where you were but the first thing SSDs did for gaming was making load times A LOT faster without any intervention from Microsoft. Following the introduction of nvme drives, people were clamoring for software technologies capable of taking advantage of them. You had those drives 6x the speed of a standard SSD but for what?
Because they are direct competitors and the cycles of their consoles match almost perfectly. A 500GB SATA SSD was still considerably more expensive than an equivalent HDD in 2014 so Sony went with the cheaper option. Do remember that this was following the PS3, a machine that lost them over $100 per unit upon release and took ages to turn a profit (assuming it even did). Sony wouldn't repeat the mistake of selling a $600 console again. If the PS4 was priced at $600, I have no doubt it would have sported an SSD along with the software support to take advantage of it.
Microsoft have no such excuse. PC doesn't see major upgrades every 5-7 years. Nvme's were there. They just didn't care because it wasn't in their consoles.
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Right. But no one is stoping producers and other vendors to implement something similar in Linux or macOS right? And yet here we are. I understand that msft is one to blame for late adoption but if it wasn’t for series consoles probably we would never got it? Who knows. At the same time DS arrived with new generation of consoles before then all games had to accommodate for slow storage.
And they're arriving now. They needed to ensure that NVME was part of a hardware baseline that everyone was going to use before they did this. Why rush in front if NVME wasn't going to become the universal standard going forward?
I'm not sure I understand the anger here:
a) PS5 users leveraging a bad data point to point out PC's weaknesses?
b) PC users leveraging a bad data point to point out DX12's weaknesses?
c) PC users leveraging a bad data point to point out MS' lack of initiative to have Direct Storage out earlier?
d) PC users leveraging a a bad data point to point out MS' lack of initiative around Direct ML to support AI based super resolution and other items?
The only thing I see here, consistently, is that everyone is upset that a bad data point is bad. The arguments aren't bad, but they're based off a bad data point. Rushed and poorly ported games perform bad, I don't think there is much else that needs to be said about the topic. Brute force saves the day, it's neither efficient or representative of what a properly ported title can achieve. There's a lot of things happening together and developers still need to take their time to change their engines accordingly especially during a time that we are coming off COVID, people are still not back in the office like they used to be.
The technologies are coming, they are arriving. Developers are working, but a lot of these games releasing in 2023 are largely games that could have been in development since 2019, from before when consoles where even out. And shipping a title is going to be more important than leveraging all this new and sometimes proprietary technology, because at the end of the day that's how they get paid. This is still the first generation of games as far as I'm concerned, and this first generation of games are all largely last gen games bumped up. These new features won't be seeing the day of light until gen 2 and gen 3 and the beginning of the next generation.
As soon as consoles adopted PC technology, the business decisions around technology changed. People look at technology at driving business decisions, but sometimes the reverse can happen. Now you suddenly have a cross generation, that didn't really exist all that much back then. Now because of cross generation, and cross play, and cross platform, they make more money by targeting larger populations, and new technology titles are very good at alienating the larger population. What largely used to be a PC problem has now spread to console, and those are business decisions, not technology ones.
What's easy; Hard cuts: Only the latest hardware has the latest features --> means lowest profits for developers, forget about it
What's hard: New technology that can backport to older hardware -> means more profits for developers because the larger population can be targeted, but means it takes longer to get out there.
MS choosing the latter.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
And what people continue to fail to understand is that DirectStorage is only one part of what is needed and not even the biggest part.
The biggest part is for developers to code their data loading algorithms with fast storage in mind. Part of the push from MS for DirectStorage is educating developers that they have to code specifically for SSD/DirectStorage otherwise they'll see virtually no gains. Basically DirectStorage will help in that it offers developers guidance on how to get started coding for Fast Storage, the underpinnings (driver, API, etc.) just help streamline it to an extent.
With absolutely no change in the storage subsystem in Star Citizen they redid their entire storage subsystem in game and saw an immediate massive improvement in load and streaming times for the game. Basically achieving most of the speed benefits associated with games making explicit use of the SSD in the new consoles. This was back around 2017/2018? I can't remember exactly when it was. Now it's at the point where performance on HDD is catastrophically bad during gameplay (not just loading) compared to having it installed on an SSD due to the amount of data being streamed in.
Even on the new consoles without explicitly coding for the SSDs, you'll see relatively minor gains. Similar to PC going from HDD to SSD in most games but at least better than swapping to an SSD in the PS4.
I'd say roughly speaking that coding for Fast Storage will get you about 75-85% of the way there while changes to how DirectStorage interacts with the Windows Subsystem gets you the rest of the way.
So basically, at any time a developer wanted to, they could have coded their game to have faster loading and streaming times, but that requires effort and rethinking what had been considered a very basic and unglamourous part of game developement. Easier to just continue using the same code for game storage subsystems.
Regards,
SB
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Well that’s precisely the point right? Given Microsoft’s near total dominance of PC gaming apis and operating systems they were in a unique position to push the industry in this direction long ago. I don’t buy the excuse that they needed to wait and see if SSDs and NVMe took off first.
Most developers are just going to follow where the major apis lead them.
Was there ever a point when this was in doubt? NVME drives didn't exactly arrive yesterday. NVME drivers were overtaking SSDs in the enterprise market as far back as 2018. The moment NVME drives were introduced, we all knew this was where the industry was headed, both in the consumer and enterprise spaces.
You seriously believe that Microsoft were waiting for a higher rate of adoption of NVME drives when all of a sudden, their consoles dropped and the timeline coincidentally matched with the baseline they needed to focus on DirectStorage? Come on, man. They pushed their Velocity Architecture for the Xbox (and PC to a lesser extent) and one of the pillars was DirectStorage.
Microsoft could have done that ages ago. They simply did not care because it wasn't in their consoles. PC just happens to benefit from this as a byproduct.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
The point is that there was no need for MS to even point them in the right direction because you can realize almost all of the gains without changing any APIs, at all.
Star Citizen and at least one other game I know of but can't think of at the moment basically showed the dramatic speed increases you can attain by coding specifically for fast storage versus just reusing the same storage algorithms in their games as had been used for years. Again, this was with absolutely Zero changes to the Windows IO subsystem and with no help from MS.
Regards,
SB
Which is awesome but completely sidesteps the point. Your post is basically: developers didn't bother. Does that somehow excuse Microsoft?
Yeah I’m not following either. Microsoft is definitely not off the hook here when they literally control the I/O stack and graphics API. With great power comes great responsibility.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
And if developers continue to not bother is it suddenly still Microsoft's fault?
Keep in mind that with consoles being the primary development platform for most AAA developers, that that is far more important WRT how developers code their games than almost anything MS does in Windows.
Had DirectStorage been provided back in 2013, developers would likely have continued to not bother.
Developers are only starting to bother now because of the consoles. And even on consoles alot of AAA developers still aren't bothering. So is it now also Sony's fault in addition to Microsoft's that many developers still don't bother?
Regards,
SB
I never said that. These are two separate issues.
Well, they didn't provide it, did they? So that point is moot. It's basically a vicious cycle. We don't do it because developers don't bother. Developers don't bother because we don't do it.
I see Sony first-party developers doing that on the PS5 at least. Is there a single Microsoft game that takes advantage of Direct Storage? And I'd say it's only becoming a topic on PC now because of DirectStorage's rather recent introduction. If it had been available since 2013 as you proposed, who knows how far we'd be now? Would it still be a nice tech that no one uses because "consoles don't have it so who cares?" or would it have made immense strides in all those years?Developers are only starting to bother now because of the consoles. And even on consoles alot of AAA developers still aren't bothering. So is it now also Sony's fault in addition to Microsoft's that many developers still don't bother?
Regards,
SB
Define ages ago. Why does it matter that consoles are defining the baseline features for games ?
Who is supposed to define that arbitrary border that says this is what all hardware needs to support for developers to target against ?
If consoles define this and they want to ensure that PCs do as well why would this not be the case? Why the upset? How could PCs define the baseline features? It’s a moving window with millions of hardware configurations.
Microsoft claims to be a steward of PC gaming. They haven’t said in public that the PC is a second class platform for the company. On this basis alone it is fair to hold them to task on dropping the ball on the PC side of things.
If they came out and admitted they don’t care about PCs as a leading game platform that would be a different story.
If they came out and admitted they don’t care about PCs as a leading game platform that would be a different story.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I don't know if you're just deliberately missing the point. The new DirectStorage APIs are not necessary to take advantage of the greater speeds that SSDs bring. This has been proven by actual games.
In other words, short of Microsoft writing the storage algorithms for the developers and that somehow being their responsibility to write code for games, how in any way, shape or form is it Microsoft's fault that developers haven't coded their games to take advatage of fast storage.
Keep in mind, that even with DirectStorage, developers will still have to do what they could have done at any point in the past 10-20 years and that is ... code specifically for fast storage. Nothing that Microsoft does or does not do changes that.
Regards,
SB
I feel like MS cares more about PC at this point than they do Xbox console. lol
What goes around eventually comes around. DirectXbox has come full circle haha.
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