Current Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

[zupallinere]

XSX is safe. They're going to beat PS5 in every single 3P game, there's no doubt in my mind on this. MS's strategy extends from X1X: they know well in advance what their performance numbers will be like with live code; they know it likely for RT code as well. When they set out a target to hit 4K with X1X, they did a good job of hitting that target. The target for XSX is 4K@60 now.

MS sure seems to be on a fine glidepath here. Lots of power and a lot of cash to pull gamers into their multisystem ecosystem. Sony on the other hand has to keep it's base and keep folks wanting a Playstation experience rather than a more PC/Xbox one. The Tempest engine is one such thing which will be a pretty effective and relatively cheap differentiator if it takes off (may even sell a few more PSVRs that can make use of it).
The SSD does have a lot to it (many prioritized controllers) and if we can see a game or 3 that creates something not seen in gaming as of yet It could really keep folks in the PS family at least for a while.
A game based on a system of interconnected worlds a button press away that end up forcing the player to manage their "loadout" to take into account a whole new environments with a new set of hostiles essentially fully realized and ready to pounce.
Actually my first thought was a game based on Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber where the magically endowed characters can shift through various realities.

Members of the royal family of Amber, after walking a Pattern that is central to Amber, can travel freely through the Shadows. While traveling (shifting) between Shadows[alternate worlds], one can alter reality or create a new reality by choosing which elements of which Shadows to keep or add, and which to subtract.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Amber

 

[iroboto]

If there is a game that pulls the full 9-22Gb/s amount. And it’s obvious how no other game has been like it before; yea that’s going to do it.

i think CPU should be a bigger factor for different gameplay experiences. But I could be wrong. The reality is for a lot of narrative titles; you still need some down time for players to tune in. That was where we did loading for this gen. For next gen??? I dunno. Perhaps there are different ways to tell the story.

But the SSD is definitely the narrative king right now. especially as more time goes on and we are finished processing the difference in compute power.

 

[goonergaz]

If there is a game that pulls the full 9-22Gb/s amount. And it’s obvious how no other game has been like it before; yea that’s going to do it.

i think CPU should be a bigger factor for different gameplay experiences. But I could be wrong. The reality is for a lot of narrative titles; you still need some down time for players to tune in. That was where we did loading for this gen. For next gen??? I dunno. Perhaps there are different ways to tell the story.

But the SSD is definitely the narrative king right now. especially as more time goes on and we are finished processing the difference in compute power.

problem was design/story telling was dictated by hardware limitations, with PS5 devs can design the game and tell the story how they want (well, with much less limitations).

 

[iroboto]

problem was design/story telling was dictated by hardware limitations, with PS5 devs can design the game and tell the story how they want (well, with much less limitations).

Definitely more creative options. Like being able to play through sequences in the middle of dialog etc.

Sort of like how in movies they skip to a flashback etc.

There are definitely more options available because of how quickly one could load a level.

but they should be able to do significant stuff with Xbox as well.

 

[zupallinere]

If there is a game that pulls the full 9-22Gb/s amoun

Don't forget 5.5Gb/s uncompressed !!! Some corner case in I/O management might end up being it's own genre of gaming who knows

 

[manux]

This is completely stupid example, but imagine madden game. The streaming solution would allow for crazy thing like zooming into players eye where all the assets in ram are just related to rendering that eye. And add ray tracing to it and you get insane reflections to that eye.

Artificial, but imagining being able to have exactly the right assets in ram in dynamic fashion really does open up possibilities.

 

[PSman1700]

Which is honestly, the narrative is ridiculous because the internet only sees the 2x factor and sort of just ignores the fact that XSX is running a very high speed SSD as well.

SSD isn't as safe as what MS did, so I'm sort of drawn to it.

Abit early to call on that also, as some sources say the XSX is close to the PS5 SSD speed in the end. They may be lying or telling the truth, time will tell. Il not make any definite conclusions yet
Even if the PS5 has a faster SSD, XSX is going to have substantional leap over current gen 5400rpm drives that will make a world of a difference. Any speed improvements from there are not going to be as noticeable as from current gen to next gen.

A question, you can have a very fast SSD like in these consoles, but where does the limit go? I mean, the storage can be that fast, but in the end, its the rest of the system (GPU/CPU/RAM etc) that must process and render it, there must be a balance somewhere?

 

[chris1515]

Abit early to call on that also, as some sources say the XSX is close to the PS5 SSD speed in the end. They may be lying or telling the truth, time will tell. Il not make any definite conclusions yet
Even if the PS5 has a faster SSD, XSX is going to have substantional leap over current gen 5400rpm drives that will make a world of a difference. Any speed improvements from there are not going to be as noticeable as from current gen to next gen.

A question, you can have a very fast SSD like in these consoles, but where does the limit go? I mean, the storage can be that fast, but in the end, its the rest of the system (GPU/CPU/RAM etc) that must process and render it, there must be a balance somewhere?

Yes but I think the two consoles will be able to have tons of high-quality textures, tons of polygons, animation and audio sound. But what is interesting comes after. On games many things come from the baked process of the data we have for example not enough power to do full hybrid raytracing, I heard some devs telling we will continue to have for some AAA game baked static light indirect illumination but dynamic light will use RT. We can imagine for example create different baked simulation physic for explosion and use some particle or baked it inside texture and have some pretty realistic smoke explosion on screen. They will have access to tons of data, the interesting things of baked data is to do things impossible in realtime. We will probably have an added complexity of this. We will have crazy destruction too. All geocache or alembic cache can be used more freely...

For example, they said to use geocache sparsely in Gears 5 because it takes tons of memory... Many baked data are use in AAA games.

 

[see colon]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1241454613993152512

Maybe the PS5 OS RAM reservation is lower than the Xbox reservation. This guy which worked on Ps5 before leaving Sony praise the NX Gamer video.

That NXG video makes it seam like the entire OS is moved to storage while a game is being played, but wouldn't that disable features like sharing, overlay, and anything else OS related? If the entire OS is in storage and you've allocated the entirety of RAM to run a game, when you call the OS back by hitting the share button or whatever it doesn't matter that you can move the OS back into memory in half a second because there isn't free memory to do so. You would have to move a portion of allocated ram to storage to free it up before you can fill it with the OS. At that point, assuming the half second claim is true, and read and write speeds are identical (has Sony released a write speed?) the half second is a whole second, and you risk things breaking when you go back to the game unless you spend time swapping back OS and game data. Wouldn't it just make sense to reserve a bit more RAM for the OS and rely on the storage to stream game data in as needed. Game data is more variable, and the SSD is fast enough to fill RAM when it's needed while data that isn't needed can simply be discarded instead of being moved back to storage.

Also, his comments that clock speeds wouldn't fluctuate that much, maybe 50mhz according to him, I would take with a grain of salt. I think the point he was making, that if a game doesn't need the power, high clocks aren't needed, is fine. But if it was only a 50mhz difference I don't think Sony would have made suck a big deal about the clock rate being variable.

 

[Pressure]

Abit early to call on that also, as some sources say the XSX is close to the PS5 SSD speed in the end. They may be lying or telling the truth, time will tell. Il not make any definite conclusions yet
Even if the PS5 has a faster SSD, XSX is going to have substantional leap over current gen 5400rpm drives that will make a world of a difference. Any speed improvements from there are not going to be as noticeable as from current gen to next gen.

A question, you can have a very fast SSD like in these consoles, but where does the limit go? I mean, the storage can be that fast, but in the end, its the rest of the system (GPU/CPU/RAM etc) that must process and render it, there must be a balance somewhere?

It feels like you (and others) continually downgrade the SSD aspect to only be about its peak sequential read and write speed and not its underlying functionality. One of them is fully custom with a great I/O SoC to enable great features. The other is just a normal PCIe v4 NVMe controller as far as I can tell.

 

[Scott_Arm]

That NXG video makes it seam like the entire OS is moved to storage while a game is being played, but wouldn't that disable features like sharing, overlay, and anything else OS related? If the entire OS is in storage and you've allocated the entirety of RAM to run a game, when you call the OS back by hitting the share button or whatever it doesn't matter that you can move the OS back into memory in half a second because there isn't free memory to do so. You would have to move a portion of allocated ram to storage to free it up before you can fill it with the OS. At that point, assuming the half second claim is true, and read and write speeds are identical (has Sony released a write speed?) the half second is a whole second, and you risk things breaking when you go back to the game unless you spend time swapping back OS and game data. Wouldn't it just make sense to reserve a bit more RAM for the OS and rely on the storage to stream game data in as needed. Game data is more variable, and the SSD is fast enough to fill RAM when it's needed while data that isn't needed can simply be discarded instead of being moved back to storage.

Also, his comments that clock speeds wouldn't fluctuate that much, maybe 50mhz according to him, I would take with a grain of salt. I think the point he was making, that if a game doesn't need the power, high clocks aren't needed, is fine. But if it was only a 50mhz difference I don't think Sony would have made suck a big deal about the clock rate being variable.

Yah, the share button will probably be the main offender. If people are recording and sharing 4k HDR game clips, it's going to need some RAM to work with. You really wouldn't want to be accessing the ssd with non-stop writing. You probably only want to write to SSD when someone chooses to save something with the share button. I do agree that there's a lot of stuff that can be unloaded while games are running, and only put back into RAM when people try to access the full home screen.

 

[PSman1700]

Yes but I think the two consoles will be able to have tons of high-quality textures, tons of polygons, animation and audio sound. But what is interesting comes after. On games many things come from the baked process of the data we have for example not enough power to do full hybrid raytracing, I heard some devs telling we will continue to have for some AAA game baked static light indirect illumination but dynamic light will use RT. We can imagine for example create different baked simulation physic for explosion and use some particle or baked it inside texture and have some pretty realistic smoke explosion on screen. They will have access to tons of data, the interesting things of baked data is to do things impossible in realtime. We will probably have an added complexity of this. We will have crazy destruction too. All geocache or alembic cache can be used more freely...

For example, they said to use geocache sparsely in Gears 5 because it takes tons of memory... Many baked data are use in AAA games.

Sounds intresting indeed, curious how next gen games will look like. I think star citizen detail should be possible (seen the sandstorm particle effects on DF video? amazing), id techs new engine does alot of detail already, devs have a easier and faster time then ever creating those worlds.

It feels like you (and others) continually downgrade the SSD aspect to only be about its peak sequential read and write speed and not its underlying functionality. One of them is fully custom with a great I/O SoC to enable great features. The other is just a normal PCIe v4 NVMe controller as far as I can tell.

I do not think personally that the next generation of consoles will be worlds apart regarding the SSD and it's underlying IO system. Both systems are build around with the SSD in mind, and both are using PCIE4 NVME tech.

 

[Xbat]

But the SSD is definitely the narrative king right now. especially as more time goes on and we are finished processing the difference in compute power

Speaking for myself, which should be implied but I m saying it anyways . I know what 15% difference in flops gives and that doesn't excite me. The potential of what the faster storage brings is much more exciting to me so I can see why some devs are excited by it and not so much about an extra 2 TFlops.

 

[zupallinere]

so much about an extra 2 TFlops.

I remember when 1 TFlop was what CRAY supercomputers were angling for at the end of the 20th Century now it is seemingly disregarded as merely noise ... kids these days

 

[see colon]

It feels like you (and others) continually downgrade the SSD aspect to only be about its peak sequential read and write speed and not its underlying functionality. One of them is fully custom with a great I/O SoC to enable great features. The other is just a normal PCIe v4 NVMe controller as far as I can tell.

The real question is, will that extra speed matter, and when. We saw a handful of games at the very end of the PS3/360 generation that really leveraged bluray, but by then I'm not sure many people really cared that the video files on FFXIII looked worse on 360 or that they had a separate disc on 360 for the install on GTAV. If we get 6 years into PS5 vs Series X and only then are we exceeding the limits of Mircrosoft's storage solution, I think that means they made the right call.

I'm optimistic, though. And I hope this drives the powers that be to create faster storage options for PC.

 

[chris1515]

Speaking for myself, which should be implied but I m saying it anyways . I know what 15% difference in flops gives and that doesn't excite me. The potential of what the faster storage brings is much more exciting to me so I can see why some devs are excited by it and not so much about an extra 2 TFlops.

There is the SSD and better audio on PS5 side and more than the technical side, the game I want to play on it.

 

[RagnarokFF]

It feels like you (and others) continually downgrade the SSD aspect to only be about its peak sequential read and write speed and not its underlying functionality. One of them is fully custom with a great I/O SoC to enable great features. The other is just a normal PCIe v4 NVMe controller as far as I can tell.

This is not the case.

 

[chris1515]

This is not the case.

Yes the Sony SSD is faster and has a faster general lossless algorithm but the Xbox one has a better texture compression format and some of the things done on Sony to have minimum impact on CPU are there too but they miss a killer feature the coherency engine and the GPU scrubbers.

The PS5 SSD is better but the Xbox SSD is good too.

 

[scently]

It will be interesting to discover what the size of the L3 cache of the CPU in both systems. The DF article states there are 76mb of SRAM on the XSX apu. I wonder if 16mb of that is reserved for the CPU. That would really help reduce CPU bandwidth pressure of the main memory. I know Flute had 8mb, I wonder if that carries over to the final PS5 system or if they increased it to 16mb. Given the bandwidth figures on both machines, they could both do with 16mb of L3 cache or more.

 

[MrFox]

This is not the case.

It's using a phison 5019-E19T, a ram-less pcie4.0 controller with only 4 nand channels. The bandwidth is limited by the speed of nand chips, and the access will have contention of the limited number of channels. (unless the linkedin leak was false)

Sony made their own custom controller with 12 channels and 6 priority queues. Nothing like this exists off the shelf.

The software and SoC decompression modules are a different matter, but the controllers are that way and it dictates the maximum bandwidth and concurrency.