Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

[Arwin]

That is not entirely true, it will be very easy to stream textures to the GPU from SSD and that should be extremely easy for game engines to adapt. More likely it will take longer for games to actually start using that many high res textures on multiplatform titles but even there it shouldn’t take too long I think, with a lot of high-res texture pack experience in the past paving the way.

 

[chris1515]

That is not entirely true, it will be very easy to stream textures to the GPU from SSD and that should be extremely easy for game engines to adapt. More likely it will take longer for games to actually start using that many high res textures on multiplatform titles but even there it shouldn’t take too long I think, with a lot of high-res texture pack experience in the past paving the way.

This is not so easy.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1308235775058653185

https://twitter.com/x/status/1308237053717409793

https://twitter.com/x/status/1308237380730593280

They make fun about this. Sony first party seems to have done the job but other will have to do it too.

Fabin Giesen is from RAD tool games(oodle kraken and oodle textute) and lenore is a game dev. And this is not only the I/O stack but sometimes it is slow down by other inefficiency on CPU side, single threaded process or game thread sheningan.

 

[RDGoodla]

Many thinks 448GB/s bandwidth is not enough for the faster front end in PS5 GPU. But it seems there is no problem especially compared to Xbox sx. Why 448 GB/s is sufficient?

 

[PSman1700]

Could you point me to the RT benchmarks for the dGPU's as be nice to compare myself. As I don't remember seeing them.
Probably just dismissed them out of hand, at the time to be fair.

Although fast, wide, by definition your saying pretty much maxing everything?

I ment in normal rendering

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Just an upscaled last gen game, certainly quickly ported for launch. Wait for real next gen games to really have an idea. Remember AC4 last gen vs current gen, was not much of a difference, not even double the fps like we have here. And then we got unity.

Ubisoft made a decent effort to support a bunch of extra staff in Black Flag. It most definitely wasn't an upres-job-done deal.

When Direct Storage PC will arrive you will be ok. They don't push the SSD to its limit but being able to stream 3 to 4GB of compresses data wen needed in Demon's souls is great..

I think you need to temper expectations here. We know how DirectStorage works and it's not going to benefit any games out there now or releasing soon. Like getting the most out of nextgen games on console, it requires a whole different thought process on how you manage and store your game assets in storage and how you manage asset check-in in-game. Spider-Man loads in about six seconds (4s to menu, 2s to in-game) which is money-f*** ridiculous. Valhalla on PS5 loads in around 40 seconds. That's almost an order of magnitude in difference but requires a completely different asset and I/O paradigm.

The soft barrier on PC is the need for Steam and other game stores to massively enhance the way they handle installs and updates because you definitely do not want to use this new storage approach on 99% of all gaming PCs out there now, whether they're running an SSD or HDD, because it'll result in slower loading. PC games will at least for an interim period, which could last years, need two distinct builds for games and you'll need to patch them differently as well.

I'm not expecting my 3080 to magically make any of my PC games load faster with DirectStorage because it can't. It needs new games to support it and realistically, I'll probably have a 5080 before games are routinely packaging assets for DirectStorage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Arwin]

Many thinks 448GB/s bandwidth is not enough for the faster front end in PS5 GPU. But it seems there is no problem especially compared to Xbox sx. Why 448 GB/s is sufficient?

My theory would be that thanks to how the texture can stream from file system to GPU cache with a dedicated chip, the high SSD speeds allowing you to load data later rather than having to prefetch it and keep it in memory, less CPU and RAM is needed. And that also automatically means you need less bandwidth.

@chris1515, if you watch the interview between Bluepoint and DF, a lot of how this works is described in some detail. True, there is other stuff happening too, so it won’t happen overnight, but it nevertheless is easy and will happen I think if only even because it saves developers and artists a lot of time too.

 

[chris1515]

Ubisoft made a decent effort to support a bunch of extra staff in Black Flag. It most definitely wasn't an upres-job-done deal.

I think you need to temper expectations here. We know how DirectStorage works and it's not going to benefit any games out there now or releasing soon. Like getting the most out of nextgen games on console, it requires a whole different thought process on how you manage and store your game assets in storage and how you manage asset check-in in-game. Spider-Man loads in about six seconds (4s to menu, 2s to in-game) which is money-f*** ridiculous. Valhalla on PS5 loads in around 40 seconds. That's almost an order of magnitude in difference but requires a completely different asset and I/O paradigm.

The soft barrier on PC is the need for Steam and other game stores to massively enhance the way they handle installs and updates because you definitely do not want to use this new storage approach on 99% of all gaming PCs out there now, whether they're running an SSD or HDD, because it'll result in slower loading. PC games will at least for an interim period, which could last years, need two distinct builds for games and you'll need to patch them differently as well.

I'm not expecting my 3080 to magically make any of my PC games load faster with DirectStorage because it can't. It needs new games to support it and realistically, I'll probably have a 5080 before games are routinely packaging assets for DirectStorage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I speak at in theory maybe some third party games will exploit Directstorage in 2022 but more realistically it will be 2023/2024. I think Demon's soul's is is a taste of a part of true next generation games with crazy geometry level nearly 1 polygon per pixel, great texture 1 texel per pixel and a fully dynamic GI system. After maybe we will add some RT reflection and/or shadow coming in the mix or not(UE5).

My theory would be that thanks to how the texture can stream from file system to GPU cache with a dedicated chip, the high SSD speeds allowing you to load data later rather than having to prefetch it and keep it in memory, less CPU and RAM is needed. And that also automatically means you need less bandwidth.

@chris1515, if you watch the interview between Bluepoint and DF, a lot of how this works is described in some detail. True, there is other stuff happening too, so it won’t happen overnight, but it nevertheless is easy and will happen I think if only even because it saves developers and artists a lot of time too.

But it is not automatic, game devs need to rework the game engine, I/O stack and how they package the data to be efficient. First party devs have done it. Third party devs need to do it. At least it can help loading much faster than aC Valhalla for example.

They will do it, I expect 2021 to continue the cross gen trend out of a few games like next Battlefield.

 

[liams]

I speak at in theory maybe some third party games will exploit Directstorage in 2022 but more realistically it will be 2023/2024. I think Demon's soul's is is a taste of a part of true next generation games with crazy geometry level nearly 1 polygon per pixel, great texture 1 texel per pixel and a fully dynamic GI system. After maybe we will add some RT reflection and/or shadow coming in the mix or not(UE5).

I would imagine Microsoft first party will support it, its the same API apparently between console and pc so shouldn't be too bad to transfer over

 

[pjbliverpool]

The soft barrier on PC is the need for Steam and other game stores to massively enhance the way they handle installs and updates because you definitely do not want to use this new storage approach on 99% of all gaming PCs out there now, whether they're running an SSD or HDD, because it'll result in slower loading. PC games will at least for an interim period, which could last years, need two distinct builds for games and you'll need to patch them differently as well.

Hopefully this will be invisible to the user, i.e. the game installer/store will detect if the PC is Direct Storage capable and deliver the correct package. I'm still not clear what the requirements for entry for Direct Storage are. Microsoft seem pretty clear you'll need an NVMe drive but Nvidia are claiming that RTX-IO will work on any SSD. It may be that the two aren't co-dependent.

I almost stumped up for PCIe4 SSD recently in light of Valhalla apparently needing one. But given it works fine from an HDD I'll hold off a bit longer, hopefully until the 7GB/s models come down in price a bit and we see how DirectStorage works.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I speak at in theory maybe some third party games will exploit Directstorage in 2022 but more realistically it will be 2023/2024.

I absolutely do expect some games to support DirectStorage in 2022, maybe even next year. But I know it's going to be a while before you'll be able to go to Steam and game download new games and expect them to load in seconds.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Hopefully this will be invisible to the user, i.e. the game installer/store will detect if the PC is Direct Storage capable and deliver the correct package. I'm still not clear what the requirements for entry for Direct Storage are. Microsoft seem pretty clear you'll need an NVMe drive but Nvidia are claiming that RTX-IO will work on any SSD. It may be that the two aren't co-dependent.

I think there will be some hardware configurations where it'll be abundantly obvious DirectStorage will be either beneficial or detrimental, but I think there will be a huge middle ground where it'll be difficult to calculate - a bit like to trying to find optimal graphics settings.

Some of things to need to include in that calculation are burst/sustained SSD/NVME speeds, PCI speeds, GPU performance, GDDR bandwidth, CPU performance and system RAM bandwidth. And even then, that's just the base hardware, you can't factor in exactly how the game is loading data.

 

[Rootax]

Many thinks 448GB/s bandwidth is not enough for the faster front end in PS5 GPU. But it seems there is no problem especially compared to Xbox sx. Why 448 GB/s is sufficient?

Most games are cross gen right now. It's way too soon to deduce anything imo.

 

[snc]

Many thinks 448GB/s bandwidth is not enough for the faster front end in PS5 GPU. But it seems there is no problem especially compared to Xbox sx. Why 448 GB/s is sufficient?

some developers (and also Mark Cerny) hints good cache system in ps5

 

[Arwin]

I think you are too pessimistic. Unreal Engine for instance probably already supports iron PS5, Sackboy is an UE4 title. I think it will go much quicker thanks to those relatively few engines and the huge benefit.

 

[BRiT]

Unless something has changed, UE5 still isn't slated for full release until Late 2021: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...es-release-using-unreal-engine-5-spawn.61742/

 

[chris1515]

Unless something has changed, UE5 still isn't slated for full release until Late 2021: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...es-release-using-unreal-engine-5-spawn.61742/

I suppose first party of MS and Sony or very big third party have access to UE 5. MS has many teams using Unreal Engine but Sony Bend and the new Sony San Diego studio rumored to reboot Uncharted (many ex ND) are using Unreal Engine too.

 

[chris1515]

I expect the next Battlefield(only next gen) or the first Embark studios game to do good usage of the SSD after it will depends of the game.

 

[function]

It's a bit of a relief to see the XSX only under preforming as much as it is. Considering they weren't showing games running on it even as late as this summer, and the development environment changed completely last year and still isn't fully featured, it could have been worse.

The wonky, crashing frame rates on some games are a sure sign that software isn't a good fit for it yet.

 

[function]

Many thinks 448GB/s bandwidth is not enough for the faster front end in PS5 GPU. But it seems there is no problem especially compared to Xbox sx. Why 448 GB/s is sufficient?

Because the bottleneck is elsewhere. Series X isn't utilising all its bandwidth at the moment (or all its ALU).

 

[Rootax]

And don't forget that some of xbx ram is slower than ps5's