Silent_Buddha
Legend
Mmmm, not enough drama. I think we need to use a 24 hz thermal camera for a more cinematic experience.
Regards,
SB
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]
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Mmmm, not enough drama. I think we need to use a 24 hz thermal camera for a more cinematic experience.
Regards,
SB
Mate sorry I dont think you actually understand what you're talking about
see my previous post
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2218911/
what the guy was claiming is in previous generations ( a la no SSD was needed) you could have all/99% of the next level already in memory, show some FX for a second, load the remaining 1% and set it up and viola, nearly no loading times like R&C, yes thats true if the memory permits but the thing is why theres nearly no loading times is
CAUSE ITS ALREADY FUCKIN LOADED INTO MEMORY
<- You have to understand this. Q/ Why do most games have level loading during gameplay? A/ Cause it can't fit all at once in the memory (unless its a simpler game). If a game could simply load all the levels/creatures/music whatever at once at the start of the game why have we not be doing it this way instead of making millions of players wasting untold millions of years (collectively) waiting on a loading screen in the middle of a game over the last few decades?
What R&C is doing (as shown by the video section where 5 or so levels are displayed one after the next) is its pulling it all from the SSD, its not already in the memory
Could you do something like R&C on a slower SSD? Sure maybe a little slower 2 secs vs 1 sec but you could not load that amount of stuff into memory last generation with the HDD that quickly, its physically impossible, then you're talking about 10s of seconds
Mate I'm sure Jon Burton agrees with 100% I've written
With a sophisticated texture/asset streaming system or virtual texturing, there should be memory, bandwith, and processing power to spare for 1:1 texel to pixel at 60fps.
We can all thread back to sebbbi's old posts on the matter and update the data to modern realities to check.
This is not a matter of lack of performance of the new-gen machines, but rather of an engine that does not have fine-grained enough management of resources to make the most effective use of the hardware now available.
what the guy was claiming is in previous generations ( a la no SSD was needed) you could have all/99% of the next level already in memory, show some FX for a second, load the remaining 1% and set it up and viola, nearly no loading times like R&C, yes thats true if the memory permits but the thing is why theres nearly no loading times is
CAUSE ITS ALREADY FUCKIN LOADED INTO MEMORY
I mean, I understand it well enough to have done that kind of thing myself in Unity and Unreal.
The point when the game begins to pull data in for the transitions isn't necessarily limited to the rift loading screen. These transitions are predetermined in the on-rails section, and transfers could begin up to several seconds beforehand if needed. This is a very old trick and I don't believe it's going to go away just because of the great drives in new gen consoles.
Does R&C do this? I don't know, but there are definitely areas where there would have been opportunity to do it.
Clearly R&C quality assets are beyond mechanical drives and I've repeatedly said that, but I'm happy to say it again. Assets of R&C's quality are well beyond last gen HDD streaming ability. From a gameplay perspective it's possible to achieve similar or the same results though, as Jon has explained.
As a separate issue, it's now clear that even R&C doesn't need the PS5's full SSD performance. Even with a significantly slower drive it seems to be performing basically the same. This is great news for everyone.
Could this also be evidence of the game employing some of the techniques that Jon was talking about? Maybe. If the game ever comes to PC we'll be able to find out a lot more about how much is accessed and when and where.
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Yup, there there lots of things you can do to slow down transitions and generally you'll what you have to hide loading. Whilst it would be less slick, you could extend the time in portals and re-arrange the geometry on the other side so that there is less complexity/diversity of assets needed to load before you transition.
R&C, as far back as PS2, had pretty minimal loading times hidden by the animation of Ratchet jumping into his ship, taking off, barrel-rolling a couple of times in space, then landing and jumping out of your ship. It feels less like a loading-time because there a clear visual continuity from where you came from to where you are going, but it's just hiding the load.
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First Insomniac themselve said they did not push the SSD. And here it is a linear game when game will be open world or with unpredictible portals SSD will be pushed further. If the rumor is true the next Spiderman will have doctor strange and multiverse. And here old tricks will not work.
https://www.axios.com/sony-ps5-insomniac-ratchet-clank-1ad70cf8-398f-4adb-aea2-716b03860ad9.html
Basically here they brute force loading, they don't care about prefetching data. They don't care about sub level and design around slower storage. The game can probably be done using tricks on a SATA SSD but it means more work for developers.
Here they load naively assets for the full level. Does they need the asset not at all but it means less work and constraint for level designer. If they are able to load in a little bit more than 1 second a level of R&C they can load a full level during a portal transition. They don't need to design games around tricks.
From the moment they are able to load from a save in 1.3 s it means they don't need prefetching data because portals are loading screen. This is time lost for designer. They can use the gain on other part of the game.
Road to PS5, mark Cerny speech isn't about SSD for the gamers but SSD for the game and level designer.
And I am sure Nixxes will one day been able to run this game on SATA SSD. They will use old tricks for PC version without NVME SSD. If someone can port The Witcher 3 to Switch I am sure they will be able to port R&C on PC with a SATA SSD.
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Indeed. Ratchet & Clank (along with Miles Morales) do an excellent job on PS5 and keeping load times crazy low and R&C's portal'ing clearly isn't pivotal to the gameplay, though it is visually very cool. But every generation we see new techniques and people hold up the early/new technical accomplishments forgetting that every generation, the techniques improve leaps and bounds with experience.
I still yearn for that persistent massive open world game, at least as detailed as GTA V, with almost no loading times and where changes to the environment persist because reads and writes are inconsequential. You're not limited to blowing up a building or bridge (or not) and the game loading in a slightly different version of the game. The game really can keep up with the mayhem you're creating and it's long-lasting.
You could most likely do your spiderman game on a sata ssd with 16 -32 gigs of system ram. The ssd only helps in loading but the ps5 and xbox series x will always be limited by the 16 gigs of total system. PC's don't have that limitation. So yea a sata ssd may only hit 550MB/s but does it matter if you can just load up the other data to sit into ram ?
Matters if you want to make use of direct storage.
Isn't it PCIe 3.0 NVMe minimum spec?
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I really hate this assumption that PC gamers all have massive amounts of RAM. I personally do not have any personal computer, including laptops, with less than 32Gb RAM but the Steam hardware surveys paints a very different picture. Games cannot rely on any particular resource being available and they need to support a wide variety of hardware in use.
Using the Steam Survey is a bit of a problem at times for these kinda things because it encompasses soooooo many PCs. So many of which are not at all even in the starting demographic of people interested in "high end" experiences. So when there is like 2% something on the Steam Survey, it can mean multiple millions of devices as a representation.
but why would you need too ?
ddr 4 1600 would offer 12.8GBs
DDR 4 3200 offers 25.6GB
DDR 5 ?? 50GB/s + ?
The ps5 ssd is 6GB/s
Just load your data into ram and go from there. You have more ram on the graphics card to hold a bunch of textures and then you can stream new stuff in from the ddr ram
Kugai Calo
Regular
I think Eurogamer has also written an article regarding Xbox 360, where it was not recommended to install GTA5's play disc to the hard drive, for the same reason. Fun time!
I believe there are other less bombastic gains from having an SSD as a baseline, that will still impact the way games are built and organized significantly.
Things like voice, sound of video files can also be fetched on the fly. That does not seem like a huge win memory-wise at first, because on typical games TODAY those occupy a meagre portion of memory. But that is because games are designed in such a way that this is the case. But with the zero-seek time, a game can be designed to have a huge library of sounds and video (and other things for that matter) from witch it could fetch few random small clips from at any moment with negligible impact to performance.
So in-game radio's and TVs for example, can fetch clips from any part of the game's entire library, completely unpredictably. The sound and video files can be separated into single second files, so no more memory than the absolutely minimum necessary has to ever be resident in memory. Fetching a thousand 10kb files from an SSD takes about as much time as fetching a single 10Mbs one. And doing so in the middle of fetching some other larger and more important asset does not disrupt it's loading at all.
You can have a TV sotore in a GTA games with 5 different TV stations playing simultaneously, with non-repeating content (unless you stay several minutes watching it that is - and even then, they could randomize the order the content plays on each so the repetition is even less noticeable) That is not game changing, but its a nice detail. The same concept can open up a lot of cool possibilities. Magazines and Newspaper covers on Newstands with randomized content every different time you come across them, with a sprincle of narrative-related stuff in there (mentioning previous missions). Same for Bill board ads, characters clothing, stickers on NPC's cars, grafitti on the streets.
An open world game could allow a player to place hundreds of different grafitti on any wall of their choice, out of a library of thousand different designs, with minimal impact in the game's texture budget, and very little planning ahead by the dev.
All of this is stuff, of course, could be done before, but it required some amount of planning, and so were implemented in a very limited fashion and with free random seeks, it becomes trivial and can be all over the place, all the time.
Things like voice, sound of video files can also be fetched on the fly. That does not seem like a huge win memory-wise at first, because on typical games TODAY those occupy a meagre portion of memory. But that is because games are designed in such a way that this is the case. But with the zero-seek time, a game can be designed to have a huge library of sounds and video (and other things for that matter) from witch it could fetch few random small clips from at any moment with negligible impact to performance.
So in-game radio's and TVs for example, can fetch clips from any part of the game's entire library, completely unpredictably. The sound and video files can be separated into single second files, so no more memory than the absolutely minimum necessary has to ever be resident in memory. Fetching a thousand 10kb files from an SSD takes about as much time as fetching a single 10Mbs one. And doing so in the middle of fetching some other larger and more important asset does not disrupt it's loading at all.
You can have a TV sotore in a GTA games with 5 different TV stations playing simultaneously, with non-repeating content (unless you stay several minutes watching it that is - and even then, they could randomize the order the content plays on each so the repetition is even less noticeable) That is not game changing, but its a nice detail. The same concept can open up a lot of cool possibilities. Magazines and Newspaper covers on Newstands with randomized content every different time you come across them, with a sprincle of narrative-related stuff in there (mentioning previous missions). Same for Bill board ads, characters clothing, stickers on NPC's cars, grafitti on the streets.
An open world game could allow a player to place hundreds of different grafitti on any wall of their choice, out of a library of thousand different designs, with minimal impact in the game's texture budget, and very little planning ahead by the dev.
All of this is stuff, of course, could be done before, but it required some amount of planning, and so were implemented in a very limited fashion and with free random seeks, it becomes trivial and can be all over the place, all the time.
Problem of a SATA drive is (just like "any" m.2 drive) you can't be sure you reach a specific speed. There are SSDs on the market that are really slow and don't saturate the SATA standard. And there are SSDs on the market that get easily limited by the old SATA standard. Setting the minimum requirement to PCIe 3.0 NVME drive settles this. Developers can be sure they have at least 1+ GB/s available.
Like I wrote before the streaming tech would still work great with an SATA SSD + caching into RAM. E.g. Spiderman loads that what is visible on screen. That is why the loading-times are so short. That shouldn't really be a problem for a fast SATA SSD maybe the initial loading is 1-2s slower but while in the game the SSD can continuously cache things that might be needed for the next x seconds (roughly ps5 preload-times * 10). In a common PC these days with 16GB RAM + 8GB GPU RAM should be plenty of space to buffer that. It could work, but PC space with all it's configuration is just a bit unpredictable and there are still plenty of people that still use HDD in their gaming PCs and so we won't see bigger benefits from SSDs while this is the case. Will still need a few years and than 32GB memory should be more or less the norm.
Quick location changes were never really a problem, we've already seen something like this on the Xbox one X. In AC Origins the transition to the eagle view was smooth, while other systems had to load. This was possible because the developer just used the additional memory as buffer for the eagle view. So swapping the camera from the bird back to the player was not a problem. And we've seen this countless times in other games. And yes, IMHO this is somehow the worst case you can use the memory for.
I don't see whats all the fuss is about. So what if the PS5 allows for performance you won't find in normal SSDs? Especially for some mechanic thats not readily used in games. Do I have to look forward to a future reality where portals in games are so common that it becomes its own genre? You know like first person, RPGs, open-world and now portal games.
I am sure whatever performance or capability the PS5's SSD provides, devs will find ways to accommodate on non-PS5 hardware.
I am sure whatever performance or capability the PS5's SSD provides, devs will find ways to accommodate on non-PS5 hardware.
I can state from personal experience that on X360 putting the HDD install disk on an SSD attached via USB, and then putting the "play from disk" data onto the internal HDD, lead to streaming performance that was well beyond the "fair" streaming comparisons that reviewers loved to wage console wars.
With dual sources of SSD over USB2 and optical disk copied to HDD, my X360 outperformed any of the tests DF did at the time.
Was an efficient way to learn that I don't like in any way the GTA5 protagonists. I do respect the balls of Rockstar to reject humanity, but it left me kinda sad.
I think the SSD and compression tech is just too over blown. What you say is true you can move some things to the ssd and stream in just in time. You can also just do that with more ram.
Also not for nothing but that is how it worked in a lot of games back in the sega cd games and ps one years.
I think everything faster is getting better. So yea faster IO speeds with compression and base speeds is all super important. But so is ram and so is faster cpus and gpus and so on. Not one thing is going to solve all the issues
I got a bit confused with what exactly you did there
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