Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

[zed]

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.

The thing is cause the new drives (ps5 and xbox series s/x) can transfer data 10x - 100x quicker than previous gen the need to do any 'tricks' is greatly lessened

Dude mate seriously look at the video again

(approx times)
2:58 on bug back
3:05 rift
3:07 skyscrapers section
3:13 rift
3:14 sliding down a ramp
3:20 rift
3:22 onto a back of a dragon
3:29 rift
3:30 flying cars city scene
3:35 rift
3:37 pirateship

theres 6 different scenes, each scene is shown 6-7 seconds plus a rift is 1-2 seconds so max < 10 seconds to load each scene
Wheres all this time on rails beforehand to load the next level?
the HDD was not fast enough to do this in previous machines like he claims to pull this off in anything close to the quality of what R&C is doing. Thats just a fact, you can come up with alternative opinions but not alternative facts, this aint politics

 

[goonergaz]

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 ?

This will only work for predictable loading, not for open worlds or where there is the option to ‘jump’ to several different locations instantly…think of a game where you could instantly move between several planets for example.

But this is forgetting that the idea of the SSD is to remove a burden from the developer - rewatch Cerny talking about it, games that were previously designed around slow loading do not require what you describe.

What Sony wanted was some demonstration of what the SSD can bring to the table, it’s for developers to see if they have the creative nature to make it do something extraordinary.

The thing is cause the new drives (ps5 and xbox series s/x) can transfer data 10x - 100x quicker than previous gen the need to do any 'tricks' is greatly lessened

Dude mate seriously look at the video again

(approx times)
2:58 on bug back
3:05 rift
3:07 skyscrapers section
3:13 rift
3:14 sliding down a ramp
3:20 rift
3:22 onto a back of a dragon
3:29 rift
3:30 flying cars city scene
3:35 rift
3:37 pirateship

theres 6 different scenes, each scene is shown 6-7 seconds plus a rift is 1-2 seconds so max < 10 seconds to load each scene
Wheres all this time on rails beforehand to load the next level?
the HDD was not fast enough to do this in previous machines like he claims to pull this off in anything close to the quality of what R&C is doing. Thats just a fact, you can come up with alternative opinions but not alternative facts, this aint politics

Indeed

 

[Deleted member 86764]

 

[eastmen]

This will only work for predictable loading, not for open worlds or where there is the option to ‘jump’ to several different locations instantly…think of a game where you could instantly move between several planets for example.

But this is forgetting that the idea of the SSD is to remove a burden from the developer - rewatch Cerny talking about it, games that were previously designed around slow loading do not require what you describe.

What Sony wanted was some demonstration of what the SSD can bring to the table, it’s for developers to see if they have the creative nature to make it do something extraordinary.


Indeed

So I hate to be an ass. "predictable loading" "several different locations" It seems like these two things are the same thing no ? Unless your talking about fast travel in something like skyrim. Where you click a map and then go to some where new but that can easily be hidden with enough ram and streaming in from a slower drive into the ram.


If you take a ps5 it has 16 gigs total ram. On PC there is a limit of what 64 gigs on most boards + then 4-16 gigs of graphcis ram , i think some cards have 20gigs. Plus then streaming from a drive. If we assume the OS on ps5 takes 2 gigs of ram and on pc 8 gigs of ram that means the on the ps5 you have 14 gigs in which to fit everything the game needs. On pc you have 56 gigs of ram + the storage of the actual video card. Then you move on to the drive you want.

Even in ratchet and clank your just going into portals of predetermined areas of which they can already have textures loaded and if smart a bunch of stuff will get reused.

The SSD is getting hype because of the limited pool of ram these consoles have. The xbox had 64MB of ram. The xbox 360 had 512 + 10MB of edram that is over 4 times the amount of ram. The xbox one had 8 gigs and 32MB of esram. The xbox series x has 16 gigs of ram. We went from 4 times to 16 times to 2x the ram. On Sonys side the ps1 had 2MB Ram , 1MB vram to ps2 with 32MB of rdram and 4 MB of edram to ps3 with 256MB of xdr and 256 of GDDR 3 and then ps4 with 8 gigs of ram and finally ps5 with 16 gigs of ram.

The speed of the ssd is there to justify the lack of ram due to costs not scaling down. But I am sure both companies would have gone with 24 or 32gigs of ram over the speed of the ssd if pricing was equal

 

[snc]

loadings from 1 minute 28 s on ps4 pro to 3s on ps5 ;d

 

[goonergaz]

So I hate to be an ass. "predictable loading" "several different locations" It seems like these two things are the same thing no ? Unless your talking about fast travel in something like skyrim. Where you click a map and then go to some where new but that can easily be hidden with enough ram and streaming in from a slower drive into the ram.


If you take a ps5 it has 16 gigs total ram. On PC there is a limit of what 64 gigs on most boards + then 4-16 gigs of graphcis ram , i think some cards have 20gigs. Plus then streaming from a drive. If we assume the OS on ps5 takes 2 gigs of ram and on pc 8 gigs of ram that means the on the ps5 you have 14 gigs in which to fit everything the game needs. On pc you have 56 gigs of ram + the storage of the actual video card. Then you move on to the drive you want.

Even in ratchet and clank your just going into portals of predetermined areas of which they can already have textures loaded and if smart a bunch of stuff will get reused.

The SSD is getting hype because of the limited pool of ram these consoles have. The xbox had 64MB of ram. The xbox 360 had 512 + 10MB of edram that is over 4 times the amount of ram. The xbox one had 8 gigs and 32MB of esram. The xbox series x has 16 gigs of ram. We went from 4 times to 16 times to 2x the ram. On Sonys side the ps1 had 2MB Ram , 1MB vram to ps2 with 32MB of rdram and 4 MB of edram to ps3 with 256MB of xdr and 256 of GDDR 3 and then ps4 with 8 gigs of ram and finally ps5 with 16 gigs of ram.

The speed of the ssd is there to justify the lack of ram due to costs not scaling down. But I am sure both companies would have gone with 24 or 32gigs of ram over the speed of the ssd if pricing was equal

Sorry, using your open world example - if you have 20 different ‘jump to’ locations, how does that work!? But even so I specify jumping to different planets instantly as an example.

Clearly more ram can help in some scenarios, but even then the devs have to work around the restriction of the loading speed unless you can fit the whole game into RAM. And even then you have the initial load and then a shot-tonne of background streaming - did you ever play day-z on a HDD then upgrade to SSD?

And you can’t design games around 56gb ram PCs unless you want to restrict you product sales significantly.

 

[eastmen]

Sorry, using your open world example - if you have 20 different ‘jump to’ locations, how does that work!? But even so I specify jumping to different planets instantly as an example.

Clearly more ram can help in some scenarios, but even then the devs have to work around the restriction of the loading speed unless you can fit the whole game into RAM. And even then you have the initial load and then a shot-tonne of background streaming - did you ever play day-z on a HDD then upgrade to SSD?

And you can’t design games around 56gb ram PCs unless you want to restrict you product sales significantly.

In open world games the places you can warp or fast travel too are limited to pre determined locations. In something like skyrim the majority are very similar looking. So you'd be able to keep commonly used textures in ram and have the others get pulled in. You wouldn't need an ultra fast ssd for that.

As for needing to load the whole game into ram , I don't see the problem. 50 gigs of ram even on the largest games would allow you to install at least a third of the game into it the ram. The majority of computers now ship with at least a sata ssd giving much faster speeds than a hdd and even that is giving way to slow nvme drives offering over 1GB/s bandwidth.

Everything is evolving just as it always had. This isn't the first time storage speed has jumped , its only the first time a company is hyping it as the greatest thing.

As for restricting your audience. I mean that is the root of pc gaming isn't it. Were you complaining when the first games requiring 3d accelerators came out ? First games that needed a sound card or a cd rom ?

 

[milk]

Sorry, using your open world example - if you have 20 different ‘jump to’ locations, how does that work!? But even so I specify jumping to different planets instantly as an example.

Clearly more ram can help in some scenarios, but even then the devs have to work around the restriction of the loading speed unless you can fit the whole game into RAM. And even then you have the initial load and then a shot-tonne of background streaming - did you ever play day-z on a HDD then upgrade to SSD?

And you can’t design games around 56gb ram PCs unless you want to restrict you product sales significantly.

While theoretically true, the price of solid state storage has now made it unlikely that most games will ever exceed 32-64Gb of data, so in a hypothetical parallel universe where RAM cost kept falling linearly, and PS5/Series had a slow HDD+64Gbs of memory, you'd still be able to implement the very same games on them in the end. Only difference would be VERY long load times at game start-up.

Despite that, the efficiency/optimization-loving side of me really appreciates that this gen most of RAM is indeed being used as WORKING memory, and not sitting idle as a dumb data cache.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

In open world games the places you can warp or fast travel too are limited to pre determined locations. In something like skyrim the majority are very similar looking. So you'd be able to keep commonly used textures in ram and have the others get pulled in. You wouldn't need an ultra fast ssd for that.

It's similar looking to try to reduce how long it takes to load into that new area. Now, do this with completely different looking locations. And let's have 10's of different fast travel locations? There's no efficient way to cache that for fast loading off an HDD.

The best you can do is have quests that point players to go to certain areas. So if there was only 1 quest (which kind of defeats the purpose of an open world) you can cache the next location the quest has the player go to. But what if you have multiple side quests and the player is doing them in random orders?

Regards,
SB

 

[Karamazov]

i game like megaton rainfall would benefit so much from the new tech.
I wonder if the dev is working on something new.

 

[function]

I got a bit confused with what exactly you did there

Not a great explanation from me there.

On X360, GTA5 had two disks - one to install to the HDD (or fast enough USB drive) and the one to have in the drive during gameplay, which was also used to stream additional data.

I guessed that the DVD was less BW and latency critical, so I installed the install disk onto a USB connected SSD, then installed the "play from" DVD onto the units HDD. Loading / streaming was really good, and as a bonus the DVD drive span down and so the noise generator that was the 360s DVD drive was silenced!

Hopefully that makes more sense!

The thing is cause the new drives (ps5 and xbox series s/x) can transfer data 10x - 100x quicker than previous gen the need to do any 'tricks' is greatly lessened

Yeah, the reliance on these kinds of techniques has been greatly lessened, and I've talked about that in this thread.

Dude mate seriously look at the video again

(approx times)
2:58 on bug back
3:05 rift
3:07 skyscrapers section
3:13 rift
3:14 sliding down a ramp
3:20 rift
3:22 onto a back of a dragon
3:29 rift
3:30 flying cars city scene
3:35 rift
3:37 pirateship

theres 6 different scenes, each scene is shown 6-7 seconds plus a rift is 1-2 seconds so max < 10 seconds to load each scene
Wheres all this time on rails beforehand to load the next level?

~8 seconds is actually a reasonable amount of time to play with, if your datasets are small enough and optimally arranged for accesses. Micro levels and short snippets of on rails sections can have a cut down loading requirements too - a lot of what you'd load for free roaming can often be excluded.

GTA5 on the 360 could do entire fast character swap to different free roaming locations in something like 20 seconds. Was less with my more funky GTA 5 setup!

the HDD was not fast enough to do this in previous machines like he claims to pull this off in anything close to the quality of what R&C is doing. Thats just a fact, you can come up with alternative opinions but not alternative facts, this aint politics

I mean, I've said many times that clearly anything the quality of R&C is impossible without a good SSD. And Jon Burton was talking about gameplay, and citing real world examples - including some where he's used the techniques himself but on older systems (with less ram to fill and simpler assets).

Last gen, having 5 GB of ram still being fed by 5400 rpm laptop drives was a bit of a killer and this gen is a much needed correction.

 

[Karamazov]

the R&C sequence was on rails but you can actually use photomode during the sequence and move the camera around, and you can see gameplay elements from the levels, like boxes, in the distance, so i guess these are the real levels loaded and not just some fraction of a level prepared for that specific sequence.

 

[function]

the R&C sequence was on rails but you can actually use photomode during the sequence and move the camera around, and you can see gameplay elements from the levels, like boxes, in the distance, so i guess these are the real levels loaded and not just some fraction of a level prepared for that specific sequence.

That's very cool.

 

[Dr. Nick]

I've wondered why developers haven't tried "letterbox" more. With the right game people might view it as begin cinematic.

 

[goonergaz]

While theoretically true, the price of solid state storage has now made it unlikely that most games will ever exceed 32-64Gb of data, so in a hypothetical parallel universe where RAM cost kept falling linearly, and PS5/Series had a slow HDD+64Gbs of memory, you'd still be able to implement the very same games on them in the end. Only difference would be VERY long load times at game start-up.

Despite that, the efficiency/optimization-loving side of me really appreciates that this gen most of RAM is indeed being used as WORKING memory, and not sitting idle as a dumb data cache.

But 56gb wasn’t possible this gen due to price? And what’s to say SSD won’t come down or even RAM costs go up?

In open world games the places you can warp or fast travel too are limited to pre determined locations. In something like skyrim the majority are very similar looking. So you'd be able to keep commonly used textures in ram and have the others get pulled in. You wouldn't need an ultra fast ssd for that.

As for needing to load the whole game into ram , I don't see the problem. 50 gigs of ram even on the largest games would allow you to install at least a third of the game into it the ram. The majority of computers now ship with at least a sata ssd giving much faster speeds than a hdd and even that is giving way to slow nvme drives offering over 1GB/s bandwidth.

Everything is evolving just as it always had. This isn't the first time storage speed has jumped , its only the first time a company is hyping it as the greatest thing.

As for restricting your audience. I mean that is the root of pc gaming isn't it. Were you complaining when the first games requiring 3d accelerators came out ? First games that needed a sound card or a cd rom ?

Your views are just far too narrow minded and not considering the bigger picture.

Ive said countless times that part of the SSD upgrade was to remove that headache for the developers yet you keep putting it back in.

So now open world games will need to have fairly similar looking ‘jump to’ points - great.

You need to open your mind to what possibilities SSD allow rather than downplaying and sticking to ‘how we’ve always done it’. This is the biggest advancement in loading speeds for many generations, it changes the way games can be designed, it’s big.

It was a while until a majority of games required 3D cards, but those were also different times, these days games are costing significantly more to produce and therefore limiting audience is not the greatest idea.

 

[chris1515]

An explanation directly from the insomniac dev creating R&C portal were tune around 5GB/s less of uncompressed data. And he thinks uncompress data from SN750 goes above 5GB/s. This is logic. This less than the 8 to 11GB/s of PS5 SSd for uncompressed data using oodle Kraken and oodle textures.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1440440363768967170

And because they use an API devs don't know what is done in the background. He use data from the profiler and they are CPU bound setting up entites at least for now.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1440748142077493255

William Bundy is from RAD tools game, the company behind oddle Kraken and they helped created the hardware decompressor.

 

[Globalisateur]

An explanation directly from the insomniac dev creating R&C portal were tune around 5GB/s less of uncompressed data. And he thinks uncompress data from SN750 goes above 5GB/s. This is logic. This less than the 8 to 11GB/s of PS5 SSd for uncompressed data using oodle Kraken and oodle textures.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1440440363768967170

And because they use an API devs don't know what is done in the background. He use data from the profiler and they are CPU bound setting up entites at least for now.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1440748142077493255

William Bundy is from RAD tools game, the company behind oddle Kraken and they helped created the hardware decompressor.

So basically in Ratchet they are far from fully using the internal SSD speed of 5.5GB/s. He was CPU bound at 5GB/s so he used that speed to tune the game. But 5GB/s is using compression so that means a 3GB/s or so SSD should be enough to sustain those requirements, for now.

This is expected as they said in a previous interview the I/O was actually too fast for their engine, that's the CPU bound part. Turns out there is always a bottleneck somewhere, but I don't think Cerny was expecting the I/O to be too fast for the game engine (entity initialization).

 

[chris1515]

So basically in Ratchet they are far from fully using the internal SSD speed of 5.5GB/s. He was CPU bound at 5GB/s so he used that speed to tune the game. But 5GB/s is using compression so that means a 3GB/s or so SSD should be enough to sustain those requirements, for now.

This is expected as they said in a previous interview the I/O was actually too fast for their engine, that's the CPU bound part. Turns out there is always a bottleneck somewhere, but I don't think Cerny was expecting the I/O to be too fast for the game engine (entities initializing).

They said next games will load faster data than R&C Rift Apart but in Spiderman post mortem they said the game engine CPU part can impove a lot because they don't use job oriented and fully parrallelised engine like Naughty Dog but they use use the old fashined game and render thread plus some jobs like many other devs.

They said it was enough for Spiderman and RC Rift Apart but in the future they will probably need to fully improve the CPU game engine achitecture.

They need to do what Naughty Dog did in 2013/2014 on Jaguar CPU.

 

[Globalisateur]

They said next games will load faster data than R&C Rift Apart but in Spiderman post mortem they said the game engine CPU part can impove a lot because they don't use job oriented and fully parrallelised engine like Naughty Dog but they use use the old fashined game and render thread plus some jobs like many other devs.

They said it was enough for Spiderman and RC Rift Apart but in the future they will probably need to fully improve the CPU game engine achitecture.

They need to do what Naughty Dog did in 2013/2014 on Jaguar CPU.

So that would explain why they'd be CPU limited if they aren't multithreaded enough to setup the scene with the new data. Makes sense cause before the HDD was so slow they probably needed only one thread as they had plenty of time to setup the scene, particularly if that was done in a traditionnal loading screen.

 

[turkey]

So basically in Ratchet they are far from fully using the internal SSD speed of 5.5GB/s. He was CPU bound at 5GB/s so he used that speed to tune the game. But 5GB/s is using compression so that means a 3GB/s or so SSD should be enough to sustain those requirements, for now.

This is expected as they said in a previous interview the I/O was actually too fast for their engine, that's the CPU bound part. Turns out there is always a bottleneck somewhere, but I don't think Cerny was expecting the I/O to be too fast for the game engine (entity initialization).

Yes that's probably it, I however read the initial tweet more as a reference to the PS5 claiming just over 5gbs when it tests the drive, more than WD

Then Ratchet and Clank works ok which he knows is about 5gbs... As you say compression but that still does not explain the PS5 performance score.

Does it copy data that the drive is able to compress / read better than random bytes.