Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

[PSman1700]

He’s perhaps used to people who upgrade consoles (seven years), or low-income areas where users play primary on chromebook class pc’s or even base ps4 consoles.
Personal views often are painted by what they experience themselfs.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Similarly, if your actual concern is loading times then you're either going to already have an NVMe drive, or be quite ready and willing to get one.

It's the NVMe drives for sure. They've consistently been more expensive than non-NVMe solid state configurations (because of the format factor), and because the of underlying I/O APIs you have never gotten anywhere near the theoretical performance that NVMe drives can delivery - the point of DirectStorage that Microsoft make in their blog post.

The bar in the vast majority of cases will be even lower than a PS5 owner who wants to purchase an external SSD for extra storage. Not a high bar I'm sure we can both agree.

I'm not sure I follow this. You need an NVMe drive for DirectStorage in your Windows PC, you can buy cheaper external storage for PS5, but to boost the internal storage requires a NVMe drive.

The cost differential of SATA SSD vs NVMe SSD is significant, and the performance is often not in terms of gaming where the bottlenecks lie elsewhere in the software driven check-in process. I've seen people debate this on forums and many will chose to pay less for the same sized SATA SSD over NVMe, or just buy a larger SATA than you could with the same money for a NVMe.

I'm all NVMe here, my PC build from earlier this month but that 2Tb WD Black SN850 which was £264 which isn't an insignificant amount of money for a lot of people.

I really don't understand the attitude/assumption that many PC users have that gamers are running even closely the latest various PC technologies - particularly storage where NVMe is faster, but situationally faster.

 

[pjbliverpool]

It's the NVMe drives for sure. They've consistently been more expensive than non-NVMe solid state configurations (because of the format factor), and because the of underlying I/O APIs you have never gotten anywhere near the theoretical performance that NVMe drives can delivery - the point of DirectStorage that Microsoft make in their blog post.

Yes and you can literally get an NVMe drive these days for less than £30 (256GB) - for £50 you can get a 500GB drive. Please stop making this out to be some massive barrier to entry.

I'm not sure I follow this. You need an NVMe drive for DirectStorage in your Windows PC, you can buy cheaper external storage for PS5, but to boost the internal storage requires a NVMe drive.

If you want to increase your PS5's usable fast storage you need a Gen4 NVMe drive that meets certain performance characteristics. Anything else is just a data backup. Direct Storage has no such requirements and therefore any old Gen3 NVMe will do - which as I said, is cheaper.

The cost differential of SATA SSD vs NVMe SSD is significant, and the performance is often not in terms of gaming where the bottlenecks lie elsewhere in the software driven check-in process. I've seen people debate this on forums and many will chose to pay less for the same sized SATA SSD over NVMe, or just buy a larger SATA than you could with the same money for a NVMe.

I'm not sure why this is relevant to the topic? Everyone knows NMVe is more expensive than SATA SSD's but that's not what we're discussing. We're discussing the barriers to entry for taking advantage of Direct Storage - which are minimal.

I really don't understand the attitude/assumption that many PC users have that gamers are running even closely the latest various PC technologies - particularly storage where NVMe is faster, but situationally faster.

No-one has said this. An eight year old Maxwell based GPU is not the latest PC technology and Steam tells us 94% of gamers already have one, and if people who care about fast loading times do not yet have an NVMe drive, it's a very simple, cheap upgrade as detailed in my first point above.

 

[iroboto]

It's the NVMe drives for sure. They've consistently been more expensive than non-NVMe solid state configurations

In the pc space, I think most gamers are just holding out until they are told they really need them.

It’s not really a major point of pain here for them, if there is no reason they need the nvme today, it’s better to wait for prices to drop even further.

The games will have to be built and nvme becomes a critical piece will it be adopted heavily on PC. This is a situation of if you build it, they will come.

If the price points are too high, they likely would have gone to console gaming for this generation as the entire package will come in significantly cheaper.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

In the pc space, I think most gamers are just holding out until they are told they really need them.
It’s not really a major point of pain here for them, if there is no reason they need the nvme today, it’s better to wait for prices to drop even further.

Exactly this.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Yes and you can literally get an NVMe drive these days for less than £30 (256GB) - for £50 you can get a 500GB drive. Please stop making this out to be some massive barrier to entry.

I didn't say it was 'massive barrier to entry', I said for some this will require a hardware change. The barrier to entry may be buying an NVMe drive How much of a barrier that is depends on the individual's PC and their financial circumstances.

I'm not sure why this is relevant to the topic? Everyone knows NMVe is more expensive than SATA SSD's but that's not what we're discussing. We're discussing the barriers to entry for taking advantage of Direct Storage - which are minimal.

This was in response to Remij who said: "The kind of people interested in the things DirectStorage brings already have those things, let's not kid ourselves." on the need for a NVMe. People are acting like SATA SSDs aren't massively popular and installed in a lot of PCs. So you're back to hardware change. See point 1.

There will be people with gaming laptops with no options to go NVMe at all.

 

[PSman1700]

In the pc space, I think most gamers are just holding out until they are told they really need them.

It’s not really a major point of pain here for them, if there is no reason they need the nvme today, it’s better to wait for prices to drop even further.

The games will have to be built and nvme becomes a critical piece will it be adopted heavily on PC. This is a situation of if you build it, they will come.

If the price points are too high, they likely would have gone to console gaming for this generation as the entire package will come in significantly cheaper.

How do people hold out on something like an NVME drive these days? Most people buy prebuilds and/or laptops, which almost always are equipped with NVME sdd disks. I have a hard time believing that people are telling manufacturers to replace the nvme drive with a sata disk or even a mechanical drive at almost the same price?
Nvme is one of the cheapest components in building or sourcing a pc or laptop. Its not much more expensive vs sata ssd, often even at the same prices. I got a samsung 980pro 1tb for 130usd..... thats one of the higher performance pcie4 drives. You can get quite much below that price for the same storage as the PS5 gives you.

I didn't say it was 'massive barrier to entry', I said for some this will require a hardware change. The barrier to entry may be buying an NVMe drive How much of a barrier that is depends on the individual's PC and their financial circumstances.



This was in response to Remij who said: "The kind of people interested in the things DirectStorage brings already have those things, let's not kid ourselves." on the need for a NVMe. People are acting like SATA SSDs aren't massively popular and installed in a lot of PCs. So you're back to hardware change. See point 1.

There will be people with gaming laptops with no options to go NVMe at all.

Nvme has been increasingly becoming the standard along time before the PS5 released. Nvme is more common then you think, in special for pc gamers that are actually going to be playing these games. NVme would be the least 'concern', CPU and GPU still are doing most of the magic.

Im more concerned about the PS5's steep price increase, the PSN subscribtion being more expensive, supply issues and the fact the console is selling less then the PS4 did. The PS4 is still the largest market/usergroup. Will they all upgrade massively? I suppose not, since almost everythings cross-gen, and theres no real incentive to get a PS5 since theres basically no software that makes truly use of the hardware. Maybe people will shift when theres actual software for it.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I didn't say it was 'massive barrier to entry', I said for some this will require a hardware change. The barrier to entry may be buying an NVMe drive How much of a barrier that is depends on the individual's PC and their financial circumstances.

Maybe I'm reading too much into your posts but based on these earlier responses to my statement of "PC's should fare quite a bit better in this regard (CPU overhead) this generation than last once Direct Storage removes the CPU decompression burden.":

How does DirectStorage deliver that? This requires hardware changes. As in hardware is doing the decompression that the CPU is currently doing.

No hardware changes apart form DX12 GPUs and NVMe SSDs. That's change for a lot of PC users.

I assumed you were trying to argue that Direct Storages GPU decompression is going to have limited impact on the PC gaming market as whole in terms of equalizing the CPU overhead in those games that support it. My argument is that those benefits (in supported games) are likely to be quite widely felt from a very early stage because a large percentage of the market that is interested in this will already have the requisite hardware, and for those that don't already have it, it's very cheap to acquire it (literally half the cost of a single AAA console game if needs be).

 

[function]

I may have missed something - bet have we seen that GPU decompression is going to require NVMe drives?

DS itself doesn't require NVMe, and the DS blurb and github stuff released so far includes writing to D3D resource buffers and using the DS custom decompression queue (albeit for CPU based decompression). This may change for the addition of GPU decompression, but do we know that it will?

I know that by far the biggest improvements will come with the speeds enabled by NVMe drives, but offloading some of the decompression work from CPU to GPU would seem to offer at least some benefit to the CPU even at SATA SSD speeds.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I may have missed something - bet have we seen that GPU decompression is going to require NVMe drives?

I thought NVMe drive requirement was for the saving the CPU having to drive as much I/O, i.e. not related to recompression.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Maybe I'm reading too much into your posts but based on these earlier responses to my statement of "PC's should fare quite a bit better in this regard (CPU overhead) this generation than last once Direct Storage removes the CPU decompression burden.":

You have. Apologies if I wasn't clearer, all I implying is that the API in isolation can't deliver changes for everybody. That for some, some new hardware would be required to benefit from some/all of the DirectStorage improvements.

And some changes can be inexpensive - expensive being subjective. If you don't have a NVMe drive now but have a free M2 slot, adding one can be £30 if you go with a low-capacity option. Some people are used to and happy to compromise for a lighter budget, but for some they may not want to manage their game library and would rather wait until they can afford a larger drive. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I reckon PC users are as diverse as the hardware.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I may have missed something - bet have we seen that GPU decompression is going to require NVMe drives?

DS itself doesn't require NVMe, and the DS blurb and github stuff released so far includes writing to D3D resource buffers and using the DS custom decompression queue (albeit for CPU based decompression). This may change for the addition of GPU decompression, but do we know that it will?

I know that by far the biggest improvements will come with the speeds enabled by NVMe drives, but offloading some of the decompression work from CPU to GPU would seem to offer at least some benefit to the CPU even at SATA SSD speeds.

I don't think we have any information on this yet so yes it's entirely possible that function won't require an NVMe which would potentially mean ~94% of the PC gaming base (according to Steam) is already capable of supporting that function. It seems sensible to not make that a requirement if possible, although I guess it depends if there are any capabilities enabled by the NVMe standard in general that are required to make the routing of data in this way possible.

 

[SmooTh]

 

[Dampf]

Sad 2060 noises.

It appears like its being replaced now with the 3060 and the 2060 Super in Alex videos.

A shame given the 2060 is far more popular on Steam than any other RT capable GPU, is considered the better option compared to the 3050 and also is much more interesting to tweak for with its 6 GB.

I would like to see entry level RT optimized settings again, but I understand DF wants to focus on the midrange.

Maybe I should start my own channel dedicated to optimized RT settings for even lower end hardware like my 2060 laptop.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Great video! Some nice performance comparisons at nearly matched PS5 settings and it's good to see the 3060 seemingly offering a largely equivalent to PS5 experience (as close as it's possible to measure given the differences) - so much for needing an RTX 3070 for this which is almost 50% faster than the 3060.

Interesting CPU comparison using the 11400F and 12400F too - both of which are falling a little below the locked 60fps level (although it's still worth remembering that according to Alex the PS5 uses an object range of between 7 and 8, not exactly 8 and this could have a noticeable performance impact given Richard shows the difference between 8 and 10 here is around 18%).

I still would have liked to see an 8 core compared here though as I can't help but feel that after giving up a whole core to work on decompression, a 6 core CPU is just at to great a core disadvantage vs the PS5 for equivalence, even if those cores are much faster.

Also interesting to see the RT impact on performance. It seems most of the game isn't actually stressing the RT capabilities that much.

 

[Overstander]

Great video! Some nice performance comparisons at nearly matched PS5 settings and it's good to see the 3060 seemingly offering a largely equivalent to PS5 experience (as close as it's possible to measure given the differences) - so much for needing an RTX 3070 for this which is almost 50% faster than the 3060.

Interesting CPU comparison using the 11400F and 12400F too - both of which are falling a little below the locked 60fps level (although it's still worth remembering that according to Alex the PS5 uses an object range of between 7 and 8, not exactly 8 and this could have a noticeable performance impact given Richard shows the difference between 8 and 10 here is around 18%).

I still would have liked to see an 8 core compared here though as I can't help but feel that after giving up a whole core to work on decompression, a 6 core CPU is just at to great a core disadvantage vs the PS5 for equivalence, even if those cores are much faster.

Also interesting to see the RT impact on performance. It seems most of the game isn't actually stressing the RT capabilities that much.

First Post on this Forum after quite a lurking time
So what i think about the Spiderman Port to PC is that in contrary to the overall opinion in this Thread, PC is as a platform (not any high end user mind you) but as a platform of gamers it is in trouble. Cosnoles offer much better per watt / performance than PCs - they are engineered that way.
You always can make things go more fluid if you alter them from being general purpose (PC) to specifically render Game code as efficient as it can possibly get.
Especially Consoles APIs (and here Sony realy shines) are much more lean and have every layer removed that is not needed.

So that was and is true for PS4. The latest Video from Richard Leadbetter shows this - PS4 cannot be matched on PC with similar Hardware. He is running the Game in 900p and it still runnes less performant. The Base PS4 Game renders almost all of the time in 1080p. With hardlocked 30fps. And thats all with Richard Leadbetter using a CPU that is running circles around the PS4s Jaguar Cores.
The Performance Edge that Consoles have did not manifest as much last Generation mainly because the extraordinary edge the PC Community had with their CPUs over the Jaguar Cores. Console Performance and API Edge over PC was here "sacrificed" in a way by using a under normal (PC) circumcstances totally unfit for gaming CPU.

Only the less friction ( hardware and software wise ) Enviroment on Consoles made it possible to found a whole gerneration of still very good looking games with a Netbook CPU at a Time where so much more performant PC CPUs were used by people.
This Time however , all is different!
This Time a very good CPU is used. But it is still a lean and friction less console enviroment. Even more so on PS5 where its dedicated HW Decompression block does even more free up CPU time. Something the PC simply cannot copy 1:1.
Direct Storage will help but it will come at a cost.
Ill jump over a few points now and adress my take on the Question of a RTX3070 is sufficient to play PS5 Ports in the future at the same ( or even better) Detail Settings.
My Answer is of course NO.
We all see what it takes CPU and GPU wise to play a mere PS4 Game uplifted per PS5 patch on PC to play at the same Settings. Gone are the times where way worse PC Hardware (read GTX 750) could bring something to the table.

I saw i a page or so earlier in this thread the Idea that People with RTX 30 Series or even RTX20 Series GPUs would be fine simply because RTX I/O is here to save the Day. It was aknowledged that RTX I/O on RTX 20 and 30 Series does not even come with dedicated decompression HW. Nvidia simply wants to use underutilised GPU parts. Someone stated that a mere 2Tf sacrifice would be enough to match PS5s I/O throughput. Also wrong - RTX30 Cards from 3070 upwarts enjoy a rasterisation edge vs PS5 but its not like it is in the next league. For RTX 20 cards? Forget it. I state that when the first 2nd Wave PS5 exclusive arrives wich should leverage PS5s I/O Block hard, the RTX 20 cards are not going to cut it anymore. And the chance is there that a RTX 3070 could not match a PS5.
Heck, i want to see a Ratched and Clank Rift Apart port to PC right now. Does anyone, given how a PS4 Game with a PS5 Patch stresses PC Hardware right now, believe that Rift Apart would run very good on the same range of hardware of today? The Game relies heavily on real time decompression of several GB/s with every cameramove. The "what is not in sight is not in memory" aproach that Cerny forecasted in his Road to PS5 Talk. And Rift Apart does not even bring the PS5 to sweat - we know that because the swap out of external SSDs wich are technicaly under Sonys recommendation for a SSD upgrade.
And please do not read this post as a stab against PC in general. I game on one as well - but things need to adressed in all fairness.

 

[DavidGraham]

The Matrix demo works fine on PC without DirectStorage, proper optimizations or highly advanced NVMe drives, so I don't really understand what this fuss is all about?

 

[Karamazov]

The Matrix demo works fine on PC without DirectStorage, proper optimizations or highly advanced NVMe drives, so I don't really understand what this fuss is all about?

Matrix demo works also on a 4TF XsS !

 

[Flappy Pannus]

<edit n/m, didn't see the second page that addresses my critique>

 

[cwjs]

The Matrix demo works fine on PC without DirectStorage, proper optimizations or highly advanced NVMe drives, so I don't really understand what this fuss is all about?

The matrix demo (ue5 in general) has a wildly different asset loading strategy than most games and is nowhere near any streaming bottlenecks, not really relevant unless everyone wants the trade offs of nanite. (Which maybe they do?)