Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[Silent_Buddha]

I remember reading this interview, but... I've pulled stock HDDs from PS4's, hooked them up to a PC to test and benchmarked them, and they all have read speeds of about 100MB/s. Well, the working ones, anyway. That's pretty normal for 5400RPM drives. I'm sure there are cheap drives with less cache and worse seek times that are going to affect performance. And obviously the HDD controller in PS4 would affect performance. Did I have a fever dream or did I read that the PS4 only supports 1 SATA device internally so the HDD actually uses a USB to SATA converter on board? I feel like that information came out of the efforts to make Linux work on PS4. Perhaps the overhead and inefficiencies of that are causing issues.

Anyway, I'm not accusing Insomniac of lying about the HDD performance on PS4. In fact, I have no doubt they would make such claims without merit. But I do find it curious that there are drives that exist that limit PS4's performance to 20MB/s. I've never seen a working 5400RPM drive that slow. That's USB flash drive speeds.

The 20 GB/s is likely closer to the Random read speed combined with some segments of linear reads. While duplication of assets can allow some use of the linear read speed of HDDs, a streaming system is still going to lean on quite a bit of random access reads.

Regards,
SB

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Yes FFs, Ratchet and clank requires 8gigs of system ram in recommended specs not your 32 gigs. Here I will post the requirements again for you

You have no idea what you're even arguing here.

This part is interesting:

DirectStorage ensures quick loading times, and GPU decompression is used at high graphics settings to stream assets in the background while playing.

So, GPU decompression won't be used at anything lower than high?

As part of a preset, but I'm sure you'll be able to individually enable/disable it. Yeah I commented on this when it was leaked as well, DirectStorage is meant to be easily switchable to GPU/CPU decompression and I suppose the reason for this option is that GPU decompression has a GPU resource cost - to what degree who knows, but even if it's single-digit %'s it's good to have the option if the CPU-based DS can provide the same performance on some CPU's with a lot of cores that would otherwise go unutilized.

Bear in mind even just CPU-decompression in DS can potentially have a big performance advantage vs. regular Windows IO.

 

[Karamazov]

first video of the loading time in R&C with an HDD

 

[Remij]

first video of the loading time in R&C with an HDD

lol

 

[GuardHei]

kinda unexpected that they don't even bother to add planar projection shadows for those small dinosaurs

 

[Overstander]

Interestingly the specs sheet encouraged certain people to act like "oh look specs are actually not that high - PS5 easy outmatched"

But i bet after the various analysis videos it will be clear how good and sophisticated PS5s I/O Block truly is. And what an unbeatable package it is in terms of power per buck

Cant wait.gif

 

[Remij]

Interestingly the specs sheet encouraged certain people to act like "oh look specs are actually not that high - PS5 easy outmatched"

But i bet after the various analysis videos it will be clear how good and sophisticated PS5s I/O Block truly is. And what an unbeatable package it is in terms of power per buck

Cant wait.gif

I bet it will be clear that any ol' SSD will do.. and then I bet people who champion the console will latch onto something else to claim is best about PS5.

There's no better deal than the GPU I already own, and the SSD I already own, suddenly becoming more useful and faster for games without costing me anything.

 

[Overstander]

I bet it will be clear that any ol' SSD will do.. and then I bet people who champion the console will latch onto something else to claim is best about PS5.

There's no better deal than the GPU I already own, and the SSD I already own, suddenly becoming more useful and faster for games without costing me anything.

No i think i would diverge into - "early PS5 Exclusive cannot be fully make use of PS5s potential" and move the goalpost like that. But you know what - that's valid.
But i don't think need that "escape route"

 

[Remij]

No i think i would diverge into - "early PS5 Exclusive cannot be fully make use of PS5s potential" and move the goalpost like that. But you know what - that's valid.
But i don't think need that "escape route"

We already know it doesn't fully make use of the PS5's potential.. Digital Foundry proved it already.

We may never see that potential tapped!

 

[arandomguy]

What I'm also going to be interested in is the CPU thread scaling on Ratchet and Clank. The system requirements suggests scaling beyond the typical 6c/12t and really even 8c/16t. But if GPU decompression is being used is that scaling not just limited to decompression?

 

[eastmen]

I bet it will be clear that any ol' SSD will do.. and then I bet people who champion the console will latch onto something else to claim is best about PS5.

There's no better deal than the GPU I already own, and the SSD I already own, suddenly becoming more useful and faster for games without costing me anything.

A standard mechanical hard drive is going to hit about 100-150MB/s a sata ssd will hit around 500-550 so almost 5 times the speed. Then there are nvme drives ranging from 1,000mb/s to 8,000mb/s. I'm expecting the standard sata ssd will be pretty close to the loads featured in the ps5 version

 

[arandomguy]

As part of a preset, but I'm sure you'll be able to individually enable/disable it. Yeah I commented on this when it was leaked as well, DirectStorage is meant to be easily switchable to GPU/CPU decompression and I suppose the reason for this option is that GPU decompression has a GPU resource cost - to what degree who knows, but even if it's single-digit %'s it's good to have the option if the CPU-based DS can provide the same performance on some CPU's with a lot of cores that would otherwise go unutilized.

With how it's currently diagramed (which makes sense) it does brings up a concern in terms of VRAM cost.

I've had this reservation for awhile in that I don't think we should assume Direct Storage will actually lower VRAM requirements in sense that is commonly thought and may actually lead to increased usage.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

What I'm also going to be interested in is the CPU thread scaling on Ratchet and Clank. The system requirements suggests scaling beyond the typical 6c/12t and really even 8c/16t. But if GPU decompression is being used is that scaling not just limited to decompression?

RT plays a big factor as well most likely.

 

[Dictator]

RT plays a big factor as well most likely.

Definitely RT - that is the thing that scales furthest on the CPU based on my spider-man video.

 

[pjbliverpool]

With how it's currently diagramed (which makes sense) it does brings up a concern in terms of VRAM cost.

I've had this reservation for awhile in that I don't think we should assume Direct Storage will actually lower VRAM requirements in sense that is commonly thought and may actually lead to increased usage.

There are buffers required for DS1.1 in VRAM but they're pretty tiny by modern VRAM standards. Off the top of my head I think the optimal buffer size was only around 128MB.

 

[Allandor]

Interestingly the specs sheet encouraged certain people to act like "oh look specs are actually not that high - PS5 easy outmatched"

But i bet after the various analysis videos it will be clear how good and sophisticated PS5s I/O Block truly is. And what an unbeatable package it is in terms of power per buck

Cant wait.gif

In "Power per buck" consoles are always superior.
The problem I see here is that many at launch said that such a game won't be possible on any other available hardware. And that is just not true and wasn't back tha. That is just fanboyism, nothing more.
Yes loading screens might be needed for some things, but that doesn't change the fact that this game is much less demanding (data-streaming wise) than many thought.
But that was already proven when the slowest m.2 SSD in the ps4 had no problem at all with this game.

The big problem in such discussions are fanboys that don't want to discuss how something can be technically achieved (in other ways) but are praising their holy grail as nothing else and believe anything the marketing machine of the console creators "speak out".

Those features are and can be useful, but one feature can't compensate everything. If such datatransferspeeds are needed, the SSDs are just to small to really be useful. And somehow all the data must also be used.
Those transfer speeds will just mean that they will not get a bottleneck. But there are always other bottlenecks.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Regards R&C on HDD, just wait a week for an analysis without jumping to conclusions. Then we can discuss on a technical level what SSDs bring, with the fabulous point of a PC with replaceable components and drives to see which components - CPU, GPU, storage, RAM - affect loading performance in which ways.

 

[DavidGraham]

DF analyses Portal Prelude RTX and it's RTX IO implementation (which for now, is exclusive on RTX GPUs).

 

[Dampf]

DF analyses Portal Prelude RTX and it's RTX IO implementation.

Hmm. Nvidia already provided similar data. What I am interested in is how much this impacts GPU performance and VRAM. As @Dictator has a specific build without RTX IO this would've been the perfect opportunity to test that. But we only know the framerate of the RTX IO off build because the RTX IO on image was cropped :/

Alex, could you perhaps provide this information using the two builds? I'm sure a lot of us are interested in that and would appreciate it!

When Nvidia was asked about this one time, they said it's tiny and “probably not measurable”. (https://back2gaming.com/guides/nvidia-rtx-io-in-detail/)
I wonder if that's true.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Hmm. Nvidia already provided similar data. What I am interested in is how much this impacts GPU performance. As @Dictator has a specific build without RTX IO this would've been the perfect opportunity to test that. But we only know the framerate of the RTX IO off build because the RTX IO on image was cropped :/

Alex, could you perhaps provide this information using the two builds? I'm sure a lot of us are interested in that and would appreciate it!

When Nvidia was asked about this one time, they said it's tiny and “probably not measurable”. (https://back2gaming.com/guides/nvidia-rtx-io-in-detail/)
I wonder if that's true.

I assume there is no frame rate impact because the game isn't streaming anything in the background. The loads are taking place at dedicated load screens. Watching GPU utilisation at those moments may reveal something I guess, I will check it out myself shortly when the kids have finished their session in Bowsers Fury!