Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2016 - 2017]

[Deleted member 11852]

Digital Foundry: In Theory: Does PS4 offer VR its best chance at success?
Sony has mainstream penetration and the cheapest hardware - but can it deliver the quality?

I was in two minds about linking this given it's not an analysis but a conjecture piece with a sprinkling of FUD. Are Sony going to destroy VR for everybody? Please.

 

[Globalisateur]

Digital Foundry: In Theory: Does PS4 offer VR its best chance at success?
Sony has mainstream penetration and the cheapest hardware - but can it deliver the quality?

I was in two minds about linking this given it's not an analysis but a conjecture piece with a sprinkling of FUD. Are Sony going to destroy VR for everybody? Please.

It's not a Digital Foundry article. Why didn't you just put it in the VR thread?

EDIT: Well it didn't seem like it was a DF article. More like conjectures like you said. meh.

 

[Cjail]

The guys at DF need to write piece a week to justify their existence.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

EDIT: Well it didn't seem like it was a DF article. More like conjectures like you said. meh.

I'm careful about attribution now. Eurogamer's tweet clearly makes it clear it's a DF piece even though their website people seem to have made a conscious decision not to brand Digital Foundry articles as such.

It's a nonsense summary. Responsibility to make VR successful is Sony's responsibility? Unlike their competitors, Sony don't have a price or release date for PSVR but it's all on Sony. I don't agree with Carmack's opinion on "poisoning the well". The first car I drove was a piece of crap, it didn't put me off driving cars, just made me want a better one. A failure of one product is an opportunity for another.

I do think Oculus are in the uncomfortable position as they look like the man in the middle. True we don't know PSVR's cost yet but I think most people would be shocked if it was equal or greater to Rift. The middle ground is a bad place to be with new technology where people will generally fall into one of two camps, they want to dip their toe in with as little investment as possible (PS4/PSVR probably) or they go all in with the most expensive because they perceive it to be better. Vive vs. Oculus is debatable and only time will tell.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Digital Foundry: Should you upgrade Xbox One with an SSD?
Loading times are getting out of hand - can solid-state storage reduce waits on Microsoft's console?

 

[Clukos]

Digital Foundry: Should you upgrade Xbox One with an SSD?
Loading times are getting out of hand - can solid-state storage reduce waits on Microsoft's console?

Video

 

[Clukos]

I think everyone should give the hybrid drive a try. At worst, it's slightly better than the stock drive and at best it's almost as good as an SSD at a much lower price. I only wish they'd release a hybrid drive with more ssd storage, 8 gigs seems to be on the low side (although i don't know how caching works in these drives, 8 gigs may be more than enough).

 

[Globalisateur]

I think everyone should give the hybrid drive a try. At worst, it's slightly better than the stock drive and at best it's almost as good as an SSD at a much lower price. I only wish they'd release a hybrid drive with more ssd storage, 8 gigs seems to be on the low side (although i don't know how caching works in these drives, 8 gigs may be more than enough).

I don't know. I heard they were not very reliable (maybe I am wrong). I'd prefer a 7200rpm HDD.

 

[Clukos]

I don't know. I heard they were not very reliable (maybe I am wrong). I'd prefer a 7200rpm HDD.

At least for that particular drive, if it had any major problems, something would surely show up here: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Lapto...1457274399&sr=8-1&keywords=hybrid+seagate+2.5

Also, the hybrid should produce less heat and consume less power as well as make less noise than the 7200rpm drive. And from what DF have tested back in 2014, it seems like it's faster as well (with some games making better use of the SSD cache portion than others), pretty sure there's a big difference in Bloodborne for example, which makes great use of Hybrid/SSD drives.

Edit: They just released a 32GB nand version of that drive (ST1000LX001 model), this should be considerably faster than any non-hybrid drive.

 

[djskribbles]

I don't know. I heard they were not very reliable (maybe I am wrong). I'd prefer a 7200rpm HDD.

Does anyone other than Seagate make hybrid drives? Personally not a fan of Seagate... have had a lot of bad experiences. If HGST or WD made one for a reasonable price, I'd consider.

I put a 1TB 7200RPM HGST drive in my PS4 at launch and have been very happy. While 7200RPM drives may be slightly louder, the PS4 isn't completely silent anyway. Have had no issues with heat either and I don't see anyone complaining in reviews.

I don't buy a lot of games so 1TB is way more than I'd ever need.

 

[Ika]

Video

How is trim handled over the USB connection, or they are testing the speed of the SSD without trimming?

 

[orangpelupa]

doesnt nowadays the FW itself will do the trim by itself?

 

[Clukos]

How is trim handled over the USB connection, or they are testing the speed of the SSD without trimming?

Trim is being handled by the SSD itself nowadays iirc.

 

[Ika]

Trim is being handled by the SSD itself nowadays iirc.

But the drive's spec says otherwise. I would be really surprised if the XBONE would do trim over USB by default, so I'm not really sure how "pro/expert" this test is (the drive can do idle time garbage collection, that might be enough tho, but we have no data how efficient that feature is).

"Performance Optimization TRIM (requires OS support)"

http://ocz.com/consumer/trion-100-ssd/specifications

 

[BRiT]

Trim merely ties deleted sectors to marking them as SSD garbage collection candidates that can be erased back to a free state. This wouldn't become an issue until you write more data to the ssd than the size of the entire ssd plus over-provisioning location. For the purpose of these speed comparison test I highly doubt they're even close to hitting that limit.

 

[3dilettante]

TRIM has become generally standard in the PC space, while in the early days when client SSDs were more niche there were significant problems with performance degradation and latency inconsistency as fresh blocks became used up and one was at the mercy of the sometimes poor garbage collection done by the drives.
There were workarounds that basically involved reformatting drives periodically before they got worse than the hard disks they were supposed to replace.

The various workarounds and mitigation measures like periodic formats or expanding the reserved space are not within reach of console users--although I have seen discussion of backing up data, ripping an SSD back out, plugging into a PC, reformatting, and then reinstalling in the console.

I have not had much luck finding an in-depth comparison between degraded and steady-state performance on many PC sites since TRIM has been taken more or less as a given--beyond "yup, performance doesn't suck with TRIM on".
The consistency and performance of modern higher-capacity drives that are using the less performant TLC flash and cheaper controllers is uncomfortably poor in various cases even with TRIM.

 

[Clukos]

I think the seagate hybrid drives are using MLC flash for the SSD portion of the drive.

 

[3dilettante]

Hybrid drives manage their flash as a cache for the underlying disk, so the drive controller should know whether specific blocks are free since the drive decides when they are.
Hard disks do have a different sort of fragmentation problem, which I have only seen rough workarounds for. Mentions for periodically prompting the PS4 to rebuild its database seem to allow it to defragment some of its data. Game installs and partitions tend to work in larger linear stretches, so I do not know how much its behavior might differ versus the more varied workload of a PC.

 

[Ika]

Trim merely ties deleted sectors to marking them as SSD garbage collection candidates that can be erased back to a free state. This wouldn't become an issue until you write more data to the ssd than the size of the entire ssd plus over-provisioning location. For the purpose of these speed comparison test I highly doubt they're even close to hitting that limit.

I made a lot of tests with SSD drives, and they get pretty slow without TRIM. I don't have the OZC drive in question, but the garbage collector is usually pretty weak in these drives.

Hybrid drives manage their flash as a cache for the underlying disk, so the drive controller should know whether specific blocks are free since the drive decides when they are.
Hard disks do have a different sort of fragmentation problem, which I have only seen rough workarounds for. Mentions for periodically prompting the PS4 to rebuild its database seem to allow it to defragment some of its data. Game installs and partitions tend to work in larger linear stretches, so I do not know how much its behavior might differ versus the more varied workload of a PC.

I remember, when these hybrid drives came out I was wondering why didn't they map the beginning of every sector/track/cluster to a SSD instead of using it as a cache... and I still wonder why nobody is doing that. The transfer speeds of modern hard drives are pretty good, they are slow because of the seek times. So if we could access the data from SSD while the head is seeking, things would be much faster... well at least in my theory:]

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I would have thought Unity would be better now, but it still gives crap performance.

It doesn't have to be though. Ori and the Blind Forest runs fantastically well and is gorgeous to boot on Unity. I have a theory that since Unity is generally (not always) used by smaller developers with smaller budgets that games based on Unity just don't get as much optimisation and polish as games based on say UE which is generally (not always) used by developers with a larger budget.

If you look at UE games by smaller developers with limited budget you'll also see quite inconsistent and sometimes extremely bad performance.

Digital Foundry: Should you upgrade Xbox One with an SSD?
Loading times are getting out of hand - can solid-state storage reduce waits on Microsoft's console?

It's interesting to see that Microsoft sourced such a SLOW drive. Either that or their internal interface is significantly slower than the one in the PS4. As external USB replacement drives using the same drives as PS4 are basically the same speed when running games.

Well, at least when you add faster storage you can still use your existing XBO drive to store media and smaller apps on it.

Regards,
SB