Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [2018]

[function]

Might be some value in discussing SSD.
https://gearnuke.com/microsoft-looking-staff-leads-next-gen-xbox-development/

I'm kinda hopeful that a custom memory arrangement might involve, say, 64 GB of SLC as pool for developer controlled game working space, dash and suspend ... and then use dirty QLC with automated external caching for game installs.

There comes a point where the correct balance between durability and capacity is separate pools. Some SSDs already have an SLC cache. On console, might as well expand that cache and treat a part of it as an additional pool because it's not like you're needing to protect a low durability SSD against a Windows pagefile.

 

[eastmen]

If you look at IHS (iSupply) breakdowns for consoles you'll see that the HDD has never cost more than 10% of the RRP and it's usually much lower. I don't see decent sized SSDs dropping that fast even by 2020. If games continue to trend upwards of 100Gb, 1Tb is going to be your realistic minimum with 4Tb (or more) for keen gamers.

I mean I can't find a tear down of either the xbox one or ps4 at launch with the price of the HDD . If I can buy a 1TB m.2 sata 960 evo drive for $120 as a final cost to me its going to be much less to actually produce and much less for a huge company like MS or Sony buying millions of them.

I also don't see a huge problem with drive size. 1TB would be fine at launch and you can even make a premium sku with higher storage. MS can also simply offer their own solution for external drives and designate performance they have to hit to be considered compatable.

Your own point about games is the issue. If games are trending upwards of 100Gb whats going to happen when consoles get access to 24 or 32 gigs of ram which a next gen console might have ? How will a 2.5 inch mechanical drive handle that ? Even the best 2.5 inch drives I've seen barely break 120Mb/s reads. If my math is right at a 120Mb/s that's 7,200Mb a minute. So your trending close to three and a half minutes of loading to fill 24gigs and almost four and a half for 32gigs and that's before seek times to find the data you want. A 500Mb/s ssd will transfer 30,000M/b a minute. So it would take less than a minute to load 24 gigs and just over a minute for 32gigs. If you go with an nvme drive that's up to 3,400Mb/s . So you can load that 32 gigs of ram in less than 10 seconds. I believe my math is right but I could be off. However moving to nand at this point in time could be one of the biggest performance increases we could get with next generation. You could get away with a lower ram amount with more turn over from nand with nvme drives

 

[MrFox]

Flash cache plus hdd remains the only reasonable solution so far (depending when it launch), and power users can still replace it to get faster load times... The guaranteed streaming bandwidth would be predictable and the drive itself would only affect preloading time. It's the best of both worlds.

I bought a 1TB SSD in 2012, moved it to my ps4 at launch, then moved it to my ps4 pro... Hopefully the same drive will go in my ps5. Pretty good investment when they allowed user-replaceable drives since 2006. MS should take a hint.

 

[eastmen]

Flash cache plus hdd remains the only reasonable solution so far (depending when it launch), and power users can still replace it to get faster load times... The guaranteed streaming bandwidth would be predictable and the drive itself would only affect preloading time. It's the best of both worlds.

I bought a 1TB SSD in 2012, moved it to my ps4 at launch, then moved it to my ps4 pro... Hopefully the same drive will go in my ps5. Pretty good investment when they allowed user-replaceable drives since 2006. MS should take a hint.

MS allows usb external drives. So you can easily hook up an SSD to your xbox. I have a 512 gig hooked up to mine and I keep games on that and apps like Netflix on the original drive.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I mean I can't find a tear down of either the xbox one or ps4 at launch with the price of the HDD . If I can buy a 1TB m.2 sata 960 evo drive for $120 as a final cost to me its going to be much less to actually produce and much less for a huge company like MS or Sony buying millions of them.

$37 so 9.25% of PS4's build costs and 7.4% of Xbox One.

I also don't see a huge problem with drive size. 1TB would be fine at launch and you can even make a premium sku with higher storage. ... ... ... Your own point about games is the issue.

A 1Tb drive is fine when you first buy the console but that fills up real quick with modern games. As for worrying about how quickly data is pulled off, I wouldn't worry about that too much. Huge amounts of data filling memory isn't data pulled off the drive, it's game world and state data.

 

[eastmen]

$37 so 9.25% of PS4's build costs and 7.4% of Xbox One.



A 1Tb drive is fine when you first buy the console but that fills up real quick with modern games. As for worrying about how quickly data is pulled off, I wouldn't worry about that too much. Huge amounts of data filling memory isn't data pulled off the drive, it's game world and state data.

Thanks , when I searched I only found articles refrencing it without the hardrive price but with other prices in it.

As for the data filling memory , Where will all the 4k textures come from ?

 

[goonergaz]

MS allows usb external drives. So you can easily hook up an SSD to your xbox. I have a 512 gig hooked up to mine and I keep games on that and apps like Netflix on the original drive.

FYI, so do Sony.

 

[eastmen]

FYI, so do Sony.

I never said they didn't. I was responding to the drive swapping issue. I prefer just adding a drive as it gives you more bang for your buck

 

[goonergaz]

I never said they didn't. I was responding to the drive swapping issue. I prefer just adding a drive as it gives you more bang for your buck

Sorry if I read it wrong, but It was kind of implied as it was in response to MrFox who was saying MS should learn from Sony and allow internal HDD swaps', read in that context it's like 'yeah but MS allow something Sony don't'.

Personally I prefer the neater solution of internal HDD swapping, it also means all the system files (etc) are on the faster SSD rather than fitted HDD.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think the ideal everyone wants is both - swappable internal and running content off external.

 

[goonergaz]

I think the ideal everyone wants is both - swappable internal and running content off external.

Like Sony offer...best of both worlds.

 

[milk]

As for the data filling memory , Where will all the 4k textures come from ?

From the same place they come from in Xbox X

 

[Deleted member 11852]

As for the data filling memory , Where will all the 4k textures come from ?

You misunderstand, what I’m saying is memory is not filled with data pulled from the HDD and not all games need all the data before you can begin interacting with it. Game designers have used many tricks to give the appearance of the game being ready to play while it’s still streaming in the background.

 

[MrFox]

You misunderstand, what I’m saying is memory is not filled with data pulled from the HDD and not all games need all the data before you can begin interacting with. Game designers have used many tricks to give the appearance of the game being rea.dy to play while it’s still streaming in the background.

Also the assets being read from the disk is all LZ compressed or otherwise a lossy compression for textures. It has to be uncompressed in memory. Then there's all the render buffers taking a big chunk of memory too.

If they go wild with a high speed cache, they will have to use a much bigger Amiga Blitter to decompress the data at line rate. Otherwise load times might hit a hard limit regardless of the SSD speed.

 

[eastmen]

Sorry if I read it wrong, but It was kind of implied as it was in response to MrFox who was saying MS should learn from Sony and allow internal HDD swaps', read in that context it's like 'yeah but MS allow something Sony don't'.

Personally I prefer the neater solution of internal HDD swapping, it also means all the system files (etc) are on the faster SSD rather than fitted HDD.

I think the ideal everyone wants is both - swappable internal and running content off external.

Like Sony offer...best of both worlds.

How does Sony cover issues that might arise with swapped drives ? I am not sure for the end user its really the best of both worlds

 

[eastmen]

You misunderstand, what I’m saying is memory is not filled with data pulled from the HDD and not all games need all the data before you can begin interacting with it. Game designers have used many tricks to give the appearance of the game being ready to play while it’s still streaming in the background.

and what we have ended up with are games that have repetitive textures to make up for the lack of streaming speed.

 

[milk]

and what we have ended up with are games that have repetitive textures to make up for the lack of streaming speed.

Studios started relying heavily on offline procedural texture tools for their content creation. They became a standard practice of high end production's much like z-brush had last gen. Mark my words, a lot of the synthesizing of the final textures will move to run-time next gen. So there's much less raw texture data to stream from HDD. It's a bet I'm making.

 

[turkey]

Studios started relying heavily on offline procedural texture tools for their content creation. They became a standard practice of high end production's much like z-brush had last gen. Mark my words, a lot of the synthesizing of the final textures will move to run-time next gen. So there's much less raw texture data to stream from HDD. It's a bet I'm making.

I think procedural and ML creation will take off, cost saving when generating such detailed world's alone will demand it.

If that's done client side or not, consoles are unlikely to have that much power to burn or the bandwidth time saved will be lost to CPU cycles.

Are there not better virtual memory mapping techniques and hardware support allowing far less wasteful fetching of texture data. Or is this about a different issue?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

and what we have ended up with are games that have repetitive textures to make up for the lack of streaming speed.

There are a lot of repeating textures and geometry in real life. I don't know what games you're thinking of but when I think of games with great streaming I think of GTA, Fallout, RDR, Far Cry and Assassin's Creed.

 

[milk]

I think procedural and ML creation will take off, cost saving when generating such detailed world's alone will demand it.

What I'm saying is this has already happened.