Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

[Deleted member 11852]

That's quite a task for a non-dev like me.

Fair enough. You can find most of these figures in these forums but really it was an exercise intended to demonstrate that the components in PCs and consoles operate at different speeds and are generally connected via a series of buses that work at much slower speeds then CPU/main DRAM and/or GPU/VRAM.

I'll tell how I came up with that question though so you know where I'm coming from.. I ran a search on google to know what it is that bottlenecks games to load fast these days. A lot of the answers I got is that the bottleneck has shifted to CPU now because it takes awhile to decompress assets.

The truth is there are bottlenecks are everywhere. The CPU in the current gen consoles is a definitely an issue though because modern 3D game engines are hugely compex and even when you're offloading some engine functions like physics, ray calculations and collisions to the GPU, there is still a lot left. And off-loading tasks to the GPU brings it's own administration/problems.

I would still recommend checking out all the GDC game developer presentations though, particularly for big games. They will often explain how to solved certain challenges which are almost always predicated on some bottleneck, beit RAM, CPU, GPU, or I/O or any combinations of these things.

You can forgive me then for wanting a cost-effective SSD cache to happen.

Don't we all! But it's no substitute for a healthy pool of fast RAM, it's several orders of magnitude too slow.

 

[Pinstripe]

What's more lilely for PC gamers? Forcing an upgrade to a NVMe SSD, or forcing ~32GB RAM as minimum, using it as a substitute for the console's "special" SSDs?

 

[megre]

Don't we all! But it's no substitute for a healthy pool of fast RAM, it's several orders of magnitude too slow.

Not with DDR4 though. It's a lot slower but not several orders of magnitude too slow than DDR4. A lot of games use a big portion of RAM to cache assets anyway. ReRAM is perfect for that job if it proves to be a lot cheaper per GB. It's a question of cost, that I understand.

The CPU in the current gen consoles is a definitely an issue though because modern 3D game engines are hugely compex and even when you're offloading some engine functions like physics, ray calculations and collisions to the GPU, there is still a lot left. And off-loading tasks to the GPU brings it's own administration/problems.

So what do you think of caching uncompressed data on the non-ReRAM SSD at 4gb/s? Wouldn't that prove to be advantageous at run-time?

 

[PSman1700]

forcing ~32GB RAM as minimum

32gb ram is going to be faster, and can be used for more besides the ssd.

 

[iroboto]

What's more lilely for PC gamers? Forcing an upgrade to a NVMe SSD, or forcing ~32GB RAM as minimum, using it as a substitute for the console's "special" SSDs?

Nvme would be a cheaper upgrade vs trying to go to 32GB+.
So I would think nvme would be the desired path if the consoles make that the baseline.
MS needs a serious update though. Not sure if they will keep the 4KB blocksizr default for nvme.

 

[iroboto]

So what do you think of caching uncompressed data on the non-ReRAM SSD at 4gb/s? Wouldn't that prove to be advantageous at run-time?

The consoles themselves are heavily customized to perform 2 functions
A) real time decryption
b) real time decompression
When you hear about heavily customized CPU and GPU you can bet it’s more about that than any real significant performance upgrade. The focus is to ensure the consoles cannot be hacked and run pirates games.
Ensuring things cannot be hacked is the utmost priority. So the hardware is customized to work with encrypted and compressed data. The CPU is largely not involved IIRC from the XBO presentation; or the blocks on the CPU have been customized to handle it.

 

[Miniature Kaiju]

An ASIC can do real time codec orders of magnitude faster than a CPU core, trade off being locked into one or a bunch of compression schemes.

Consoles never needed this kind of speed, so they never used them, but cameras, for instance, frequently do.

If you're shuttling +2GB/s worth of compressed data around, though, that might make sense.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

What's more lilely for PC gamers? Forcing an upgrade to a NVMe SSD, or forcing ~32GB RAM as minimum, using it as a substitute for the console's "special" SSDs?

What is special about the SSDs in the nextgen consoles?

 

[Pinstripe]

What is special about the SSDs in the nextgen consoles?

You tell me, that's what everyone is talking around here.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

You tell me, that's what everyone is talking around here.

People are guessing around here. Nobody can answer your question regarding NVMe SSD or 32Gb RAM until more is known about the nextgen solid state storage tech. Personally think a lot of people are reading too much into a bunch of Sony patents and forgetting Sony patent every crazy idea they come up with. People were reviewing Sony patents before the launch of PS4 and before the launch of PS3 and how much of that tech was inside those consoles?

Spoiler

Very few.

 

[megre]

Mine was not from patent. Well you could say it's worse because it's a non-existing product. But I have more than a patent registration to hold on to.

 

[Esrever]

People are way too focused on SSD speed which won't even be a bottleneck if the game is smart enough to stream data into RAM properly. Assets are still going to have to be in RAM to be used effectively and no matter how fast your SSD is, its still magnitudes slower than RAM. Both consoles will have to stream assets and I wouldn't expect the games to change much depending on the SSD speed because just having an NVMe SSD is already much faster than last gen.

That being said, on PC, NVMe is limited by the game software and eventually by the OS and CPU issuing the commands, you can already saturate an entire core of a CPU if you are doing something with XPoint. In XPoint, the DIMMs solution is much much faster than the NVMe solution, especially in latency. Expect there to be hardware solutions in both consoles to fix this where the NVMe talks with a dedicated chip rather than the CPU to streamline the whole thing. How much focus both console makers put into this chip will only really depend on their design goals.

 

[PSman1700]

People are guessing around here. Nobody can answer your question regarding NVMe SSD or 32Gb RAM until more is known about the nextgen solid state storage tech. Personally think a lot of people are reading too much into a bunch of Sony patents and forgetting Sony patent every crazy idea they come up with. People were reviewing Sony patents before the launch of PS4 and before the launch of PS3 and how much of that tech was inside those consoles?

You should see the GAF and resetera forums, it's like a virus how certain people spread all this crazy information they really think is true or is going to be. Discussions there have nothing to with speculating (realisticly) anymore. And as always, the PS5 is going to be special, has more power etc. All this while we don't know anything regarding paper specs.

 

[PSman1700]

hardware solutions in both consoles to fix this where the NVMe talks with a dedicated chip rather than the CPU to streamline the whole thing.

Adds extra cost though, and why isn't this used on PC, if that means freeing up a whole core from the cpu? Or are people going to need >8 core cpu's to match it?

 

[Esrever]

Adds extra cost though, and why isn't this used on PC, if that means freeing up a whole core from the cpu? Or are people going to need >8 core cpu's to match it?

Because software in PC isn't going to use it. These things would be small fixed function hardware that make sense in a console but is harder to push in PC. Software (and the OS) already being a bottleneck for general SSD related things, not even getting to NVMe. There is already not much speedup going from SATA SSD to NVMe on PC, trying to optimize NVMe isn't really on the menu yet. Servers have customized solutions depending on what they are designed for.

As for what the requirement for PCs next gen, I have no idea tbh. There might be a short period where loading is needed for PC while new consoles don't need it. Most games will be crossgen at the start so they would still need to design for previous gen with loading screens anyways. It could also be that there will be a tonne of texture pop next gen on console ports on PC until SSDs catches up on PC. Having more RAM requirement can also be a easy option for the devs if they choose to just preload earlier for slower drives.

 

[PSman1700]

Because software in PC isn't going to use it. These things would be small fixed function hardware that make sense in a console but is harder to push in PC. Software (and the OS) already being a bottleneck for general SSD related things, not even getting to NVMe. There is already not much speedup going from SATA SSD to NVMe on PC, trying to optimize NVMe isn't really on the menu yet. Servers have customized solutions depending on what they are designed for.

We don't know yet how it will be done in consoles, but i doubt the pc will be lagging behind forever For star citizen there's a big speedup, so it is possible to get a large boost.

 

[Rootax]

If I can have Yakuza's engine and Days Gone at 4k60 without loading, I'll be happy

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Adds extra cost though, and why isn't this used on PC, if that means freeing up a whole core from the cpu? Or are people going to need >8 core cpu's to match it?

Current gen consoles already had some minor customizations related to easing the processing required for decompression of data. XBO, for example has some slightly customized DMA engines specifically for this that weren't in PC GPUs at the time. I'm sure the PS4 had things on their end to help with this as well. Both consoles either feature customizations to the SOC or have additional chips to deal with the processing load associated with decrypting (as well as keeping that encryption secure) encrypted data.

With both consoles moving to SSD storage and focusing heavily on leveraging any benefit they can from that, we're likely to see significantly more customizations in both SOCs (or their associated chipsets) WRT to moving data from the SSD to the SOC.

What that entails is what some here are speculating about.

Moving that amount of data that quickly isn't a trivial task. Especially when you have compression and encryption involved. It becomes far more taxing than just moving data around which is already taxing.

Regards,
SB

 

[megre]

"When it comes to the PS5, faster hardware is always appreciated and will make life easier in the short term," Donnelly said, "But it's the new SSD that really stands out; essentially streaming will become something that we don't really have to worry so much about and it will free up some extra CPU bandwidth in the process."

Doesn't this sound like an SSD used as cache where game data sit uncompressed (or with very little compression)?

Or does it sound more like a separate secondary decompression chip?

The von Neumann bottleneck is the idea that computer system throughput is limited due to the relative ability of processors compared to top rates of data transfer.

 

[Globalisateur]

Doesn't this sound like an SSD used as cache where game data sit uncompressed (or with very little compression)?

Or does it sound more like a separate secondary decompression chip?

Dedicated decompression chip. There is a patent about it.