Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [pre E3 2019]

[iroboto]

Spider-man is a ~50GB games with dozens of fast travel points. How could they possibly cache the destination data ahead of time in RAM unless they were faking the whole thing?

TD has a cached fast travel. As long as you are fast travelling within closer Zones to the player the load times are significantly faster. So without knowing which two points were chosen for fast travel, and/or how it works, we’re granting a lot of assumptions.

And TD is a slow moving game. And you can fast travel directly onto a player on your squad making it fairly dynamic, ie it’s not like you can cache just the fast travel points and begin streaming from there. A fast moving game like Spider-Man might have larger separation zones. Etc etc.

The Spider-Man demo was good to zero in on how the difference could be between this and next gen, but a cold boot of a game is more definitive when we’re discussing the nature of storage I/O performance.

 

[bgroovy]

TD has a cached fast travel. As long as you are fast travelling within closer Zones to the player the load times are significantly faster. So without knowing which two points were chosen for fast travel, and/or how it works, we’re granting a lot of assumptions.

So we have to assume they knowingly chose a destination that would be cached. So, deception. And that still ignores the other demo that showed they could go anywhere in the city at jet speed. Was the whole city cached in RAM? Seems like people are working awful hard to make it seem like the PS5 will be worse than claimed on the most strained premises possible.

 

[iroboto]

So we have to assume they knowingly chose a destination that would be cached. So, deception. And that still ignores the other demo that showed they could go anywhere in the city at jet speed. Was the whole city cached in RAM? Seems like people are working awful hard to make it seem like the PS5 will be worse than claimed on the most strained premises possible.

No we aren't working hard to prove anything.
No one is saying it can't do this or that. No one is saying it's not ssd or is ssd, or some variant of it.
We're discussing.
But ultimately, we're just saying, it would be a hell of a lot easier to narrow down what it is; if he showed a cold boot.

 

[MrFox]

Reading every quote from Cerny and the identifiable facts from the interview, I see no margin left for speculating a ram solution.

It's great exploring the corner cases, but simply adding more ram just doesn't fit if you accept his statements as accurate.

I think the only possibilities left are either a full ssd, or a tiered storage. The mechanisms necessary to achieve this with a tiered storage (ssd+hdd) is much more interesting to discuss than just a plain non-upgradeable fast ssd.

 

[iroboto]

And that still ignores the other demo that showed they could go anywhere in the city at jet speed

You should be questioning that. Because the game doesn't allow you to do that. And we stopped running physics and game logic on per update tick a long time ago.
Just because the hardware is faster, that shouldn't mean that all of a sudden spiderman can swing through the world at warp speed. There are game locks to limit spider man's speed for game sake.
You should be questioning your own evidence. Either the interpretation is very off, or this is a modified version of spiderman.

 

[BRiT]

Its just less impressive showing speed improvements in loading between 600 meg to 2500 meg than showing speedups for entire game bootups. I'm sure Sony has a really impressive comprehensive IO system and it would be nice to see it entirely.

 

[Scott_Arm]

So we have to assume they knowingly chose a destination that would be cached. So, deception. And that still ignores the other demo that showed they could go anywhere in the city at jet speed. Was the whole city cached in RAM? Seems like people are working awful hard to make it seem like the PS5 will be worse than claimed on the most strained premises possible.

Yes. I find most of the talk in this thread kind of weird right now.

On the TV, Spidey stands in a small plaza. Cerny presses a button on the controller, initiating a fast-travel interstitial screen. When Spidey reappears in a totally different spot in Manhattan, 15 seconds have elapsed. Then Cerny does the same thing on a next-gen devkit connected to a different TV. (The devkit, an early “low-speed” version, is concealed in a big silver tower, with no visible componentry.) What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact.

People can choose to believe there's some kind of attempt at deception, like staging fast travel to near locations they know will be caches, or a RAM based solution which makes little to no sense, but the quotes in the article and the context of the article suggest something more than a slow HDD with a fast cache of any sort. Sounds a lot more like an SSD as the base drive with some kind of enhancements.

What else developers will be able to do is a question Cerny can’t answer yet, because those developers are still figuring it all out—but he sees the SSD as unlocking an entirely new age, one that upends the very tropes that have become the bedrock of gaming. “We're very used to flying logos at the start of the game and graphic-heavy selection screens," he says, "even things like multiplayer lobbies and intentionally detailed loadout processes, because you don't want players just to be waiting."

At the moment, Sony won’t cop to exact details about the SSD—who makes it, whether it utilizes the new PCIe 4.0 standard—but Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. That’s not all. “The raw read speed is important,“ Cerny says, “but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster." As opposed to 19 times faster for the next-gen console, judging from the fast-travel demo.

Again, saying that the solution is anything but an SSD drive seems intentionally obtuse, or devil's advocate to the point of being obtuse. This is what they're choosing to hype to get ahead of the leaks. We'll see if the actual hardware lives up to these claims, but it seems fairly clear that what they're pitching is a revolution in loading times, not an "it loads fast in some situations but as slow as before in others."

 

[iroboto]

Again, saying that the solution is anything but an SSD drive seems intentionally obtuse, or devil's advocate to the point of being obtuse. This is what they're choosing to hype to get ahead of the leaks. We'll see if the actual hardware lives up to these claims, but it seems fairly clear that what they're pitching is a revolution in loading times, not an "it loads fast in some situations but as slow as before in others."

I generally have issues when I read numbers like 19 times faster.
We have major revolutions in gaming just being to be 2x to 3x faster. That's just ray tracing.
Being 2x to 3x faster is already, massive. 19 seconds becomes 6. Or in the case of his PS4 example, 19 should become 12 by installing SSD.
When 19 seconds becomes 0.8 seconds and I see an argument that its performance is strictly just storage (not the massive bump in going from Jaguar to the unreleased Zen 2, not the change in the bus speeds 8 years later; and I can't don't have access to it or can't purchase it because it's faster than what's available on PC ssds, red flags are up for me on the argument.

The idea that they could come up with a I/O raw storage reading better than industry players who do data centers, is intriguing at the very least, how many records does google have to smash through to get your results in a fraction of a second; I mean they run really slow hard drives, they can't all be SSD.

We need that type of tech everywhere in the world, if this is actually a Sony designed solution, being told it's limited to a PS5 is non-sensical to me, Sony would profit more from selling it. There's certainly a lot more money there to be made.

 

[bgroovy]

You should be questioning that. Because the game doesn't allow you to do that. And we stopped running physics and game logic on per update tick a long time ago.
Just because the hardware is faster, that shouldn't mean that all of a sudden spiderman can swing through the world at warp speed. There are game locks to limit spider man's speed for game sake.
You should be questioning your own evidence. Either the interpretation is very off, or this is a modified version of spiderman.

It's pretty clear in the article they are using debug modes controlling a free camera and not actually controlling spider-man. Why would you even think otherwise? The whole point of the demo was that, even decoupled from spider man's movement, on ps4 you can't move any faster because you are waiting for data to load from the drive. On PS5 the huge increase in storage speed means you can go at lightning speed, wherever you want because you aren't limited by asset streaming.

 

[iroboto]

. Why would you even think otherwise?

Reading the article, I did not get your interpretation at all. I'm sorry.
If in debug mode, you're moving faster on a faster system, it's probably because the system is faster, not because the storage is faster. This is usually how I interpret things.

If we had 2 PCs side by side trying to render real-time ray tracing, one with RTX card and one without in a heavy ray traced scene, would you attribute the performance difference to the hard drive just because it was zooming down the hallway faster?

No because that's not how we do benchmarking.
We keep the same PC in it's entirety, and we swap the components out individually and see where the performance changes.

You didn't get that type of benchmark.
PS4 Pro runs Spiderman at 30fps right?
So something that is more than double it's graphical power can run the game at 60fps+ right?
So in debug mode where it doesn't lock framerate, wouldn't it just process everything 2x-3x faster thus -zooming around- the world like a jet?

I get there is something there with speed; how much are we going to attribute to raw hard drive performance here is what I'm debating.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

This doesn't really leave much room for interpretation. The faster storage allows faster asset streaming and thus faster movement in a game world given the same scene complexity. Framerate is a separate issue.

What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact.

That’s just one consequence of an SSD. There’s also the speed with which a world can be rendered, and thus the speed with which a character can move through that world. Cerny runs a similar two-console demonstration, this time with the camera moving up one of Midtown’s avenues. On the original PS4, the camera moves at about the speed Spidey hits while web-slinging. “No matter how powered up you get as Spider-Man, you can never go any faster than this,” Cerny says, “because that's simply how fast we can get the data off the hard drive.” On the next-gen console, the camera speeds uptown like it’s mounted to a fighter jet.

 

[HBRU]

really impressive tech in ps5... it seems ps5 will not be cheap... so expensive Ps5 and a new -cheap- myabe also a bit improved ps4pro@7nm ? I see the new Rage2 running @30fps on base ps4 and @60fps on ps4 pro with same res 1080 p..

 

[cheapchips]

I was trying to find the price trend of actual NAND chips rather than SSDs, off the back of a few articles talking about prices crashing through this year. Drew a blank, or at least a paywall, on that.

There's a few analyst quotes, for what they're worth, on cost dropping double digit percentages per quarter.

Is it a lower cost solution for them to buy chips and have the storage solution be part of the main board? I'd assume the technical hurdles to that are minimal?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

In an interview with Mike Ybarra, he was asked about improving install time and load time (in reference to sony). His answer was that they are working on it but they don't want to require the devs to have to do anything, otherwise it won't be used.

And yet devs put effort into learning Cell and ESRAM, devs supported DualShock gyros and the touchpad, to a lesser degree they supported Kinnect of PS4 camera controls, devs put high fidelity audio in consoles that support them and devs make an effort to PS4 games to stream and control well on Vita so the notion devs won't take advantage of of extra hardware is ridiculous.

A fully transparent method precludes a small flash area which would require the devs to tag what needs to be in the high speed storage, and what needs to be there first.

Hybrid drive file systems do this automatically, putting the most accessed files into the faster area.

What is the message here? Don't buy PS5 for insta-loads because if Xbox 4 doesn't have, third parties won't use it. As somebody who still buys about half of my games on disc (no fibre or cable options for internet) I know most devs support PS4's fast-install process. WATCH_DOGS 2 and Mass Effect Andromeda are both playable from about 30 seconds after putting the disc in for a fresh install. Ditto the Tomb Raider reboots, Horizon Zero Dawn, Shadow of Mordor / War etc.

If you build it, they will come.

 

[Globalisateur]

Yep, it's clear now insta-loading will be an exclusive feature of PS5 like Play-go was (and still is) for PS4.

 

[HBRU]

Dsoup you forget Sony has exvlusives (1) not exlcusive games runs also on PC and also PC may adopt similar loading solutions (2)... almost sure MS will not stay behind as this feature is incredibly good (3)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This doesn't really leave much room for interpretation. The faster storage allows faster asset streaming and thus faster movement in a game world given the same scene complexity. Framerate is a separate issue.

Yeah, that one solid. Reading it again, you're right, it's a demo mode and not actually in game. that's something lots of people missed, reading it as though being played. TBH the article could have been written a lot better, but it's really just a flavour piece rather than a technical bible!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Dsoup you forget Sony has exvlusives (1) not exlcusive games runs also on PC and also PC may adopt similar loading solutions...

Given the IO stack PC has to use, is that really possible? If we look at DX12 providing console-like low overheads to graphics drawing, it hasn't been adopted in any big way or achieved the results we'd like. Some SSD accelerated API thing is likely going to face the same, taking time to be introduced and time to be adopted. I don't think there's much likelihood of PC getting a similar super-fast load system any time soon, giving consoles that crown for at least the first few years of their life. Which as I said before will be nice, akin to putting in a cartridge and playing.

 

[HBRU]

yeah... if true Sony has again guessed a winning feature... maybe a bit les of Teraflops but warp speed loading in certain games are soooo good

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Given the IO stack PC has to use, is that really possible?

Everything being disconnected is the PC's biggest advantage in flexibility and the biggest challenge in reducing bottlenecks because every bridge and bus is a bottleneck. Although nothing is known about the next PlayStation or Sony's approach to reducing load times, the simpler architecture of a console makes that both easier and cheaper to solve than on Windows.