Next-Generation NVMe SSD and I/O Technology [PC, PS5, XBSX|S]

I have no numbers but I know that it motivated a lot people on the reddit destiny sub to buy a SSD as it has a real impact on the game experience. The game is also pretty much "unplayable" without external vault managers(on Phones,pads or laptops) and most destiny players use them. Convenience/Frustrations are an important motivation.

 

This is the thing, in any community it doesn't take any people talking about something to create a lot of noise - because people enthused about something that makes their life better often life to talk about it. That's doesn't necessarily equate to a large number of console owners buying SSDs. I recall DF did testing of SSD performance improvement on PS4 Pro and One X and the results ranged anywhere from insignificant to 50% improvements but not many instances at the higher-end because for most console games there are bottlenecks other than drive I/O.

 

https://www.psu.com/news/western-digital-unveils-its-first-ps5-compatible-ssd/

https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn850-nvme-ssd#WDS500G1X0E-00AFY0

 

How plausible is it that some of Velocity architecture or something similar is ported to the Xcloud. I am sure there was a mobo shot that had an Nvme connection,.I doubt the blades all have laptop hard drives in them. This is existing hardware not project scarlet.

The reason being there is a significant hardware investment out there. Xcloud has been referred to as a platform separate to its retail hardware equivalent. HDD speed is something that will not easily be worked around for next gen games but could be incorporated into the platform.

We have seen some games loading faster at a scale that looks CPU related and others that must be simply IO improvements as it's so drastically. The cloud could easily take on fast storage, potentially direct storage API.

 

Xcloud will be getting upgraded to XSX hardware for rollout next year.
With the first blade supposedly off the assembly line last week.

So not a matter of upgrading the 1S blades to VA, they will just get superceded.

 

My post was perhaps not clear, the question was 2 parts in my mind.

Will Xcloud become an independent SKU with its own hardware spec, and will current hardware be upgraded to SSD if that becomes part of it. Loading times for cloud seems a poor show and could be a pretty low effort upgrade for quality of life for users. Faster to initialise instances, faster to load or pre load the game before it even gets to playing the game. The CPU and GPU in Xcloud atm is slightly clocked higher than retail I believe to ensure a more reliable experience.

One S will be a platform for game support for a good few years and also perfectly viable for already released One and 360 titles, the new hardware will be running 4 Xbox One instances so this will be a deployment with a local SSD.

I am unsure on economics and power and heat but the newer one s blades seem relatively new, cool and bar the SSD very similar to the hardware replacing them at least if we think vanilla Xbox One code.

So factoring in the new servers that will have SSD storage locally, will Xcloud become a hybrid SKU for game devs if they wish, the rendering power of Xbox one with an dependable SSD that allows better performance.

If going hybrid they could add better memory bandwidth to remove ESRAM and project scarlet blades will have gddr6 but what overall bandwidth when the pool is split and under contention with the other instances is unknown.

Was just an idea, I think Xcloud is a large push, the GDK has cloud as a platform, Phil has also referred to it as a platform so I am not sure it's too far fetched to see it become it's own thing at some point. This may be reserved for Lockhart games which may fit better to streaming at a lower resolution with all the new technology but I feel even without game code changes a SSD for vanilla Xbox one could be better with better IO interconnects which the dedicated cloud design possibly already has.

Possibly not for this thread after thinking this response out, now it includes possible memory and economics...

 

I think they'll go with a chimera architecture. They'll need some solid state local to the virtual Xbox hardware to correctly mimic the Series X performance but they will not need or want as much local store as in a console, where the goal is to have spare storage to hold a lot of games. I would have thought that Microsoft would only want one central repository of software for several clusters of servers, if not server farm - depending on how they're configured.

 

Not sure where to put this but what exactly is going on here?:

PS4 loading times are improved as patches all but remove loading screens in first-party games
https://www.eurogamer.net/amp/2020-...but-remove-loading-times-in-first-party-games

 

Probably a change of loading strategy - from loading the whole level at once to loading the absolute minimum necessary.

 

Or handling loading with a single thread vs handling loading with 6 threads. Who knows what it is, hopefully someone will get the info from devs down the line.

 

Someone need to test those games again with various HDD speed and SSD.

 

IMO they should’ve left the patched disabled on PS4 while enabling it if PS5 is detected, that way, boom! 100x faster loading with the SSD!

 

It's frustrating that after a generation wasted on loading screens, only at the last moment they are finally finding ways to remove them.

 

I take this more as a "only at the last moment management has provided time for engineers to look at the issue, but only because it impacted their next-gen version".

 

Why frustrating? I can understand if you were disappointed but frustrated?

 

Because sometimes I've felt to be spending almost as much time waiting for playing as for the play itself.
I hate waiting minutes to just start a game to the point that I've brought an OneX just to mitigate it.
Until it was a technical problem, ok, nobody can do anything, but now is just that they barely cared?
And they are doing now just to say we could have, if only we cared, bwahahahahahah!

 

Totally understandable

The differences in times seem too good to be true
Though Im not sure whats being tested?

1/ HDD before vs HDD now
2/ SSD before vs SSD now

if its #2 then I can understand the speed up, as they would write for whats actually standard in a ps4, i.e. HDD
if its #1 then I have no idea why theres such a large speed up

 

Loading times were never a priority. After all, the game was a PS3 game ported to PS4. So on PS3 it was readable from the disc (and cached to the HDD) and on PS4 it was always on the HDD. I'm just guessing here, but I think loading times were just good enough when porting it and no more time went into optimizing those speeds.

Now with PS5 they might just tried some more things and tweaked the engine to load faster because loading on PS5 is now a priority. So they must have also changed how the game loads. And the PS4 has much more CPU-power (general purpose power vs the single power core in PS3) there, so they could change some things to the engine, load things later (or just in time, ...).

A test on PS5 would be interesting. Loading with and without the patch.

 

I had completely forgotten that most physical PS3 games ran from disc.

 

Imagine the noise if PS4/One games still ran from Optical media!