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

wasn't async compute also in physx era and still works much worse on best on market single geforce vs performance one + lowend gpu, to this day don't know why, and every iteration of new geforce nvidia claim they improved async and still was same story
They improved their GPUs’ async compute capability but didn’t improve PhysX itself much it seems, I wouldn’t be surprise if PhysX still does things in D3D10 ways.
 
sorry I'm not tracking rtx io so much as this tech. is already on consoles since last year but can you show me example of rtx io usage while rendering game (like portals in Ratchet) ? thx

PC's have been using async compute in games for years now. It's obviously not a problem, I'm not sure why you'd assume it will be.
 
I don't really know what you're asking...

It's a pretty safe bet that the combination of DirectStorage, fast SSDs, and GPU decompression will offer performance that beats the PS5.

The PS5 is only impressive because nobody expected a console to have such fast storage but compared to the relatively unrestrained world of PC hardware, it's really not that impressive.

I'm just happy that games being built with fast storage in mind is now a baseline.

SSD/IO/NVME tech is already much ahead hardware wise on pc, quite much so. In special when considering more and faster RAM aswell. Software seems to be aight aswell with MS/NV/AMD/XBOX etc backing this whole thing.

The decompression on the GPU is going to be more flexible and faster, the PS5 got outdated quite fast like this imo.

yes and probably that will be the case but as physx showed sometimes things are more complicated and switching context of computing can be problematic but not saying I have some knowledge and will be the case in rtx io (as probably will be ok) but lets wait for some results to use declarative statement

Lol, still physix i see :p It didnt even do bad, the tech was actually integrated into their GPUs and still are even as of today. Just like decompression can be done without dedicated hardware (and much faster and more flexible at that).

Here’s someone’s implementation of Ratchet Clanking’s portal in UE4 without DirectStorage and/or RTX I/O.

https://twitter.com/TheGabmeisterX/status/1404088931453259779

I dont care how they did that, its just as impressive, if not more so, then the what the PS5 has shown with rift apart.
 
It looks like internal PS5 drive is fully optimized for reading data. Writing is a bit slow.



Some drive data by Era memeber MrFox:

Drive: SN850 2TB
Heatsink: MHQJRH from amazon
TIM: full surface on both sides, came with the heatsink
Probe location: center of controller, bottom of heatsink grove
EMI Cover is closed, but 1mm gap because of the wire

Ambient Temp: 26.8C

Idle warmup: 37.02C


Copy 400GB to expansion (5m30)
Max temp: 41.75C

Idle cool down: 37.91C

Copy 400GB back to internal (30m31)
Max temp: 38.72C

This is an indirect measurement through the TIM and heatsink base, so the controller real die temp would probably be around 20C above these measurements, meaning the controller is probably peaking at 60C and the NAND mostly stable around 45C (guess work napkin math). This is pretty much ideal. The throttling is starting at 92C for this drive.

As expected, whoever claim their drive overheated obviously didn't put a heatsink on it at all. But I wouldn't be surprised we start seeing some drives later on that don't even require a heatsink. The SN850 is one of the hottest drive at 9W peak while writing, so it does require one.

The internal drive have a surprisingly slow write, more than enough for any installation speed, but not fast for copying to it. But I don't really know in what real world circumstances you'd need to move data between the two nvme. Normally you'd just install games wherever there's space left, and delete games to install new ones when it's full. You'd move only if you want to remove it or something.
 
It looks like internal PS5 drive is fully optimized for reading data. Writing is a bit slow.



Some drive data by Era memeber MrFox:

Drive: SN850 2TB
Heatsink: MHQJRH from amazon
TIM: full surface on both sides, came with the heatsink
Probe location: center of controller, bottom of heatsink grove
EMI Cover is closed, but 1mm gap because of the wire

Ambient Temp: 26.8C

Idle warmup: 37.02C


Copy 400GB to expansion (5m30)
Max temp: 41.75C

Idle cool down: 37.91C

Copy 400GB back to internal (30m31)
Max temp: 38.72C

This is an indirect measurement through the TIM and heatsink base, so the controller real die temp would probably be around 20C above these measurements, meaning the controller is probably peaking at 60C and the NAND mostly stable around 45C (guess work napkin math). This is pretty much ideal. The throttling is starting at 92C for this drive.

As expected, whoever claim their drive overheated obviously didn't put a heatsink on it at all. But I wouldn't be surprised we start seeing some drives later on that don't even require a heatsink. The SN850 is one of the hottest drive at 9W peak while writing, so it does require one.

The internal drive have a surprisingly slow write, more than enough for any installation speed, but not fast for copying to it. But I don't really know in what real world circumstances you'd need to move data between the two nvme. Normally you'd just install games wherever there's space left, and delete games to install new ones when it's full. You'd move only if you want to remove it or something.
If the write speed is any indication, then PS5 will never have a QuickResume-like feature.
 
If the write speed is any indication, then PS5 will never have a QuickResume-like feature.

It could be done, just be a little slower. It would only need to write ~12 GBs before reading in the new game. That's assuming it doesn't compress it beforehand.
 
1/6th the write speed of the SN850 would put it at a bit under 1000 MB/s. So it would take like 14-15 seconds to copy RAM to disc versus the 5-6 seconds of the Xbox. Not really a big deal, honestly.

I just wish they'd bring the feature to the PC. For me that's the one killer feature of this console generation so far. I was hoping it would be announced with Windows 11 but sadly not. I still hold out hope for a post Direct Storage launch announcement though. With a high end PC SDD you could copy 16GB to the SDD in a little over 2 seconds...
 
I just wish they'd bring the feature to the PC. For me that's the one killer feature of this console generation so far. I was hoping it would be announced with Windows 11 but sadly not. I still hold out hope for a post Direct Storage launch announcement though. With a high end PC SDD you could copy 16GB to the SDD in a little over 2 seconds...
I suspect there are some complications on how to preserve GPU states, including driver states. Xbox’s system fires up a virtual machine instance for every game, which could simplify “hibernating” a game.
 
It looks like internal PS5 drive is fully optimized for reading data. Writing is a bit slow.



Some drive data by Era memeber MrFox:

Drive: SN850 2TB
Heatsink: MHQJRH from amazon
TIM: full surface on both sides, came with the heatsink
Probe location: center of controller, bottom of heatsink grove
EMI Cover is closed, but 1mm gap because of the wire

Ambient Temp: 26.8C

Idle warmup: 37.02C


Copy 400GB to expansion (5m30)
Max temp: 41.75C

Idle cool down: 37.91C

Copy 400GB back to internal (30m31)
Max temp: 38.72C

This is an indirect measurement through the TIM and heatsink base, so the controller real die temp would probably be around 20C above these measurements, meaning the controller is probably peaking at 60C and the NAND mostly stable around 45C (guess work napkin math). This is pretty much ideal. The throttling is starting at 92C for this drive.

As expected, whoever claim their drive overheated obviously didn't put a heatsink on it at all. But I wouldn't be surprised we start seeing some drives later on that don't even require a heatsink. The SN850 is one of the hottest drive at 9W peak while writing, so it does require one.

The internal drive have a surprisingly slow write, more than enough for any installation speed, but not fast for copying to it. But I don't really know in what real world circumstances you'd need to move data between the two nvme. Normally you'd just install games wherever there's space left, and delete games to install new ones when it's full. You'd move only if you want to remove it or something.
Please consider that all those tests use the same controller chip. Sony might not have used two ways to read and write at the same time through it as this scenario might never have been an option for games. Copy a game from one drive to another is still fast enough. So I guess the controller is the real bottleneck here in those tests.
But this is just my guess. Doesn't really make sense to give the controller a bigger interface to read and write at the same time. Just increases costs with no real benefit.
 
Not that I consider write speed really relevant for consoles but the 222MB/s makes me wonder how they "achieved" that.

Is it faster than a PS4 with a SSD connected to the SATA-2 bus?:)
 
RadTools/Oodle is also now licensed for the PS4 and PS5 now hence why they PS4 got a compression boost at the beginning of the year and we have seen games coming in a bit smaller on the platform. The best compression has been the PS5 games though.
 
It could be done, just be a little slower. It would only need to write ~12 GBs before reading in the new game. That's assuming it doesn't compress it beforehand.
Do we know if the Xbox is doing hardware compression when saving RAM to storage for Quick Resume?
 
Not that I consider write speed really relevant for consoles but the 222MB/s makes me wonder how they "achieved" that.

Is it faster than a PS4 with a SSD connected to the SATA-2 bus?:)

I can't speak for the newer consoles but my modded PS3 only copies files at ~15MB/s with an SSD. PS4 writes have similarly always struck me as being slower than they should be and I've often wondered if it wasn't the filesystem or disk encryption that caused this.

It's harder to talk about PS5 but it might be as simple as the disk lacking an SLC cache. TLC NAND tends to have rather poor write speeds without such a cache which the 980 Pro has. I believe it's about 90GB (when empty) on DF's 500GB drive.
 
Do we know if the Xbox is doing hardware compression when saving RAM to storage for Quick Resume?
IMHO this is the only reason why the console also supports compression in hardware. I really can't think of another scenario why the console should have such a compression block. Recording gameplay is encoded and not a good case for data compression. So no need there.
Save games are far to small, can be done by the CPU instantly.
Dumping the memory to the SSD, maximizing throughput and saving write cycles on the SSD (and space) is the only think that I can imagine there.


What is really clear with the write speeds of the SSD that the PS5 will never support something like quick resume. ~200mb/s is just not enough for a quick memory dump.

But maybe game developers can do something similar by making a sort of quick save and quick load function. Quick resume so far is ... more like brute forcing such a feature. The quick save/load from the game would be much more elegant but than the developer has much more work to do.
 
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