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

i think something similar to quick load already happens on ps5 with the game card system, when you press a card of a certain thing to do of a game, it loads you in the game at the moment chosen in 2s.

 

A new patent from Mark Cerny seems to indicate that SIE could have implemented an automatic asset streaming mechanism on the PS5 (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/0b/54/29/45ad05727f7942/WO2021002949A1.pdf). Importantly, it uses a LOD clamp to ensure that the GPU will only render with the LOD that is actually available in cache/memory and not stall by waiting for loading of the optimal LOD of the MIP chain. If this has indeed been implemented in the PS5, it will confirms a few things:

(1) That SIE has also a JIT streaming system implemented in hardware that bears some homology to Xbox's SFS.

(2) That the PS5 has no sampler feedback as this asset aware system is mip-based while SFS is tile-based. Moreover, there is no mention of a filtering mechanism to blend in higher LODs as they become available.

 

That is just a flag for the game to jump over intros etc. Nothing really special. But still a nice feature after those publisher intros can take some time.

 

more than that as you jump straight into the game were the mission selected begins and with your savestate loaded without going by the title screen.

 

What's the xbsx write speed from the Seagate expansion to internal memory? I can't find any tests.
Edit: found one test from PC Mag

 

From the DF Article, SeriesX Secondary to Primary was faster than PS5 Secondary to Primary while PS5 Primary to Secondary was faster than SeriesX Primary to Secondary:

It's worth stressing that repeat tests on Xbox gave a highly variable range of results. Even on rebooting the machine, or disconnecting from the internet, transfer times proved varied - something to bear in mind. Transferring Cyberpunk from Xbox's stock SSD to a Seagate expansion card, the best case puts average transfer speeds at 0.69GB/s, and at worst 0.42GB/s in transferring the exact same data. In all cases, it's much slower than the PS5 transfer test to its M.2 expansion. Meanwhile, the reverse journey on Series X - transferring Cyberpunk from its Seagate expansion card to its internal SSD - gives a transfer rate of 0.67GB/s at best and 0.55GB/s at worst. A mixed bag of results then: writing to the Seagate storage card was much slower than copying a game to the M2 drive on PS5. However, in copying the data back to the internal SSD, Xbox Series X was always significantly faster.​

 

I guess these differences in speed come down to the cooling, as writing data produces more heat. That might explain why quick resume is ... well quick ... as it only reads/writes up to 14 gb of data (less if they compress the data).

How far it jumps into the game must be programmed by the developers. It is a QoL improvement for sure, but is always extra work to do. Like I wrote, quick resume is just a brute forcing method to support something similar without the need of extra work for the developer (only if an online connection is part of the game ... even if it only is some kind of savegame transfer to the cloud which needs an online connection and must reconnect after quick resume, even if the token is expired (looking at you ubisoft and my lost hours in AC valhalla because of connection problems)).

Quick resume plus the Playstation 5 method would be optimal. As old games could use quick-resume and stuff that does not need to be inside of the memory can be pushed back. E.g. they could implement a system message that tells the game "clear your unneeded data from memory, I want to save the state" and on reload most data could be regenerated or reloaded. This could than also be compatible with the write-speed of the PS5 as most data in memory might not be needed to resume, but the OS can't decide which data can reloaded/regenerated and which is the real state the game can work with.
But this can be complicated and opens the window for new bugs. The method to directly load the first savegame without publisher logo etc would already be great for most cases.

 

It is worth noting that the PS5 already has Quick resume for the currently played game, so it may also just not have been on the feature priority list. And yeah the slow write speed to the internal drive is interesting, but as yet we don’t know if that is a hardware limitation, of the SSD chip setup, of the controller from SSD/USB to SSD, or if it also applies to storing data from RAM (although that could be strange, as you could always copy through RAM). Could even be that there is a direct IO controller mapping that has a limited speed towards the internal SSD etc. Could even be a temperature failsafe that might be lifted. Perhaps it is currently set to match the maximum downloadspeed? Do we know if that is the same speed?

All we can take from this is that currently this is a limitation when copying to the SSD from an external source.

EDIT: and yeah there is also the streaming feature that could get part of the write bandwidth. My personal guess would be that they limited the writing speed on purpose and could change that if they felt that would be beneficial for some reason, but I have nothing to back that up.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22608153/ps5-ssd-speed-test-storage-expansion-m2-playstation-5

''The verdict? Surprisingly, even the slowest compatible SSD we could find had near-identical load times to the one Sony includes in the box. Sometimes it’s a second slower, sometimes a second or two faster, but basically it’s a total wash. Hopping through dimensions in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, I saw no appreciable difference with the slowest SSD in gameplay, either. Stepping through pocket dimensions was instantaneous, and when there was a slight pause during a boss fight, I saw the same pause on the internal SSD as well.''

You'd probably want a 5,500mb/s ssd to match (and exceed) the internal drive as a minimum to be sure. Even though rift apart is supposed to take advantage of the PS5's internal ssd speeds.
I think the ssd specs where impressive before the PS5 was released, now its.... still impressive, but not the fastest anymore.

No idea about the write speeds, most likely a throttling issue. I guess it depends on how important write speeds are for a games console, i doubt its all that needed (read speeds are more important), and since the PS5 doesnt have quick resume, the only time you'd notice is when copying to the SSD.

 

Surely it's to preserve the integrity of the drive over time? Do writes cause degradation of SSDs and I wonder if write speed would effect that too.

 

Wasn't this the case for both Sony and MS last gen?

Does it suspended and resume when systems have been unplugged? I don't know how it works for non XS systems.

 

The current gen consoles have suspend which is pretty awesome and only works through a form of instant-on power saving. And it doesn’t allow you to switch titles.

Quick resume will persist through patching and full power off, power outage etc. Holds up to 6ish titles, or some combination of backwards compatibility with some new gen. It’s not as fast as suspend since it needs to populate memory whereas suspend does not. On the other hand, like activity cards, quick resume must be supported by the title, it’s not necessarily an OS level feature. Ie; curse of the gods and the ascent do not support quick resume. But the OS will support suspend for them.

 

This is what I was wondering, so it's nothing like quick resume then, even for 1 title.
Anyway I wouldn't say PS5 has quick resume for 1 title, even superficially.

 

PhysX isn't a good comparison point as hardware accelerated PhysX was entirely proprietary to NV hardware. At least with hardware RT acceleration and RTX I/O, they are both implemented on PC through non-vendor specific APIs. As such RTX I/O won't go the way of the dodo like hardware accelerated PhysX just due to the fact that once released it'll be access through Microsoft's Direct Storage.

Of course, if Direct Storage turns out to be complete dog shite, then yeah it may not get used much, similar to other DirectX features which saw limited use (like geometry shaders).

That said, one of the largest barriers on PC to seeing the speeds achieved in R&C on PS5 is the game targeting SSDs. We've already seen that when SSDs are specifically targeted and optimized for that there can be very dramatic storage speed increases (Star Citizen, for example). Much like games on consoles, games on PC will have to specifically target SSDs in order to see dramatic speed increases. Much like games on consoles the underlying storage subsystem alone won't allow for dramatic increases in speed.

The reason it seems so dramatic for many games on PS5 and XBS consoles is that they are moving from extremely slow HDDs to very fast NVME drives. But most gamers on PCs were already on SSDs, so in that sense the consoles are only a little faster than most PC gaming machines when it comes to game loading. It's only when the SSDs and I/O subsystems are specifically coded for on consoles that we see something like what R&C brings to the table.

So, just like PS5 and XBS consoles won't see really eye opening improvements in storage access speeds without games specifically targeting the updated I/O, games on PC also won't see those improvements without games targeting the I/O. While a part of Direct Storage is to remove some of the inefficiencies WRT to accessing storage pools in Windows (which are predicated on HDD access characteristics), a large part of it is also to make it easier for developers to utilize the benefits of faster NVME SSD speeds by offering tools and a unified API.

So basically we have something like this from fastest to slowest...

• Current gen consoles and PC's with DirectStorage + games written to take advantage of the I/O.
• Current gen consoles and PC's + games using more advanced compression
  • PS5 currently has an advantage here as their SDK makes it easy for developers to used advanced compression.
    • Kraken being licensed by Sony for all games developed for PS5 is part of this.
• Current gen consoles and PC's with SSDs
  • Console have should have a slight advantage with like for like drives speeds if PC doesn't have DirectStorage, however PC drive speeds will continue to increase over the generation negating that slight advantage.
  • Note that most gaming PC's have been at this level for well over 5 years now.
• PC's with 3.5" HDDs.
• Previous gen consoles + PC's with slow 2.5" HDDs.

Regards,
SB

 

I wouldn't quite say "nothing like" quick resume. In PC parlance, suspend on previous gen consoles and PS5 is like suspend to RAM on PC, while quick resume is like suspend to Disk (hibernate) on PC except that it supports up to 6 "things" being suspended to Disk. That's basically enabled by each game being run in it's own virtual container, so on PC it's like using a virtual machine to suspend 6 OS instances to disk. Of course, the hardware likely has specific bits to accelerate this process similar to modern CPUs accelerating specific functions of virtualization and the virtual containers are "thinner" than say a full blown virtualized OS.

The basic functionality is similar, but the implementation differs.

Regards,
SB

 

Given Ratchet and Clank is being used as the SSD benchmark I throught this video might be of interest.

I am sure insomniac are beating the SSD because they can, but is it really as key to the game as it was marketed as?

 

I am more interested in the difference between performance in Warzone. I am getting the impression that if a game has a lot of separate assets on disc the internal drive might still win over latency/different file size optimization? Faster at retrieving multiple files in parallel?). It will be interesting to know how the priority lanes matter.

 

the guy is just wrong even if he his a programmer he obviously did not listen to what devs said about their game, they dump everything of one level to load the other almost instantly, the only other way to do it would be to have a lot more ram, and obviously PS5 could not do it with a standard HDD.
And he omits to talk about the crystals that are not on rails sequences and shift between two complete levels in less than a second, putting down his on rail trick theory.

 

Just watched that video and it’s clever, but also really not true. Yes, you could do parts of what happens in this game on older consoles. But it’s not comparable to what is happening here, as there are several instances where you are not on rails and so on. Just rewatch the DF video on this game and interview with the developer and go back to this video, and you will see that R&C does much more than was possible in previous generations, thanks to the SSD.

 

The ssd hype wasn’t directed at at us either but the average joe.