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

[PSman1700]

Chuck it in PS5 and see what it can do.

DF did chuck in a slower-than-PS5 internal SSD and didnt even notice any differences there. How their going to test a 14gb/s nvme then They sure would need some benchmarks of some sorts.
If they want to test the drives capabilities they'd need to put in a pc and go ahead. Whats even more intresting is what we can achieve with directstorage/RTX IO, were going to approach DDR ram speeds there, minus the latency etc.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

There may not be any significant bottlenecks with the default SDD, but if you swap it out for an SDD that's almost 3x faster then you're quickly going to run into one somewhere.

I think we are broadly in agreement but just to clarify, if you put a drive that 3x fast than PS5's NVMe bank you are not going to see much improvement because the interface for data from the drive remains a four-lane PCIE 4.0 bus. E.g, PS5 or PC, you're limited by the bus. The only way to go faster is with additional PCIE controller lanes, or additional drives. Or both.

If you look at block for the ASIC that does decompression, that is scalable. It's designed to cope with delivering 4x to 5x the raw read performance of the NVMe bank - bound by the ability of four lanes of PCIE to deliver it. With a PCIE interface you could scale-up that ASIC to process/decompress/feed more data into main RAM, which for PS5 is around 448Gb/sec.

 

[davis.anthony]

DF did chuck in a slower-than-PS5 internal SSD and didnt even notice any differences there. How their going to test a 14gb/s nvme then They sure would need some benchmarks of some sorts.
If they want to test the drives capabilities they'd need to put in a pc and go ahead. Whats even more intresting is what we can achieve with directstorage/RTX IO, were going to approach DDR ram speeds there, minus the latency etc.

Yes, lets test a drive on a platform that's so bottle-necked in terms of storage that a 550Mb/s SATA III SSD loads games just as fast as a 5.5Gb/s NVME drive

And RTX I/O...lmao, completely unproven in the real world, it also only does GPU related data, PS5's implementation handles ALL data.

 

[davis.anthony]

I guess you might see a tiny uplift over todays fastest PCIE 4 drives, provided you're not bottlenecked by the rest of the PS5's IO stack, but it'd be a pretty boring test compared to putting it in a PC where it can reach its full potential.

As I told PSman, PC can't even use the potential of a slow and basic NVME drive so how it's going to show the potential of this drive?

Every aspect of I/O and storage on PC is currently massively behind what PS5 has.

 

[eastmen]

As I told PSman, PC can't even use the potential of a slow and basic NVME drive so how it's going to show the potential of this drive?

Every aspect of I/O and storage on PC is currently massively behind what PS5 has.

seems odd since i can transfer large files really quickly between my nvme drives above over transfering from a nvme to a sata ssd.

But don't worry , microsoft is in the process of over hauling the IO portions of windows and is even working on moving away from ntfs

 

[Malo]

seems odd since i can transfer large files really quickly between my nvme drives above over transfering from a nvme to a sata ssd.

Sustained transfer speeds of a large file between drives is no indicator of potential performance of game I/O characteristics.

 

[PSman1700]

Yes, lets test a drive on a platform that's so bottle-necked in terms of storage that a 550Mb/s SATA III SSD loads games just as fast as a 5.5Gb/s NVME drive

Its useless to test any nvme drive using games to begin with. You test with benchmarks to fetch some actual numbers. Aside from that i bet theres no games pulling +14gb/s of data from any ssd.
Rift Apart did load and play about as fast on a slow-ish ssd as the internal SSD in a DF analysis.

And RTX I/O...lmao, completely unproven in the real world, it also only does GPU related data, PS5's implementation handles ALL data.

I think RTX IO is supposed to be an extension to Direct Storage, handling all data wont be a problem.

Every aspect of I/O and storage on PC is currently massively behind what PS5 has.

Would say its the other way around. PS5's nvme was very impressive when announced in 2019/early 2020. Now? In technical specs its quite far behind whats being on offer on other platforms, including apple mac pc's.

 

[davis.anthony]

Would say its the other way around. PS5's nvme was very impressive when announced in 2019/early 2020. Now? In technical specs its quite far behind whats being on offer on other platforms, including apple mac pc's.

So why...

1. Does PS5 have multiple AAA next generation games that load in sub 2 seconds and PC doesn't?
2. Does a 5500Mb/s NVME drive load games no faster then a 550Mb/s SATA III SSD?

There's more to storage speed then just raw drive speed, PC is way behind PS5's whole storage and I/O system and will take years for the 'average Joe' PC to catch up to it.

 

[davis.anthony]

seems odd since i can transfer large files really quickly between my nvme drives above over transfering from a nvme to a sata ssd.

But don't worry , microsoft is in the process of over hauling the IO portions of windows and is even working on moving away from ntfs

Do a loading test comparison on a game between a SATA III SSD vs NVME drive and let me know how much faster the NVME is.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Do a loading test comparison on a game between a SATA III SSD vs NVME drive and let me know how much faster the NVME is.

I'm going to provide a much fuller answer tomorrow because I'm stuck on a phone right now, but the simple answer to your question is that the software (game) isn't designed to take advantage of high speed NVMe's. Thats exactly why most multi platform games tend to load no faster on PS5 than on PC with a fast NVMe (and thus a PC with a SATA drive by your own admission).

Benchmarks designed to stress high speed drives, be that in single large file transfers or high volume, small block transfers show clear advantages to the higher speed drives proving there is no fundamental bottleneck.

There is however a much higher overhead associated with IO on the PC right now. But that will go away once DirectStorage arrives.

Aside from its low overhead storage stack, the only other notable advantage the PS5 currently has is in the hardware decoder. But DS addresses that too.

Once DirectStorage games start arriving on PC, there's only one platform that its going to be interesting benchmarking a fast PCIe 5 SDD on and that's not the PS5, except perhaps as a baseline to show how much faster the drives can perform is systems not bottlenecked by PCIe bandwidth, decompression throughput and CPU speed.

 

[davis.anthony]

I'm going to provide a much fuller answer tomorrow because I'm stuck on a phone right now, but the simple answer to your question is that the software (game) isn't designed to take advantage of high speed NVMe's. Thats exactly why most multi platform games tend to load no faster on PS5 than on PC with a fast NVMe (and thus a PC with a SATA drive by your own admission).

Benchmarks designed to stress high speed drives, be that in single large file transfers or high volume, small block transfers show clear advantages to the higher speed drives proving there is no fundamental bottleneck.

There is however a much higher overhead associated with IO on the PC right now. But that will go away once DirectStorage arrives.

Aside from its low overhead storage stack, the only other notable advantage the PS5 currently has is in the hardware decoder. But DS addresses that too.

Once DirectStorage games start arriving on PC, there's only one platform that its going to be interesting benchmarking a fast PCIe 5 SDD on and that's not the PS5, except perhaps as a baseline to show how much faster the drives can perform is systems not bottlenecked by PCIe bandwidth, decompression throughput and CPU speed.

I know exactly why drives are limited on PC thank you and it's still a moot point, as it stands right in the here and now PS5's storage and I/O are massively a head of PC and some PC gamers just can't stand it.

And sure DS can come out but what about adoption rate from developers? How long will it take for the gaming PC's developers actually care about (The mid-range portion) to have an NVME drive and storage that can match or exceed PS5's? Weeks? Months? I'm betting years.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I know exactly why drives are limited on PC thank you and it's still a moot point, as it stands right in the here and now PS5's storage and I/O are massively a head of PC and some PC gamers just can't stand it.

In current shipping games there is no massive advantage however. Compared to a PC with an SSD, loading times for games and levels is pretty similar. You only see a massive advantage for current gen console IO when compared to either previous gen consoles or PCs equipped with HDDs.

That may and likely will, of course, change in the future, but as of the "here and now" there is no massive advantage in currently released games.

R&C is likely currently the only game that really takes advantage of current gen IO, but even that is still limited and doesn't approach the theoretical speed of PS5's IO as seen by significantly slower NVME drives still offering comparable performance to PS5's internal drive. We have no idea how much slower the NVME drive would have to be in order to see an appreciable difference in storage IO performance since the slowest available NVME drive that's been tested was still over 3 GB/s.

And since it's an exclusive, we have no idea whether R&C would run similarly on a PC equipped with an SSD.

Regards,
SB

 

[davis.anthony]

but as of the "here and now" there is no massive advantage in currently released games.

As I stated above, PS5 has a few AAA games now with sub 2 second load times from the games menu to actually being in the game.

PC, despite having access to stupid fast drives (and RAID 0) for years has never achieved that for a AAA game, exclusive or not.

We also have RE:Village, all version have loading screens, apart from the PS5 version.

Even within 12 months of release we've already seen massive advantages on PS5 in terms of loading and it's the first time we've actually had a machine offer a genuine generational leap in loading times.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Thats exactly why most multi platform games tend to load no faster on PS5 than on PC with a fast NVMe (and thus a PC with a SATA drive by your own admission).

..

Once DirectStorage games start arriving on PC, there's only one platform that its going to be interesting benchmarking a fast PCIe 5 SDD on and that's not the PS5, except perhaps as a baseline to show how much faster the drives can perform is systems not bottlenecked by PCIe bandwidth, decompression throughput and CPU speed.

This is it. Many games check-in processes, i.e. the full pipeline of loading game data off storage, decompressing and de-coupling assets, processing them and getting the game engine running ASAP, have long had bottlenecks other than CPU-driven check-in process (e.g. slower drives) which is why they have never really been heavily optimised to benefit ever-faster read/write speeds.

If you toss out that old multi-multiplatform check-in, and write something that does factor this in, then you can end up with something like Marvel's Spider-Man on PS5 which loads from PS5 dashboard to playing in game in about 7 seconds, which also requires a rethink about how you organise package and store assets. And that's a massive AAA open world, which is definitely the hardest challenge a game engine is going to face in terms of having a lot of varied assets in place, and moving parts spinning, before the game can actually run.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I know exactly why drives are limited on PC thank you and it's still a moot point, as it stands right in the here and now PS5's storage and I/O are massively a head of PC and some PC gamers just can't stand it.

The here and now wasn't the topic of conversation though. The topic of conversation was future PCIe5 SDD's to which you responded "Chuck it in PS5 and see what it can do" which I assume you thought was a clever way of saying "PS5 IO is better than PC" without considering the bottlenecks such a drive would run into in a PS5 that it wouldn't be subject to in a PC. Provided said PC is using software designed to take advantage of high speed NVMe drives that is, which in the context of games likely means the first Direct Storage supporting titles.

I freely and happily acknowledge that right now, without Direct Storage and games to take advantage of it, the PC is at a notable disadvantage compared to the PS5 in IO despite being faster in hardware terms. I've no issue at all with that because it acts as a driver to fix long standing issues with the PC, and those fixes are on the way.

And sure DS can come out but what about adoption rate from developers?

Considering the same API is in use of the Xbox consoles I would assume adoption will be fairly rapid both out of necessity and convenience.

How long will it take for the gaming PC's developers actually care about (The mid-range portion) to have an NVME drive and storage that can match or exceed PS5's? Weeks? Months? I'm betting years.

This is irrelevant. Direct Storage is a backwards compatible API. A game developed on DS will continue to work on HDD's and SATA SDD's as normal. There's no disadvantage to developers in implementing it in that sense, but there are advantages in terms of unifying the development process with Xbox, and providing significantly increased performance for NVMe drive users at the higher end.

Whether the drive speed matches or exceeds the PS5 is largely irrelevant too. Games will be designed to scale from slower IO to faster IO accordingly. This is trivial to do (change texture resolution for example). PC drives are unlikely to need to match or exceed the speed of the PS5 drive either in order to match or exceed its overall performance thanks to the extra system RAM which can be used for additional pre-caching. Faster CPU's also play a significant factor in loading times irrespective of drive speed.

 

[Jay]

Direct Storage is a backwards compatible API. A game developed on DS will continue to work on HDD's and SATA SDD's as normal.

Is this the case that it has fallback in it?
I thought that you would have to make use of the legacy API's.
Could very well be incorrect assumption by me, as I can't remember why I thought that.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Is this the case that it has fallback in it?
I thought that you would have to make use of the legacy API's.
Could very well be incorrect assumption by me, as I can't remember why I thought that.

It's not entirely clear but I was basing it on this:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-developer-preview-now-available/

As a game developer, you need only implement DirectStorage once into your engine, and all the applicable benefits will be automatically applied and scaled appropriately for gamers.

In fact, this great compatibility extends to a variety of different hardware configurations as well. DirectStorage enabled games will still run as well as they always have even on PCs that have older storage hardware (e.g. HDDs).

 

[Allandor]

Is this the case that it has fallback in it?
I thought that you would have to make use of the legacy API's.
Could very well be incorrect assumption by me, as I can't remember why I thought that.

Direct-Storage does not change that much from a loading perspective. For legacy support it will just load more stuff in advance into memory (bigger buffer) while a much smaller buffer is needed for nvme drives.
The bigger difference is the packaging. If you would optimize your packages for HDDs you want to have big packages with duplicates etc. If you have a fast SSD (nvme) you want to habe as small packages as possible.

So in the end you have 2 builds for a game if you want to optimize it for both things. But the API is at least the same Creating those build can be automated, just like the "big-package" creation for todays games is automated. The thing is, you first need this "newer" build-pipeline (which might be complicated at it's own) if you want both packages. The other question for the developer also is, does it make sense for them to make the jump now or later (time is money ....).

 

[PSman1700]

So why...

The amount of AAA games using the ps5 nvme to its potentionals isnt all that staggering.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

1. Does PS5 have multiple AAA next generation games that load in sub 2 seconds and PC doesn't?

AFAIK PC games use mostly zlib and Windows' I/O is a complete drag compared to the new consoles that are made for NVMe SSDs..

I have 64GB RAM and I've tried to run games directly from a RAM drive that benches at over 10GB/s (and has much lower latency than any SSD out there). The result is really disappointing, as the CPU becomes a major bottleneck for all the hoops and loops that Windows demands game data to make, plus the poor performance that zlib has for CPU decompression.

There's more to storage speed then just raw drive speed, PC is way behind PS5's whole storage and I/O system and will take years for the 'average Joe' PC to catch up to it.

Yes, this is unfortunately true.
I only know of two non-game demos on the PC requiring SSDs to run: the UE5 Demo and Star Citizen. Neither of them are games, as all games in the market still need to support HDDs.

There are no PC games requiring SATA SSDs, much less NVMe PCIe 3.0 at >2GB/s, let alone NVMe PCIe 4.0 at >5GB/s.

Even after Direct Storage comes out, IMO it'll be years before PC games can afford to demand a minimum 2.5GB/s NVMe from their audience like the Series consoles. We might see something that takes advantage of Direct Storage and a faster I/O for faster loadings, but not a faster I/O that is instrumental for gameplay (like we see in e.g. Ratchet&Clank Rift Apart or pretty much any UE5 game that makes heavy use of Nanite).

There's no disadvantage to developers in implementing it in that sense, but there are advantages in terms of unifying the development process with Xbox, and providing significantly increased performance for NVMe drive users at the higher end.

If you build a game that depends on NVMe levels of access times and bandwidth, people with their games installed on HDDs won't be able to play them. We know what will happen when they try: