Next-Generation NVMe SSD and I/O Technology [PC, PS5, XBSX|S]
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Okay, what proportion of PCs are currently equipped that they can use DS at a suitable level of performance to match consoles once the rest of the stack is integrated and executed? 
Dobwal mentions a handful of mobos. Is this going ot be a limiting factor or is that feature something we can live without and still get reasonable DS performance on the mainstream hardware target?
Dobwal mentions a handful of mobos. Is this going ot be a limiting factor or is that feature something we can live without and still get reasonable DS performance on the mainstream hardware target?davis.anthony
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I think that suitable level should be the Series consoles, so an NVME drive with at least 2.4Gb/s raw transfer speed.Okay, what proportion of PCs are currently equipped that they can use DS at a suitable level of performance to match consoles once the rest of the stack is integrated and executed?
If we assume the high and mid range PC's already have at least that or the hardware to easily chuck in a faster NVME drive to get there the issue then becomes the casual gamer.
Looking at 'how often do you upgrade your PC' data on Google it appears that 5 years is the common time before people upgrade, which makes sense considering CPU's don't age as rapidly as GPU's.
So within the next 5 years every gaming PC should offer at least Series console SSD performance.
I'm pretty sure RTX IO and SmartAccess Storage aren't required for GPU based decompression. GPU based decompression should be a core part of Direct Storage - it just hasn't been implemented yet. RTX-IO and SAS seem to be more an extension of Direct Storage to enable the system to bypass system memory copies completely - which Direct Storage still requires. This should further reduce the CPU overhead and latency of the IO function but isn't a requirement for Direct Storages existing efficiency improvements or it's GPU decompression as I understand it.
To my knowledge the only major requirements to take advantage of Direct Storage are Windows 10/11, and NVMe drive and a SM3.0 capable GPU (for the decompression).
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Introducing NVIDIA RTX IO: GPU-Accelerated Storage Technology For The Next Generation of Games
Load instantaneously, experience vast worlds with endless views and rich detail, and further improve gameplay by leveraging the power of GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards and NVIDIA RTX IO.
www.nvidia.com
NVIDIA RTX IO plugs into Microsoft’s upcoming DirectStorage API, which is a next-generation storage architecture designed specifically for gaming PCs equipped with state-of-the-art NVMe SSDs, and the complex workloads that modern games require. Together, the streamlined and parallelized APIs, specifically tailored for games, allow dramatically reduced IO overhead and maximize performance/bandwidth from NVMe SSD to your RTX IO-enabled GPU.
Specifically, NVIDIA RTX IO brings GPU-based lossless decompression, allowing reads through DirectStorage to remain compressed while being delivered to the GPU for decompression. This removes the load from the CPU, moving the data from storage to the GPU in its more efficient, compressed form, and improving I/O performance by a factor of 2.
I surmise MS is free to code it own decompression scheme for either Nvidia or AMD. But that would probably make MS responsible for supporting that feature across new GPU releases and driver updates. Allowing Nvidia and AMD to provide that portion of functionality puts the onus of compatibility and performance on them, who should be more suited for that responsibility.
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Well at that rate, games this gen won't really be able to target full SSD tech if games are also being designed to run on PCs that can't match the performance. For a dev setting out to make a game now, to release maybe 2024, that totally maxes the potential of the SSDs, you'd want a large enough proportion of the PC market to be able to use that which I would think would want you to be able to look at the hardware now, plus a little forecasting though not too much as that's unreliable, and say, "okay, 30% or whatever of the hardware out now can run this and the software to achieve that will be ready 2023 for us to utilise 2024."
If you can't look at the PC hardware with confidence now, I'm not sure how any game can really max SSD utilisation without be console exclusive.
There are probably just as many pc's with nvme drives out there as there are all current gen consoles combined. Just because a platform is diverse (all the way from ultra low to extreme high-end) doesnt mean that games developed for todays machines wont be utilizing the hardware. Its not like current gen games are that intresting on pre-2017/2018 hardware anyway. Its not too indifferent from the consoles, where most will be left with 2013 hardware/mechanical hdd's. Hence were probably some years in before we see cross-platform games going full-force nvme, we are already almost two years in and still nothing. A hand-full of exclusives aint much either, which come to pc anyway, and utilize whats available.
Anyway, maybe this can be spun off into a seperate pc vs console topic.
Spiderman's doing quite well on pc without blazing fast ssd's and DS and further cpu optimizations, couple of seconds more load time.
Anyway, maybe this can be spun off into a seperate pc vs console topic.
Spiderman's doing quite well on pc without blazing fast ssd's and DS and further cpu optimizations, couple of seconds more load time.
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There are probably ways around the high speed SSD requirement on PC that aren't available on consoles.
E.g. Lower texture res or LOD to reduce streaming requirements. Or lean more on pre-caching to the larger RAM pool.
And on PC you can always fall back on the min spec argument. I.e. if you don't have the hardware, expect an inferior experience. Even now several games recommend an SSD for everything above minimum settings.
Agreee; as long as a particular feature set is not missing, the experience can be degraded to run on lower spec hardware. But one cannot expect compute shaders to run on a GPU that does not support it.
As long as the PC has windows 11, and direct
Storage, then the game should technically run, albeit as significantly worse settings.
davis.anthony
Veteran
Sony exclusives are likely going to be the only games that will really be able to push SSD transfers speeds, Xbox games might be limited in scope as they'll also be available on PC which may require the SSD use to be paired back for games to work on a wide range of PC's.
But will Sony exclusives be held back themselves if Sony are planning a PC release at some point? Or will Sony just delay porting the games to PC until the SSD performance has caught up to PS5?
What about setting a SATA III SSD as the minimum? Even the most budget of PC's have those SSD's and Forspoken has shown to have very good load times on those 500+MB/s drives.
But that's only half of the conversation, what about decompression?
You can just set the minimum required RAM at 16Gb and the recommended to 32Gb and cache as much as possible but how will that RAM be filled? If GPU decompression is not available or very common will the average PC have enough CPU performance to run game logic, update BVH and decompress data constantly and do all the file copying?
The next 4-5 years are going to be very crazy for PC as the platform tries to adopt Direct Storage and fast drives (As well as having Nvidia, AMD and Intel spending the next 4-5 years playing around with RT until they figure out what they think works best for their GPU's)
I think it's going to be the same for some Sony developers, those that intend to do a PC port. It will be simpler for them to target a PC release and then port to PS5. Eventually this is what could happen for most of those multi-plat developers.
In the near future games like Ratchet could be seen as experiments by current Sony executives and not worth the technical investment. Well for now we are not even discussing a SSD + PC target as a baseline as the big games are currently developed for PS4 + HDD.
davis.anthony
Veteran
I think we should be clear here there is a key difference between what DirectStorage do on PC and what consoles do.Okay, what proportion of PCs are currently equipped that they can use DS at a suitable level of performance to match consoles once the rest of the stack is integrated and executed?
Consoles have unified memory pool so the data doesn't transfer between SystemRAM and VRAM.
How consoles load and do decompression of assets will not be achievable in how the PC hardware is structured today.
What DirectStorage will do in the future (after get the GPU decompression part): SSD > SystemRAM > VRAM > GPU Decompression.
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What actual consoles do: SSD > Decompression Units > Unified RAM.
If you ask how DirectStorage do today without GPU Decompression: SSD > SystemRAM > CPU Decompression > VRAM.
The only way to PC works like consoles is if there are Unified RAM and a Decompression Unit between SSD to RAM.
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I can be wrong here but from what I read MS is asking vendor to do their decompression API to use the GPU Decompression part of DirectStorage.
MS won't code the decompression themselves.
And it makes sense because the vendor could do better optimizations to their own hardware than MS themselves.
I'm curious where you've seen that?
I know that with the current CPU based decompression, Direct Storage hands off the decompression task to the application which allows the application (game) to use whatever decompression algorithm is wishes on the CPU before handing back to the API.
I've seen no details at all of how that will work for GPU based decompression though. There would need to be a common GPU compression format for games to target (i.e. a single game can't use an AMD and NV compression scheme simultaneously). That's unlikely to be supplied by either AMD or Nvidia (or Intel) and so either GPU's would have to support some mix of 3rd party formats (much as CPU's do now - but I'm not sure any 3rd party GPU formats exist) with the application choosing which it wishes to use like the current CPU decompression model, or Microsoft would provide the format as part of the API. I don't see why they would need separate API's from the GPU vendors to handle this part of the work. That would largely defeat the point of having a common storage API in the first place.
I think we should be clear here there is a key difference between what DirectStorage do on PC and what consoles do.
Consoles have unified memory pool so the data doesn't transfer between SystemRAM and VRAM.
How consoles load and do decompression of assets will not be achievable in how the PC hardware is structured today.
What DirectStorage will do in the future (after get the GPU decompression part): SSD > SystemRAM > VRAM > GPU Decompression.
What actual consoles do: SSD > Decompression Units > Unified RAM.
If you ask how DirectStorage do today without GPU Decompression: SSD > SystemRAM > CPU Decompression > VRAM.
The only way to PC works like consoles is if there are Unified RAM and a Decompression Unit between SSD to RAM.
Click to expand...
Actually this is exactly what SmartAccess Storage is designed to address in the PC (bypassing system RAM for a direct path between SSD and GPU memory), and I assume RTX-IO too, although the marketing is more vague around that.
That was the impression I got reading the DirectStorage, RTX-IO and SmartAccess Storage PR.
The compressed formats are probably the same (what the developer will use) to all but how the decompression is done internally on GPU is the vendor solution... it is a lossless decompression so the result is the same no matter what the vendor did.
MS said sometime ago that they are in talk with GPU vendors for the GPU decompression part of DirectStorage.
And reading a bit more about SmartAccess Storage it doesn't bypass the data from SSD to VRAM... it still needs to transfer from SSD to SystemRAM to VRAM... it won't change how DirectStorage works.
What it does is like AMD Smart Access Memory that allow the Ryzen CPUs to access fully to VRAM From Radeon GPUs and the GPU decompression instead CPU decompression.
There is no bypass from what I know because the SSD bus is linked to CPU and not GPU... the assets needs to pass thought the CPU/SystemRAM... there is no direct bus between SSD and GPU.
In PC hardware if you want SSD data on VRAM you need to pass thought CPU and SystemRAM... there is no way to avoid that unless you have HUMA (VRAM + SystemRAM unified) or a bus exclusive to GPU access the SSD data... you still find HUMA in some AMD IGP system but a direct bus between GPU and SSD I never saw any motherboard manufatures doing it.
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It's not about having NVMe drives, but having the low level access. If this wasn't something meaningful to add to PCs, DirectStorage etc. wouldn't be happening, I presume. And yes, Spider-Man is possible, but that's a first effort that also targeted PS4. The question is what does a truly console-optimised game do and whether a PC can do that, and if not, will that affect how SSDs are (not) used on consoles?
In the past, PC tech hasn't lagged behind consoles notably. By and large with something like shaders, PCs got them quickly and then were waiting on consoles to catch up to justify investment in the PC space. That is, the PC space had more hardware that wasn't being tapped as consoles were the minimum spec. Storage is a case where consoles are ahead. How much so is my question.
What's that minimum spec though and what does that do to the target market size for cross-platform titles?
Note, I'm not wanting the existing discussion on console SSD and PC solutions and workarounds. My question here is in particular how far out is a console-like solution such that a technique that requires ultra low latency, high bandwidth storage will be able to take that code to PC without too much effort and get it working? I'm unsure of how much is hardware, how much is software, and how much is software that exists but needs to be incorporated versus software in development and won't be here for a few years.
AMD do specifically say in the video below that they're not developing their own compression algorithms or API, and that they use the compression algorithms that Direct Storage "promotes, supports, endorses and asks ISV's to design to". So it does seem that DS stipulates the compression algorithm(s) to be used (although not clear if the are supplied by Microsoft or 3rd parties. No doubt the vendors will approach the decompression of that differently on their different architectures, but I don't see that requiring a separate API as it's no different to how they have different rendering approaches to games built on Direct3D today.
Further into the video above AMD do state they are creating a path directly between the SSD and GPU. There's even a diagram in there that shows the system memory being bypassed. Such a route is entirely possible on modern AMD systems using peer to peer DMA which the PCIe root complex of Zen+ upwards supports. Obviously the root complex sits on the CPU package so the data itself routes via the CPU in that sense, but there would be no need for a system memory copy. Furthermore that's likely exactly how t's being done on the current gen consoles which very similar CPU's and IO hubs. In fact I'd go as far to wager that Direct Access Storage is built upon the concepts used in the consoles.
We can look at Valhalla for example the min spec is quite wide.
In fact Spiderman itself has even lower entry level specs as well as an HDD recommendation for the lowest spec, but an SDD for everything above:
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered Minimum PC specs (720p / 30fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 950 “or AMD equivalent”
- CPU: Intel Core i3-4160 “or AMD equivalent”
- RAM: 8GB
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Storage: 75GB HDD
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered Recommended PC specs (1080p / 60fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 580
- CPU: Intel Core i5-4670 / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- RAM: 16GB
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Storage: 75GB SSD
PC games are extremely scalable these days. I don't think we need to have any concerns about PC versions holding back any console specific features.
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