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

[Deleted member 11852]

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?

This really demonstrates the problem. I've just built a new 'small' PC with a Intel 12700K (20 threads), 32Gb DDR5 RAM, Z690 intel chipset motherboard, two PCI4.0 drives (256Gb for Windows 11, 2Tb for games), a 12Gb 3080 which is a hardware configuration that supports DirectStorage (DS). So what the barrier? Most software does have any support for DS, it's just not been designed for it. This doesn't seem like a problem that isn't going to change anytime soon - certainly not until HDDs (spinning-platter) and even slow SSDs are in a very small minority - at least not unless devs/publishers are willing to sacrifice sales based on PC hardware demographics.

This may be less of a problem on PC because this is a platform predicated on user choice. Some folks will run things utterly unsuited for their hardware because it's that or go without.

 

[PSman1700]

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)

Sony exclusives wont be 'held back' even if pc versions are planned beforehand. Theres no 'catching up to the PS5' either. There are enough PC's out there, probably more than PS5's that match or exceed the PS5 specs, and that gap is only going to widen when more and more capable hardware releases, while the PS5 remains static 2019 mid-range hardware.
The next 4/5 years are going to be crazy indeed, with those quality ports coming in from Nixxess, technically the best versions.

 

[BRiT]

I can't think of the last time I ever used a HDD in a PC for anything except bulk storage. Pretty sure it's been over a decade. Yup, just checked and I was using an SSD for at least 14 years. Initially it was just for the OS but as prices plummeted and dropped it became easy and economical to use it for game installations too.

I'm certain Game Developers and Publishers would have no qualms whatsoever with targeting SSD as a bare minimum. They know if they have a compelling game that gamers will upgrade as required.

 

[PSman1700]

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.

I think theres no reason for concern. A game like Rift Apart could just be ported and have min specs to where you can enjoy PS5-like experiences, everything below would severly decrease the experience. Its not like that people who want to play something like Rift Apart on previous-generation hardware anyway.

PC tech still isnt 'lagging behind', technically IO speeds are far beyond what the PS5 can deliver.

I don't think we need to have any concerns about PC

Theres that need. But then again, everyone has their concerns and these will be shared.
Again, the amount of PC's out there atleast matching or coming close to PS5 (and in special XSS) capabilities is enough to justify a quality port, as seen with the PS5 game spiderman. Even without DS loading very, very quickly.

 

[HolySmoke]

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.

I agree. We also still don’t know if missing the spec will mean lower framerates or simply slower loading assets. One would be a lot more acceptable than the other and especially if it’s just by a frame or two.

I’m sorta reminded of RAGE in a sense. It was quite IO bound for its time but it still ran off DVDs on the 360. It wasn’t great but I can’t imagine the difference between any two NVMe drives would be nearly as big as between DVD and HDD.

 

[pjbliverpool]

This doesn't seem like a problem that isn't going to change anytime soon - certainly not until HDDs (spinning-platter) and even slow SSDs are in a very small minority - at least not unless devs/publishers are willing to sacrifice sales based on PC hardware demographics.

Direct Storage works with HDD's and SATA SSD's. I don't think it offers much in the way of advantages for those devices (although GPU decompression might work with them?) but nor do they present a barrier to entry.

Aside from the fact that it's only recently launched, I'm not sure there's any major reason to not implement Direct Storage in all games that are at a appropriate place in the dev cycle moving forwards.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm certain Game Developers and Publishers would have no qualms whatsoever with targeting SSD as a bare minimum.

But what SSD? What PCI chipset and PCI standard? PCI3.0? PCI4.0? How many lanes and what sustained bandwidth?

Look at the Steam hardware survey and find that barely 50% of surveyed hardware has 16Gb or more of RAM and 30% of of hardware has four (or less) CPU cores. Intel launched quad-core processors in 2006. How much of this hardware do you think has fast solid state storage with the chipset and GPU capable or supporting DirectStorage?

Spider-Man on PC, a game which loads on PS5 in around 1.3 seconds but doesn't even support DirectStorage on PC, let alone make it mandatory?

Something is amiss.

 

[PSman1700]

But what SSD? What PCI chipset and PCI standard? PCI3.0? PCI4.0? How many lanes and what sustained bandwidth?

Look at the Steam hardware survey and find that barely 50% of surveyed hardware has 16Gb or more of RAM and 30% of of hardware has four (or less) CPU cores. Intel launched quad-core processors in 2006. How much of this hardware do you think has fast solid state storage with the chipset and GPU capable or supporting DirectStorage?

The addressable market is still large enough to justfity these ports and/or pc versions. Probably larger than the amount of actual PS5 users.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The addressable market is still large enough to justfity these ports and/or pc versions. Probably larger than the amount of actual PS5 users.

Then why do many games sell less on PC than console? And that's without limited the sales potentially putting in place I/O requirements for games in addition to RAM, CPU, GPU and VRAM requirements..

 

[BRiT]

But what SSD? What PCI chipset and PCI standard? PCI3.0? PCI4.0? How many lanes and what sustained bandwidth?

I don't think any of that matters much when looking for absolute lowest bounds. Any plain SATA SSD should be capable of hitting 500 MB/s. The maximum theoretical speed of SATA 2 is around 600 MB/s. Yes, it's barely anything at all but there can be so much done with that as most of the drastic improvements is around latency. I think this should serve as the absolute lowest bounds instead of supporting HDDs for games.

Yes, Things get interesting and more varied once you get into Gen 3 NVME M.2, where the ceiling is around 3500 MB/s and even lower latency. Then you have even higher tiers.

The jump from HDD to SSD (SATA) is drastic enough to make a world of difference. It's the going from 20 MB/s to 500 MB/s that gives an incredible 25x lift. Anything above that is less measurable, 7x (Gen 3 NVME) to 11x (PS5 NVME).

 

[PSman1700]

Then why do many games sell less on PC than console? And that's without limited the sales potentially putting in place I/O requirements for games in addition to RAM, CPU, GPU and VRAM requirements..

PC is a singular platform (including steamdeck etc), 'consoles' aint.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Look at the Steam hardware survey and find that barely 50% of surveyed hardware has 16Gb or more of RAM and 30% of of hardware has four (or less) CPU cores. Intel launched quad-core processors in 2006. How much of this hardware do you think has fast solid state storage with the chipset and GPU capable or supporting DirectStorage?

To be clear, the requirements for Direct Storage are:

Windows 10/11: >94% on Steam hardware survey
Shader Model 6 (DX12) GPU: 94% on Steam hardware survey
A HDD or above: 100% on Steam hardware survey

I think we'll be fine.

 

[HolySmoke]

I don't think any of that matters much when looking for absolute lowest bounds. Any plain SATA SSD should be capable of hitting 500 MB/s. The maximum theoretical speed of SATA 2 is around 600 MB/s. Yes, it's barely anything at all but there can be so much done with that as most of the drastic improvements is around latency. I think this should serve as the absolute lowest bounds instead of supporting HDDs for games.

Yes, Things get interesting and more varied once you get into Gen 3 NVME M.2, where the ceiling is around 3500 MB/s and even lower latency. Then you have even higher tiers.

The jump from HDD to SSD (SATA) is drastic enough to make a world of difference. It's the going from 20 MB/s to 500 MB/s that gives an incredible 25x lift. Anything above that is less measurable, 7x (Gen 3 NVME) to 11x (PS5 NVME).

I think people tend to conflate peak rates with sustained rates. When most people see PS5 having a data rate of 5.5GB/s then they often seem to expect 5.5GB/s to be the sustained rate and I don’t really believe that.

But 550MB read in 0.1s is also a read rate of 5.5GB/s. And I think we’ll see a lot more of those scenarios. The main question is how slower SSDs will handle that since 0.1s vs 0.2s isn’t really a whole lot of perceptible difference.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I don't think any of that matters much when looking for absolute lowest bounds. Any plain SATA SSD should be capable of hitting 500 MB/s. The maximum theoretical speed of SATA 2 is around 600 MB/s. Yes, it's barely anything at all but there can be so much done with that as most of the drastic improvements is around latency. I think this should serve as the absolute lowest bounds instead of supporting HDDs for games.

What you post isn't consistetn with what Microsoft published, which is:

With a high performance NVMe SSD and the proper drivers, Windows 11 can soon load new games faster than ever thanks to a breakthrough technology called DirectStorage, which we also pioneered as part of the Xbox Velocity Architecture featured in the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

With DirectStorage, which will only be available with Windows 11, games can quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU. This means you’ll get to experience incredibly detailed game worlds rendered at lightning speeds, without long load times. “DirectStorage Optimized” Windows 11 PCs are configured with the hardware and drivers needed to enable this amazing experience.

PCI3.0 drives look to be largely off the table, at least I couldn't find any that met the requirements!?! There will be overheads with PC because of the need to swish data back and forth between main RAM and VRAM to achieve that is a bit easier on decompression built into I/O which benefits particularly UMA but isn't specific to UMA, it just requires a read-RAM-decompress-write block that isn't accommodated on PC currently. But to could be really easily if Intel/AMD/Nvidia could agree a common implementation - which obviously won't happen for years.

 

[mr magoo]

What you post isn't consistetn with what Microsoft published, which is:

With a high performance NVMe SSD and the proper drivers, Windows 11 can soon load new games faster than ever thanks to a breakthrough technology called DirectStorage, which we also pioneered as part of the Xbox Velocity Architecture featured in the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

With DirectStorage, which will only be available with Windows 11, games can quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU. This means you’ll get to experience incredibly detailed game worlds rendered at lightning speeds, without long load times. “DirectStorage Optimized” Windows 11 PCs are configured with the hardware and drivers needed to enable this amazing experience.

PCI3.0 drives look to be largely off the table, at least I couldn't find any that met the requirements!?! There will be overheads with PC because of the need to swish data back and forth between main RAM and VRAM to achieve that is a bit easier on decompression built into I/O which benefits particularly UMA but isn't specific to UMA, it just requires a read-RAM-decompress-write block that isn't accommodated on PC currently. But to could be really easily if Intel/AMD/Nvidia could agree a common implementation - which obviously won't happen for years.

I don’t think high performance ssd is required but recommended for best results.
Here is the link from forspoken dev presentation and they managed to run ds on old ssd and even hdd

Forspoken Devs Demonstrate First DirectStorage Implementation and Several AMD Features

The developers of Forspoken demonstrated the very first DirectStorage implementation on PC, as well as the many AMD features in the game.

wccftech.com

 

[HolySmoke]

What you post isn't consistetn with what Microsoft published, which is:

With a high performance NVMe SSD and the proper drivers, Windows 11 can soon load new games faster than ever thanks to a breakthrough technology called DirectStorage, which we also pioneered as part of the Xbox Velocity Architecture featured in the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

With DirectStorage, which will only be available with Windows 11, games can quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU. This means you’ll get to experience incredibly detailed game worlds rendered at lightning speeds, without long load times. “DirectStorage Optimized” Windows 11 PCs are configured with the hardware and drivers needed to enable this amazing experience.

PCI3.0 drives look to be largely off the table, at least I couldn't find any that met the requirements!?! There will be overheads with PC because of the need to swish data back and forth between main RAM and VRAM to achieve that is a bit easier on decompression built into I/O which benefits particularly UMA but isn't specific to UMA, it just requires a read-RAM-decompress-write block that isn't accommodated on PC currently. But to could be really easily if Intel/AMD/Nvidia could agree a common implementation - which obviously won't happen for years.

I honestly don’t think PCIe 3.0 will be any real bottleneck. I’ve done a whole playthrough of R&C and measured the amount of reads from disk before and after. The total amount of reads was only about 1.5TB spread across 7 hours or so.

Yes, it sounds like a lot but it’s still only about 60MB/s averaged. Even accounting for quick burst reads then I can’t imagine a PCIe 3.0 drive would have ruined the experience.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I don’t think high performance ssd is required but recommended for best results.

I honestly don’t think PCIe 3.0 will be any real bottleneck.

You may both be correct, but the use of "high performance NVMe SSD" seems to be differentiating between PCI3.0 and older PCI4.0 drives. Otherwise, why not just say PCI3.0 or NVMe? It feels like Microsoft are consciously differentiating. Why undersell, or over specify the requirements, of a new API?

 

[PSman1700]

PCIe 3.0 wont be a 'bottleneck' in special when considering GPU decompression. The deployment of PCIe 4.0 (around the same release as consoles) wont be coming to a halt either. The hype around the ssd has dampened alot since the release of the current gen consoles imo. It was a very much needed upgrade since consoles never got the SSD which has been around for over what, 12 years at the PS5's launch (around 2010)?.
Impressive speeds, but long since surpassed before the console even launched. Theres no reason for Sony to hold back their games storage wise, the amount of Nvme pc users out there atleast equals the amount of all current gen consoles sold. If anything, its more the PS4 holding things back right now.

PC gamers aiming to play these big exclusives like spiderman usually arent on sata SSD's let alone HDD's. The average pc gamer looking to play Spiderman is most probably running RTX hardware (released 4 years ago) and atleast sata ssd drives, but i doubt even that as you wouldnt team a sata ssd to even a RTX2060(S) and up. Nvme hardware has been around before the consoles even launched, it wouldnt be out of the ordinary to have such hw as a requirement to get atleast PS5 experiences.

 

[Remij]

I love the discussion.

My 2 cents. PC is gonna be juuuuust fine.

The biggest thing enabling PS5 and "next gen".. is simply the fact that it's an SSD to begin with.. without needing to worry about seek times and duplication wasting resources.

Right now, in an optimized game, the CPU can already go full out during a loading screen, and load times are already extremely short. In the range of 4-8 seconds. That's just the CPU being allowed to chew through and decompress assets and do what it does as fast as it can. During gameplay streaming, games currently aren't streaming in THAT much data any given second. Even Spider-Man while swinging from block to block is like 20-50MB/s off the drive. I remember running around in Assassin's Creed Valhalla and seeing the game pull 250-300MB/s off the drive at times while running around or on horse back.

It's funny, I have an ultrawide monitor and when using UW hacks for some games that don't support it can often give you hints about how quickly games load things in. Usually the loading screen will be 16:9, and on the sides you'll see the geometry pop in.. and it usually happens almost instantly.

So currently the CPU can go all out during loading screens, but streaming during gameplay is obviously when you want the CPU to be able to do other things instead of having to decompress that data. Games like Ratchet will put more stress on the CPU because it will have to stream and decompress more on the fly, and it wont be able to go all out like it can during a loading screen. I would think it COULD be programmed to load more into RAM than it could on consoles, and start doing it much sooner, giving more time to get those assets decompressed into RAM and utilizing less CPU resources as a result.

But it's the GPU decompression that will be what allows them to essentially do it as "just in time" as possible.. like on consoles, without buckling the CPU at all. Nvidia has already gone on record saying that the hit to GPU resources will be negligible during gameplay and that they can already max out Gen4 PCIE bandwidths of 7GB/s raw (14GB/s compressed) with no issue. No game this console generation is going to come close to realistically using that kind of bandwidth.

DirectStorage is already here, developers are already tinkering with it and learning the optimal way to implement things.. and by the time the games need that massive bandwidth, the GPU decompression will be ready to go.

 

[PSman1700]

7GB/s raw (14GB/s compressed) with no issue. No game this console generation is going to come close to realistically using that kind of bandwidth.

Indeed, its the other way around. Even though i doubt we are going to see games pulling 14gb/s or more from an ssd, the capability is there but held back by consoles.