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

[Deleted member 11852]

Well that will be an expensive requirement for a lot of people too if the minimum comes at 48GB or more

This is why PC minimum requirements are a bit of mess. A modern lower-clocked i5 with fast DDR5 16Gb + fast SSD could have a better experience than a higher-clocked but older i7 with slower DDR4 32gb and slow SSD. There are just too many factors for game publishers to presenent specifications as required/recommended.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

This is why PC minimum requirements are a bit of mess. A modern lower-clocked i5 with fast DDR5 16Gb + fast SSD could have a better experience than a higher-clocked but older i7 with slower DDR4 32gb and slow SSD. There are just too many factors for game publishers to presenent specifications as required/recommended.

That's both the beauty and curse of PC gaming.

Good - Here, you can run our game on anything you want to try running it on. We'll even give you settings you can enable or disable to try to get it to run acceptably for your own personal taste.

Bad - We in no way guarantee that it'll run well if your machine is really old or really slow. Buy at your own risk.

It's why I generally recommend consoles to people who want to game but aren't really into PC hardware (knowledge of hardware or desire to tinker) and only really recommend PC to people who have the desire to tinker, the desire to learn about the hardware and its limitations and the willingness to occasionally upgrade components. Alternatively if they just have an arseload of money and want a buy a new 2k+ USD PC ever year, then who am I to discourage them from gaming on PC?

Regards,
SB

 

[Albuquerque]

Tellin' ya, my "ancient" i7-3930k (6 core / 12 thread) bumped to 125fsb / 4.5GHz with the quad channel 32Gb of DDR3 1600 ram and a 1080Ti strapped to it was absolutely fine playing essentially any game I threw at it. And yet, it's archaic by modern standards.

Beauty and curse, indeed.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Tellin' ya, my "ancient" i7-3930k (6 core / 12 thread) bumped to 125fsb / 4.5GHz with the quad channel 32Gb of DDR3 1600 ram and a 1080Ti strapped to it was absolutely fine playing essentially any game I threw at it. And yet, it's archaic by modern standards.

Beauty and curse, indeed.

Yeah, I'm still using just a lowly 1070 which is finally starting to struggle a little, but I don't going a bit low on IQ settings as long as I can maintain a minimum of 60 FPS. Some rare exceptions I'll accept a lower than 60 FPS minimum (like Elden Ring).

I'd be surprised if I couldn't game on this for at least another 2-3 years (or more) at lower resolutions and settings.

Regards,
SB

 

[PSman1700]

It's why I generally recommend consoles to people who want to game but aren't really into PC hardware (knowledge of hardware or desire to tinker) and only really recommend PC to people who have the desire to tinker, the desire to learn about the hardware and its limitations and the willingness to occasionally upgrade components. Alternatively if they just have an arseload of money and want a buy a new 2k+ USD PC ever year, then who am I to discourage them from gaming on PC?

Its not much of a real problem anymore, not what it has been on the pc side. HW these days lasts much longer, its less tinkering and windows/steam etc do a better job these days too. Consoles are still less tinkering, but the gap has narrowed alot.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

if like it's said here you can compensate consoles SSD with more ram on PC, you can compensate the absence of an SSD with more ram too i guess.

Definitely. Most games don't even care where the are installed to or run from. If you have a lot of RAM, you could probably just have a massive RAM disk and 'install' the game there for just the purpose of running/loading it. I used a RAM disk for almost for the entirety of the time I used an Amiga until I got a HDD.

 

[HolySmoke]

I just saw that the Intel SFS demo had been updated earlier this summer and ran some tests if anyone is interested. I grabbed these two captures at 8k60 to maximize the disk read rate with DirectStorage enabled on the left and disabled on the right. BypassIO is also disabled on my system for unrelated driver reasons.

The effective core utilization was 2.4 vs 3.8 cores averaged over 10 seconds. The read rate was ~1GB/s on average and each read exactly 64KB in size.

 

[Jay]

I wanted to have this discussion but I wasn't sure where to post this. So instead of starting a new thread, I will pose the question in here.

In regards to mid-generation refreshes, do we still think they are coming this gen?

I feel like it has been a forgone conclusion by many that since PS4/Xbox One gen had refreshes that this gen will have it too.

I would like to say that I don't think thats the case for a few reasons.

Cost:

Richard from DF has stated that in his conversations with MS that he was informed that the prices of memory is not expected to drop enough to make any upgrades tangible while still hitting an attractive price point.

We have just witnessed Sony increase the price of Playstation 5 almost 2 years after launch due to global economic pressures. So, a fair assumption can be made is that we will not see a significant price drop within the next 12-18 months. This price drop would be needed to make a more powerful and expensive machine still viable in the market.

In general, we know how expensive it is to bring new hardware to market. Its more than just the bill of materials. Its also R&D, administration, shipping and some other costs that are associated with it that may deter these companies to rethink the strategy. Why take the loss if you don't have to?

Corporations in general have been looking at cutting spending due to economic uncertainty.

Incentive:

Playstation executives have been on record stating that the PS4 Pro was released to stop users from migrating to PC. Well, the times and strategies have changed. Playstation is in the process of developing their PS PC brand so instead of launching new hardware, they will just support those gamers who moved to PC by releasing titles for them.

Xbox is in a similar situation as well. Honestly, the Xbox brand seems to be PC first at this point. It seems like all of their marketing efforts this year have been about PC Game Pass as that has been looked at as a key area for growth. So, with that thought process in mind, why launch more powerful hardware, the people who crave the highest end stuff will still be the ecosystem through services.

Ease of development:

For a variety of reasons we still have cross gen titles. Also, we still havent even seen any 1P Xbox exclusives launch to really showcase the system. I believe that our current XSX/PS5 systems can still be leveraged to produce pretty visuals so why burden them with another SKU to worry about testing for?

Even the biggest developers have limited resources. The more platforms/skus you have to develop for will have a negative effect on optimization per sku. Certain hardware features like mesh shaders already require a ton of debugging, so why give them the extra work?

Any thoughts of this? Or am I rehashing a topic that has already been discussed to death.

Do you think there will be a mid gen refresh console from Sony and Microsoft?

I'm not too sure there will be one this gen. If anything the PS6 and Next box will come around a year or two earlier than previous gens. Last gen we had the move to 4k TV's, and I just don't see a similar move to 8k TV's this time around. We also had the situation where both consoles were...

forum.beyond3d.com

 

[Jay]

Scorn pc minimum spec says ssd.
Being current gen only, it will be interesting to see how it runs of HDD.
Think I read today that PC is around 30GB, XS around 20GB. Don't remember seeing any titles with this sort of difference before. BCPack/compression?

 

[PSman1700]

Scorn pc minimum spec says ssd.
Being current gen only, it will be interesting to see how it runs of HDD.
Think I read today that PC is around 30GB, XS around 20GB. Don't remember seeing any titles with this sort of difference before. BCPack/compression?

CP2077 recommends a SSD but has a 'hdd mode' which reduces streaming, traffic/pedestrains etc. Guess the same could be happening for Scorn, or perhaps the game wont run at all on mechanical hdd's which wouldnt matter one bit anyway.

 

[Jay]

CP2077 recommends a SSD but has a 'hdd mode' which reduces streaming, traffic/pedestrains etc. Guess the same could be happening for Scorn, or perhaps the game wont run at all on mechanical hdd's which wouldnt matter one bit anyway.

Just checked CP2077 steam page as was curious what it had under minimum spec and it doesn't say anything about storage. Thought might say fast hdd or something.

If the steam page is correct and min for scorn is ssd, then they may not have implemented something simular. May just run like absolute crap.

 

[PSman1700]

Just checked CP2077 steam page as was curious what it had under minimum spec and it doesn't say anything about storage. Thought might say fast hdd or something.

Its in the game's settings, theres both a SSD and HDD mode. Theres an automaticmode aswell since awhile. Theres quite a large difference running that game from an ssd or a hdd.

 

[Jay]

Scorn pc minimum spec says ssd.
Being current gen only, it will be interesting to see how it runs of HDD.
Think I read today that PC is around 30GB, XS around 20GB. Don't remember seeing any titles with this sort of difference before. BCPack/compression?

But not direct storage. The wait continues. Although looking at the game don't think it needed it.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1580154154776858625

 

[davis.anthony]

Although looking at the game don't think it needed it.

People thought that about Spiderman before it released and it turns out the game absolutely benefit from it.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Didn't the devs specifically say it didn't benefit without the GPU decompression?

 

[davis.anthony]

Didn't the devs specifically say it didn't benefit without the GPU decompression?

GPU decompression is the main performance gain but I imagine those with lower end CPU's would benefit from the CPU savings from DS.

Or those that are at 55fps, that little extra CPU cycles DS would free up may enable 60fps.

 

[Kise Ryota]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1580658975225221120

 

[function]

GPU decompression is the main performance gain but I image those with lower end CPU's would benefit from the CPU savings from DS.

Or those that are at 55fps, that little extra CPU cycles DS would free up may enable 60fps.

Also facilitates disk reading tasks (including CPU decompression) being spread across more threads (implementation depending), potentially allowing for better use of the CPU resources that are available.

 

[davis.anthony]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1580658975225221120

The bandwidth metric, is that bandwidth consumed by the CPU/GPU for the decompression task itself or is it the equivalent decompression speed per second?

If it is for the task itself that's a lot of GPU bandwidth for what appears to be a very simple test scene.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The bandwidth metric, is that bandwidth consumed by the CPU/GPU for the decompression task itself or is it the equivalent decompression speed per second?

It's the loaded file size (likely original uncompressed dataset size), 5.65 GB, divided by the decompression time, 0.8s and 2.36s respectively, giving a GB/s final data provided per second. At 100% CPU utilisation it can decompress 2.4 GB/s. The GPU uses 15% CPU to decompress 7 GB/s. No mention of GPU utilisation or power draw though, which would be interesting comparison-points espeically in relation to the value of custom decompression hardware.

Edit: Is also worth noting the text describes it as a 'highly optimised sample', implying a best case comparison rather than general case. Oh, and there's no mention of the GPU used either! Very little comparative data and this is just a nice preview of the potential and indicator that, at some level at least, PC should scale okay with next-gen storage at the raw data level.