I could see directstorage as a necessity to deal with split memory I suppose, but what on earth does sampler feedback streaming have to do with quick resume? Either somebody involved with the production of this article or you are misunderstanding something here.
Next-Generation NVMe SSD and I/O Technology [PC, PS5, XBSX|S]
- Thread starter Shortbread
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Was also thinking that lol. Its just weird him saying it like that, one can simply suspend the whole windows OS with a game running in the background, hitting a key and its there rather quick, quick enough, probably ballpark Xbox series speeds.
Emulators are doing it no problem, even VM loads a whole OS lightning fast if you have the hardware these days. It seems more an excuse than the whole truth to as to why theres no Quick Resume. Not that you really need it to have the same functionality anyway.
One can 'Quick Resume' the whole OS with a game running no problem.... VM's do load ultra fast. Sure some software solution could enable some sort of Quick Resume. Again, personally its not something i cant do myself.... Its easier with quick resume perhaps and if you play more than one game at a time its handy.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Did you even read the article? Quick Resume doesn't care how the application is written it functions at the OS level.
Just like backup software doesn't care what is on a drive, it's all just 1's and 0's. Quick Resume saves a game's state (it's memory footprint) to the SSD it then loads that state from the SSD. It would work fine for a DOS game if it existed in emulation on an Xbox Series console.
The main things that prevent it from working is if the game requires more than just its state in memory before it can resume. Like, for example, a multiplayer game requires syncing with either other players (P2P) or a server (server based). This means that even single player games with an online component won't work necessarily work with Quick Resume since the saved state won't keep the connection alive with the online servers.
So, X360 games, OG Xbox games, XBO games can all use Direct Storage through Quick Resume because the app doesn't have to know that Direct Storage even exists because the OS handles that. But MS still have to whitelist the game in case it's doing something that requires more than just the memory state before the game can resume (like contacting a server, or using a system timestamp, or some other thing).
Regards,
SB
I think It's saving the entire state of the X360 Virtual Machine. That way the game plays no part in it and only has to be network fault tolerant.
davis.anthony
Veteran
But that would mean Quick Resume doesn't need Direct Storage which goes against what he said.
No. The current QuickResume Implementation is written directly against the Direct Storage API. It would require a rewrite to use Win32 APIs. It needed to be written against some I/O API and it was decided to use Direct Storage API.
davis.anthony
Veteran
Yes I did, and one goes throws your argument out the window.
That's tell us everything we need to know, Direct Storage is not needed for it to work.
You also have to question the article itself when it says silliness like this
You would need to mirror Xbox’s Velocity Architecture? Really? Lets break that down..
1. A fast PCIe SSD - I bet a simple SATA III SSD would also do the trick just fine, just a little slower depending on the game
2. DirectStorage API - This would only help with the speed and isn't required to make the whole thing possible
3. Hardware decompression blocks - Just like the API, this would only help with the speed and isn't required to make the whole thing possible
4. Sampler feedback streaming - Like...what? lol?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
In which case if you won't even believe one of the Quick Resume architects, then what more is there to say?
He says it requires the Direct Storage API and you say it doesn't.
Regards,
SB
davis.anthony
Veteran
So what if he's one of the Quick Resume architects, doesn't mean he can't be challenged on his claims or that we should take his claims blindly. Think about what he's said and put some thought in to it.
- He suggests that it won't work on any other drive than a PCIEX SSD
- He suggests that it won't work without hardware decompression blocks
- He suggests that it won't work without SFS
Can you explain what Direct Storage is doing that means it's the only solution to get Quick Resume working even though we already have ways to suspend on PC.
Come on man, at a certain point if you're reading something secondhand written at a non-developer audience you have to apply common sense. If a mathematician told me that 1+1 didn't equal 2 I wouldn't doubt their competence, but I also wouldn't start going around and correcting others, I would assume there was some context I was misunderstanding.
I don't know how quick resume works -- at a certain point, I suspect it is more complicated than some of the posters here imply, and would not be simple to ship as part of windows with all of windows' other guarantees intact -- suspending one game, loading another game, and not crashing either game or any part of the OS, all in the span of a second or two, even if both games used absolutely all of memory, sounds simple-ish on paper but also sounds like exactly the kind of thing which is actually not easy at all -- especially seeing as even the other closed platform consoles haven't copied the feature. However, I know enough to say that sampler feedback streaming is certainly not involved, and so I don't think that one quote should be taken as an authoritative statement of fact.
The only thing I can think of that bridges the conflict of these opposing positions is if there's a difference between Quick Resume and quick resume. The concept of saving out a RAM dump and reinitialising, quick resume, doesn't need PCIE SSDs or Direct Storage as you say, but the implemnentation of Quick Resume, MS's OS level solution, might well need these things as using a software stack with inherent requirements to function correctly, and no option to use just part of that stack for RAM dump/resume on its own.
I'm pretty sure if DirectStorage were to land on PC, most people would spooked by constant SSD writes and turn it off (I for one, would turn it off. I have no idea what kind of "trust" Microsoft have their for the SSDs they use. I really wonder what is going on there. A heavy gamer should have an enormous amount of constant SSD dumps/writes in a constant flow.).
Assume your actually talking about quick resume and not direct storage?
What constant writes?
It would be a single one when game state/memory is stored.
Not that I expect it to come to PC in the short to medium term if at all.
Are you similarly concerned about the SSD in XBSX. and PS5 for that matter?
It doesn't work that way at all.
You could go for an extensive 8 - 24 hour marathon session and if you're only playing 1 game you only get 1 write at the very end.
Yeah, very much to this point, write endurance concerns on SSD's are waaaaaaaaaaaaay overblown. Even the most modern and thus "weakest" QLC flash cells out there have DWPD ratings sufficient to live with a full rewrite every day for three years <!>. Or maybe half a drive-write every day for more than five years.
So unless your 1TB NVMe drive is writing 1TB every day, you're not really not in any danger for a decade if not more.
I guess the other concern would be that you have a 1 TB drive, 950 GBs of games, and you're writing to the same 50 GBs over and over? But then doesn't the drive management shuffle data around so sectors that get repeatedly used are replaced with rarely-written data and the mostly unwritten sectors then used for writes, so the drive is managed to distribute to wear to maximise longevity?
QuickResume wouldnt be writing out that much data unless a game is using 50 GB of active memory. QuickResume writes out (compressed) memory snapshots.
The drive itself manages cell life for writes and all drives have excess cells that are migrated in and out of use to extend the lifetimes.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
Yes, that's exactly what solid-state filesystems are designed to do. Although it objectively introduces more read-write cycles, the 'heath' of the NAND array overall get less reptitive use on average.
I've been song SSD storage on laptops since my first 2nd gen MacBook Air in 2009 and people were concerned about longevity back then too. After 14 years of laptops phones and tablets, I've never had storage go bad or met anybody who did.
This is not about creating a quick resume like feature for the PC. The article is about transitioning the Xbox's solution to the PC as some gamers were conflating Quick Resume with Direct Storage.
If MS's plan was to create a new solution from the ground up, it probably wouldn't need to explicitly require Direct Storage, a nvme drive or decompression tech.
But if you are already moving Velocity Arch to the PC then it would make sense that the hypothetical offering of quick resume on the PC would begin by looking at the Xbox solution as a template. There is no official plan to make quick resume possible on the PC. It was just a mental exercise by Jason Ronald on how to offer an xbox feature on the PC.
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