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

On multiplatform titles that might be the case, yet faster I/O can still yield use of larger, higher quality textures on PS5 which the I/O enables that. But for Sony first party studios, or any other developer not concerned with XBS, they can go nuts.
That'll be how many titles in the end? Especially if Sony now has one eye on PC for all titles? Also how much of a visual difference would those better assets be? Enough of a game changer to warrant the notably-higher investment in the IO?
I'm not sure the PC Ratchet & Clank analysis will do much for this. R&C:RA is a first generation Insomniac title using the SSD and we know from DF's experiment using slower SSD drives in PS5 that this particular game is not pushing the I/O hard. Their next game, or the game after? That will be the test. As as I said above, consoles are expected to last 6-7 years or more and that is a lot of time for needs and technical demands to change drastically.
It's an important starting point though. And, as I just said, Sony's interest in PC sales may affect how much they push their hardware too. A look at R&C will show the limitations (or lack thereof) of the PC and how big a market cross-plat titles can go with PS5 IO.

That all said, the history of features on consoles is a pretty discouraging precedent, with many features failing to manifest meaningfully for the console even into later titles. Whether XB360's "smart eDRAM" where the MSAA got dropped when games moved away from forward rendering, or the PSP's Bezier hardware, or VU0's massive underutilisation in PS2, too often hardware designers put in stuff that just was questionably worth it by the end of the device's generation. I'd argue that projections of what will be important over the entire generation are more often wrong than right.
 
Regarding the XBox storage comparison I wouldn't be surprised if the Xbox SSD solution is slower spec wise not because of cost/complexity for the internal solution but to cater to their expansion card setup.

I think it's about catering to PC users that might have cheaper and slower NVME's.
 
That all said, the history of features on consoles is a pretty discouraging precedent, with many features failing to manifest meaningfully for the console even into later titles. Whether XB360's "smart eDRAM" where the MSAA got dropped when games moved away from forward rendering, or the PSP's Bezier hardware, or VU0's massive underutilisation in PS2, too often hardware designers put in stuff that just was questionably worth it by the end of the device's generation. I'd argue that projections of what will be important over the entire generation are more often wrong than right.

Perhaps my imagination is limited here, but the first thing I think of when I hear "Wait until later when games start utilizing that 7GB/sec of the PS5's nvme" is...what size of game then are we talking about here that can actually warrant that? A terabyte install size?
 
So I was curious and kind of back-to-backed this with footage of this part of the game on PS5, and there's some very minor differences. In the beginning after the machine gets sucked into the portal and closes, Ratchet hangs around for like 1/4 second longer or so on PC before a portal opens up for him. And when Ratchet falls through the portal to the sort of sandy/rocky world, the time in the portal is maybe like 1/4 to 1/2 second longer on PC.

All in all not anything people will notice while playing, but some very, very slight load performance differences going on for sure. Could change in time as well, of course.

Visually, I didn't take that close a look for differences, but one obvious one is there's a lot more rain particles in that one cyberpunk looking section than on PS5.
Who knows what generation of SSD that was running, or which GPU, or what graphics settings? Higher LODs for geometry and RT reflections (building BVH) could also be making it take longer.

Will be fun to test out either way.
 
Took them and synched them
I just ran them at the some time in the two YT vids. ;) PC ends up a bit slower and with portals opening later, so loading is a little slower sometimes and there's more of a loading screen.

This is surely best-case for the PC and streaming is going to be far slower for many users.
 
I just ran them at the some time in the two YT vids. ;) PC ends up a bit slower and with portals opening later, so loading is a little slower sometimes and there's more of a loading screen.

This is surely best-case for the PC and streaming is going to be far slower for many users.

PC is definitely slower loading there, but as you said on a previous page (or another thread), this isn't telling us anything specific right now as we don't know if they are settings matched. In fact they likely aren't. That's not to say the PS5 won't end up being faster anyway, but we should refrain from conclusions until everything is properly matched.

Not only could higher settings result in more data to be loaded, but the bottleneck may not even be on IO at all. Everything in the new environment still has to be setup on the CPU side simultaneously, so higher settings, particularly Ray Tracing which requires BVH to be built could have an impact there.

We may find for example that load speed it tied more to CPU speed than NVMe drive speed. Swapping out the 3 main components (the other being GPU) as well as changing settings is going to be very illuminating here.
 
I'm not following why you think PS5's I/O is "overkill". The fewer limits you build into your hardware, the less barriers you create for developers to work around.
Oh my god THAT WAS EXACTLY MY POINT. lol

They chose a very high upper limit so it would make developers lives easier not having to worry about I/O limits. I think they aimed for something sufficiently high enough to where it's more than any developer would reasonably need so it makes memory management(which is often one of the biggest headaches in terms of optimization) easier.

I think that is the main benefit and purpose of Sony aiming so high. They really seemed to want to go all-in on making things easier for developers. I wasn't criticizing them and think this is a good thing. But I dont think it will result in appreciably better graphics or anything like some think, either. Like, even with texture resolution, there's very hard diminishing returns with that, especially compared to what XSX will still be capable of on this front.
 
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this isn't telling us anything specific right now as we don't know if they are settings matched. In fact they likely aren't.
They clearly aren't. Texture quality looks different, as does some of the lighting and the rain density in the Blade Runner style street is much higher in the PC version. Also, the PS5 version either has it's contrast muted, or perhaps there's an atmospheric effect that just missing on the video nVidia released.
 
From DF analysis:
First of all, the difference between the console experience and the 'very low' setting is frankly immense in terms of data transfer. Secondly, the comment was likely made in relation to the other development platform available to them, the PlayStation 4. In the video you'll witness the carnage of what happens when you try to run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on a launch PS4 512GB HDD (in PC) - even the very low setting doesn't work and the game eventually crashes
Immediate take-home is that above 3.5 GB/s SSD speeds, there's no difference in load times which remain below PS5's. Is that the PS5 IO system altogether in play, or a particular limit of this game, this software build, that'll be improved on PC over time?

There's a more detailed investigation to come trying different PC builds.
 
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From DF analysis:

Immediate take-home is that above 3.5 GB/s SSD speeds, there's no difference in load times which remain below PS5's. Is that the PS5 IO system altogether in play, or a particular limit of this game, this software build, that'll be improved on PC over time?

There's a more detailed investigation to come trying different PC builds.

They tried the game on a PS5 with the slowest SSD possible working on it 3 GB/s and it changes nothing. The insomniac dev working on I/O told the CPU engine code is the bottleneck not the SSD and it is running after decompression at 5 GB/s.
 
They tried the game on a PS5 with the slowest SSD possible working on it 3 GB/s and it changes nothing. The insomniac dev working on I/O told the CPU engine code is the bottleneck not the SSD and it is running after decompression at 5 GB/s.

Yes it's a shame DF didn't look at the load speed difference between different CPU's as well as different drives. Obviously they are very limited on time for the initial look but i hope they or some other site goes into more detail here. I'd like to see CPU power, GPU power, memory speed and drive speed all varied individually to see which if any is impacting the load speed.

It may simply be a game engine limitation on the PC side. I recall Insomniac saying that they were optimising the load speed on PS5 until very near launch time. On PC they don;t even have RT working on AMD cards so I'm guessing that level of optimisation hasn't been afforded.

Honestly, I don't think this port is in great shape. Sure it doesn't have shader comp stutter and the loading works pretty much the same as the PS5 if you have the hardware, but it seems to have quite a few serious bugs and optimisation issues that make me think it needed longer in the oven. Glad I didn't pre-order but I'll certainly keep an eye on it over the next few months.
 
Yes it's a shame DF didn't look at the load speed difference between different CPU's as well as different drives.
This isn't the deep-dive! It's a first look comparing top and bottom tier PC specs with PS5.

We received code for this relatively late, so our deep dive review coverage is still work-in-progress, but we have put together a detailed 'let's play' video that shows three members of the Digital Foundry team playing the game on three very different pieces of hardware.

Honestly, just read, people!
 
This isn't the deep-dive! It's a first look comparing top and bottom tier PC specs with PS5.

We received code for this relatively late, so our deep dive review coverage is still work-in-progress, but we have put together a detailed 'let's play' video that shows three members of the Digital Foundry team playing the game on three very different pieces of hardware.

Honestly, just read, people!

Clearly I get that. I said as much in the next sentence:

"Obviously they are very limited on time for the initial look but i hope they or some other site goes into more detail here."

I'm simply pointing out that it's a shame we don't yet have what is likely a key complimentary piece if data to the drive speed measurement which may tell us a lot more about whats going on. I'm sure we'll get that soon enough and for a very quick (in terms of how soon it released) initial analysis the content was excellent and went into impressive depth.

But there is a LOT to analyse with this title, and I hope a trusted source like DF are going to be able to cover it all, because there is also going to be a lot of fud flying around too.
 
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