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

[Seanspeed]

in part because of the speed of PS5's SSD can hide a lot of inefficiencies in a game's I/O stack, level-design, asset usage and data arrangement.

I've always thought that this was kind of the point of the PS5's SSD setup being somewhat 'overkill'. Like it wasn't meant to be utilized to its limits, but moreso is there to get I/O out of the way for the developers and make their lives easier.

So yea, if you're designing around the PS5 and dont have to worry so much about optimizing memory management around I/O limitations, then you probably dont have the most efficient management. Which is 100% fine if you're only worried about developing for PS5. But could definitely become an issue for other platforms if you then port from that PS5 base.

That's very different from something simply not being possible on other platforms, which I dont believe for a second.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I've always thought that this was kind of the point of the PS5's SSD setup being somewhat 'overkill'. Like it wasn't meant to be utilized to its limits, but moreso is there to get I/O out of the way for the developers and make their lives easier.

If you watch Mark Cerny's 'Road to PS5' presentation, you'll see it was a bit of both. It was intended to unburden developers whilst giving the opportunity of those want to do, to eek every ounce of performance out of it. If feels like only Sony first parties are doing this, i.e. witness load times Astrobots and Spider-Man being literally just a few seconds.

 

[snc]

isnt it that "game" made by only two brothers ?
i'm not even sure they have access to consoles dev kits.

Yep, asked them about psvr2 version unfortunetly not in work now

 

[QPlayer]

That's very different from something simply not being possible on other platforms, which I dont believe for a second.

That's exactly right. On Xbox, for example, there is the SFS hardware unit, which could also be used very efficiently for speed and performance, especially for the purpose of freeing up a significant percentage of the memory bandwidth. Not to mention if all of this were combined with an engine based only on SSD I/O. Will there be such a game in this generation?

 

[Dictator]

Does UE5 support DirectStorage currently? I thought it didn't.

I mean not on PC - I doubt it does on Xbox.

 

[Seanspeed]

If you watch Mark Cerny's 'Road to PS5' presentation, you'll see it was a bit of both. It was intended to unburden developers whilst giving the opportunity of those want to do, to eek every ounce of performance out of it. If feels like only Sony first parties are doing this, i.e. witness load times Astrobots and Spider-Man being literally just a few seconds.

I'm not really talking load times, but actually running games in real-time. But even with load times, any game whose loading is optimized around a fast NVMe is not going to see drastically different results based on using PS5 or XSX. I really doubt they went with an extra expensive 12 channel SSD design just so devs could shave off another second or so from what you could do with a 'still fast, but not as fast' SSD.

 

[Seanspeed]

That's exactly right. On Xbox, for example, there is the SFS hardware unit, which could also be used very efficiently for speed and performance, especially for the purpose of freeing up a significant percentage of the memory bandwidth. Not to mention if all of this were combined with an engine based only on SSD I/O. Will there be such a game in this generation?

I've definitely been disappointed at how little MS first party has been taking advantage of the XSX's capabilities so far. They all just seem to be using the brute force of the hardware and calling it a day. But then, their games so far have mostly all still been quite cross gen.

 

[Below2D]

This could go in 10 different threads but I'll post it here. Not much info but this is using RTX IO.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm not really talking load times, but actually running games in real-time. But even with load times, any game whose loading is optimized around a fast NVMe is not going to see drastically different results based on using PS5 or XSX.

This is also covered in Road to PS5 and DF's interview with Insomniac. Cerny conjectured that developers could unload assets behind the player, and load them in before they turn around and Insomniac confirmed they did this in Ratchet & Clank. As for drastically different results, it depends how much data is being loaded.

PS5 is 5.5Gb/sec raw, 8-9Gb/s average and 22Gb/sec peak (well compressed data), Xbox Series is 2.4Gb/sec raw and 4.8Gb/sec average. It's not a difficult concept to grasp that if need to load more data in realtime than the SSD and I/O can deliver then you need to change something

 

[Seanspeed]

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.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

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.

Literally unplayable, pre-order cancelled!

 

[Seanspeed]

This is also covered in Road to PS5 and DF's interview with Insomniac. Cerny conjectured that developers could unload assets behind the player, and load them in before they turn around and Insomniac confirmed they did this in Ratchet & Clank. As for drastically different results, it depends how much data is being loaded.

PS5 is 5.5Gb/sec raw, 8-9Gb/s average and 22Gb/sec peak (well compressed data), Xbox Series is 2.4Gb/sec raw and 4.8Gb/sec average. It's not a difficult concept to grasp that if need to load more data in realtime than the SSD and I/O can deliver then you need to change something

Look, I know what the whole Road to PS5 video and all that said. I know what the claims were. I'm talking less PR, and more what I think the actual reality of the situation is.

What you're talking about(and what Cerny talked about) is applicable to using these fast SSD's in general, it's not unique to the PS5. I dont think there will be games that honestly need 10GB/s+ of new data being streamed in at all times for this advantage to really be something that developers will be able to leverage into tangibly superior results. 10GB/s would mean basically rewriting nearly all of the PS5's available VRAM every second. What game could possibly need that?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

What you're talking about(and what Cerny talked about) is applicable to using these fast SSD's in general, it's not unique to the PS5. I dont think there will be games that honestly need 10GB/s+ of data streaming at all times for this advantage to really be something that developers will be able to leverage into tangibly superior results.

Nobody is claiming it's unique to PS5.

I will repeat what I posted: It's not a difficult concept to grasp that if need to load more data in realtime than the SSD and I/O can deliver then you need to change something.

That's platform agnostic, please stop reading everything as platform warring.

 

[Seanspeed]

Nobody is claiming it's unique to PS5.

I will repeat what I posted: It's not a difficult concept to grasp that if need to load more data in realtime than the SSD and I/O can deliver then you need to change something.

That's platform agnostic, please stop reading everything as platform warring.

Dude, I was specifically talking about the PS5's SSD setup and why Sony went with such an 'overkill'(fast) setup. Its unique advantages were the whole context of what I was talking about when you responded to me about it.

Maybe you didn't understand that or something, but your response to me doesn't make any sense unless you were also talking specifically about PS5, which it also very much seemed you were since you were bringing up Road to PS5 and all that... :/

 

[pjbliverpool]

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.

Bear in mind if this is running maxed out which it probably is for a showcase video like this, then they could be using higher res textures and shadow maps which means more data to stream in.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Maybe you didn't understand that or something, but your response to me doesn't make any sense unless you were also talking specifically about PS5, which it also very much seemed you were since you were bringing up Road to PS5 and all that... :/

Perhaps I misunderstand what you meant with "actually running games in real-time" but I took that to building a game that benefits for aggressively dumping assets for memory because you can re-load them if you needed them unexpectedly. I was referring to PS5 in this regard because this point was mentioned by Cerny in Road to PS5, and implemented in Rift Apart.

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. Something that is good enough at the start of a console generation may not satisfy the demands of developers 6-7 years later at the end of a console generation.

 

[arandomguy]

I wouldn't be so sure that that the PS5's SSD setup is all that "extra expensive." That 12 channel controller also gives much more flexibility on the NAND size hit the required speeds and also in terms of thermal load (which saves cost on cooling). The practicality (and cost) of a 12 channel controller is also different due to layout conisderations vs. the m.2 form factor. It's going to be higher cost compared to an off the shelf design but they do enough volume likely to spread that.

We've been kind of conditioned based on PC retail prices in an under supply market, and when NVMe drives were more novel, enabling vendors to market segment and sell high end fast SSDs at a large premium but the actual cost difference as opposed to margin difference is less clear. In the current over supply market we actually see high end NVMe drives selling for the same basically as years old SATA drives, for example the 1 TB Crucial MX500 SATA is currently $48 versus $50 for the P5 Plus.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Bear in mind if this is running maxed out which it probably is for a showcase video like this, then they could be using higher res textures and shadow maps which means more data to stream in.

Furthermore, a monster PC with more RAM and pre-caching.

I don't see much value in discussing this video when DF's analysis is surely only days away, unless one wants to start placing their bets now. As a rudimentary 'is PC doing what PS is doing?' comparison it's not useful. Also, it's using DirectIO which didn't exist when PS5 was made. Let's see how the PC data flow compares to see if it's overkill or not.

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. Something that is good enough at the start of a console generation may not satisfy the demands of developers 6-7 years later at the end of a console generation.

Although if games target a lower common denominator, that overhead can well go unused. The case here is the XBS solution was good enough and everything on top of that offered by PS5 won't yield meaningful benefits.

We'll have the beginnings of an insight into that question when we see how different PC configs cope with what's looking like a great port that's utilising the hardware well.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Although if games target a lower common denominator, that overhead can well go unused. The case here is the XBS solution was good enough and everything on top of that offered by PS5 won't yield meaningful benefits.

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.

We'll have the beginnings of an insight into that question when we see how different PC configs cope with what's looking like a great port that's utilising the hardware well.

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.

 

[arandomguy]

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.