Not sure if it fits best here but I'm a PS owner so figure I'll keep the general stuff in once place - When you stream assets in from the SSD, will there still be options to persist assets? For instance (very basic) you stream the camera view and in front of you is an overturned cart. You turn round and there is the same overturned cart asset behind you. Is Cerny saying because the streaming is so quick it will be culled when out of view and the asset reloaded when the camera sees it again? Or will there be some sort of residency for a period of time in case it's needed again quickly?
Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]
- Thread starter BRiT
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What they are trying to do is that anything behind you will be off RAM, and will be streamed in when you turn around again. Now, how feasible this is is the central question of seemingly every thread concerning SSDs on here. Oh and Flight Simulator 2020, of course. Welcome!
Depends on the game and engine, though it doesn't make a great deal of sense to flush out everything in the local vicinity that you may still see in a fraction of a second's time, especially in fast games like the modern FPSes.
We currently have something like 4 GBs to represent a level in a current-gen game. Next gen, we can afford 4 GBs just for the local area at 10x the quality and stream in on demand as that changes with perhaps a 1 second look ahead. The more cacheing you have with less reliance on JIT low-latency storage loads, the more portable your game will be to other platforms.
We currently have something like 4 GBs to represent a level in a current-gen game. Next gen, we can afford 4 GBs just for the local area at 10x the quality and stream in on demand as that changes with perhaps a 1 second look ahead. The more cacheing you have with less reliance on JIT low-latency storage loads, the more portable your game will be to other platforms.
Thanks - seems quite level headed here without the burning fires of console wars. Calm. I like it
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking - obviously a common example in MP FPS will be strafing quickly. So this is something that would be down to the engine. Unload after 3 seconds if notSeen for example? Obviously I appreciate cross gen/party titles will use the most limiting factor when doing their design.
I doubt it'll work based on time since last seen, but on predictions of the players movements. In something like Apex with very fast traversal and turn-arounds, you'd need to cache a lot of data at different LODs. You could in essence create a map of 'how long until the player might see this bit of the area'. The space behind a building might be 1 second away, while another building in the distance that'll pop into view when the player strafes past the corner might be 0.1 seconds away, and the rocks behind the player 0.5 seconds away from a turn. Anything greater than 0.5 seconds could be streamed on demand as you could be sure it'd be present in time. The faster the IO, the shorter that look-ahead/load-ahead needs be. But the gains from that is basically more working ram for what's already visible, and there'll be a trade-off between super optimised engines loading just in time a frame before anything is seen, and sanity on the part of the devs not having to create such a sensitive engine! Instead, I'd expect, in something like Apex, the locality, 400 m² or something, to be resident and to stream in/update closer proximities as you traverse. That's an extension of existing streaming.
Further into the generation, we may see more virtualsed textures and geometries with tiled resources, and coming out of this generation, I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the norm and no geometry is completely resident, with only visible and nearly-visible geometry ever present. That'd be great for gaming and future rendering if that can be achieved.
Although caveat with that, streamed assets likely don't play well with raytracing, so RT might change everything.
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Deleted member 11852
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It's difficult to envisage what kind of game would you have where it would desirable or necessary to adopt such an aggressive JIT streaming approach where toy you loading in things 1 or 2 seconds before you need then. Just because you may be able too, doesn't necessarily mean you should. But that it might be an option for some crazy scenario is only a good thing. I've never met a developer who was against the removal of technical barriers.
Inuhanyou
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Something like cod 2019 and doom eternal are a practice case for that approach and they seem to work well enough culling assets on the fly from hdd when extremely optimized. That just means such things can exist in practice on a much greater scale on xbsx and ps5 with an an order of magnitude streaming improvement in addition to the stronger hw in general
An FMV game. They constantly stream in content just as it's needed. SegaCD... The PS5 before the PS5.
Those games aren't unloading assets just because they are out of view, though. Not exactly sure how Doom works but COD keeps chunks of the level in memory in a radius around the player. Stuff behind the player is still in memory. That's different from all this talk about loading in assets just as they enter camera view, or mid frame, or whatever.
What’s possible and what’s practical aren’t always one in the same.
Developing a system that evicts anything directly behind your pc can find itself consistently evicting and streaming non used data.
To provide perspective, as you turn your pc to the right, the game will need to evict data from your left to make room for new data. But as you complete a 180 degree turn, data that was initially evicted needs to be streamed back in as to be ready as that data now represents the scene to your immediate right.
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Notably old paper-clips, little bits of notes, maybe a lost pen or two, depending where the pc is placed. Worst case, the wall to your room is culled. However, it could prove useful when dealing with unwanted guests as you only need turn the pc away from them.
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I'd love a little clean up round the sides of my TV here!
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I’m trying to think of example of how the speed of the SSDs could be put to good use.
Imagine a player navigating through a series of rooms and corridors. We can call them room 1, room 2, etc. In a conservative SSD usage scenario; while the player is in room 2, the SSD could keep the data resident for rooms 1, 2, and 3, since they’re likely able to see through the doors into the next rooms and could go into either space. As the player moves to room 4, the system can then scrub the data for room 1 and fetch the data for room 5 – so rooms 3, 4, and 5 are now resident.
The data that’s present on the SSD may have repeating assets in rooms 1 and 4, so it’s not like all data for each room are unique, but flushing the unnecessary data from room 1 and adding the required data for room 4. This also keeps total game size down, since devs would not be recreating unique assets for each area.
I think this is essentially a more conservative variation of what COD 2019 is doing in the battle royale mode – that is constantly shifting data within a radius of the player (a few hundred virtual metres or so). I would hazard a guess that the system would need to keep a low LOD version of the entire map in memory and need move higher LODs within radius. If we expand this to a potential COD 2020/2021, it could work somewhat like having data as follows:
Core assets (engine, physics, player characters, etc): 2-3GBs
Low LOD map/textures: 2-4GBs
Variables high LOD map/textures: 5.5-9GBs (proportional to the IO of the device)
The variable data would then flush within a radius of the player (wide to the point of low LOD being indistinguishable from the high, or thereabouts).
Imagine a player navigating through a series of rooms and corridors. We can call them room 1, room 2, etc. In a conservative SSD usage scenario; while the player is in room 2, the SSD could keep the data resident for rooms 1, 2, and 3, since they’re likely able to see through the doors into the next rooms and could go into either space. As the player moves to room 4, the system can then scrub the data for room 1 and fetch the data for room 5 – so rooms 3, 4, and 5 are now resident.
The data that’s present on the SSD may have repeating assets in rooms 1 and 4, so it’s not like all data for each room are unique, but flushing the unnecessary data from room 1 and adding the required data for room 4. This also keeps total game size down, since devs would not be recreating unique assets for each area.
I think this is essentially a more conservative variation of what COD 2019 is doing in the battle royale mode – that is constantly shifting data within a radius of the player (a few hundred virtual metres or so). I would hazard a guess that the system would need to keep a low LOD version of the entire map in memory and need move higher LODs within radius. If we expand this to a potential COD 2020/2021, it could work somewhat like having data as follows:
Core assets (engine, physics, player characters, etc): 2-3GBs
Low LOD map/textures: 2-4GBs
Variables high LOD map/textures: 5.5-9GBs (proportional to the IO of the device)
The variable data would then flush within a radius of the player (wide to the point of low LOD being indistinguishable from the high, or thereabouts).
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That's true in theory. However, in practice, you have maybe 8GBs for game assets (and 4+ for game code and runtime content). That'd be 2GBs of data for every room. That's a lot of content. Maybe in a specialist game with a limited scope, like a game that takes place in an old house, you could have a 100 GB game with 40-50 rooms, but in something large, an Uncharted or COD, that'd be too much data being too expensive to make (unless there's progress in that side of things. Maybe ML object modification will result in huge libraries of reusable assets?) and resulting in too big games.
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Best thing we bought this year, a Roomba! Most expensive thing we bought this year: A Roomba as now we're keen to change our admittedly-a-few-years-old furniture for replacements that the Roomba can get under it quite easily. This is easier said than done, specially for TV cabinets, standing shelves and sofas.
How is more living furniture not Roomba-friendly in terms of height from the floor?
Best thing we bought this year, a Roomba! Most expensive thing we bought this year: A Roomba as now we're keen to change our admittedly-a-few-years-old furniture for replacements that the Roomba can get under it quite easily. This is easier said than done, specially for TV cabinets, standing shelves and sofas.
How is more living furniture not Roomba-friendly in terms of height from the floor?
Everything can be Roomba! friendly with simple additional chains and ceiling mounts.
Tkumpathenurple
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Everything can be Roomba! friendly with simple additional chains and ceiling mounts.
Stop trying to convince DSoup to buy a sex swing.
I'd recommend the ones with straps instead of chains.
And I'm signing out.
And I'm signing out.
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Deleted member 7537
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PS5 going full XBONE (Media Sidebar Patent)
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search...0129908&tab=PCTBIBLIO&_cid=P20-KBUO6U-87137-1
I remember this being one of the nicest features of the XB OS, but I believe they removed it later.
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search...0129908&tab=PCTBIBLIO&_cid=P20-KBUO6U-87137-1
I remember this being one of the nicest features of the XB OS, but I believe they removed it later.
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Out of the swing?
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