Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

I've not really kept up on this whole matter, but I was under the impression that the XSX's addressable 100GB was less like a pool of very slow memory that one could swap in and out of, but rather, it's more like slow, read-only "RAM" (I'm putting RAM in quotation marks because, at that point, it doesn't qualify as RAM, but I hope it illustrates my point.)

So I read the whole matter as being more along the lines of games being given a 100GB installation limit, and that entire installation being addressable at 4.8GB/s, albeit read-only. Therefore, I expected the PS5 to be basically the same, but at 8-9GB/s. Like I said though, I've not really kept up on the matter.

The space for multiple instances of suspend/resume is something I'm curious about with the PS5. To my knowledge, they've yet to say anything about the matter. And if the SSD is fast enough that loading into a game takes a couple of seconds, how valuable are multiple save states going to be? And would Sony deem them valuable enough to offset the length of the internal SSD's life?

I certainly would quite like multiple save states but, if they're even present on the PS5, I'll only be writing them to the expandable storage. Similar with screenshots and video recordings: I only want to export such frivolities to a USB drive, not spend valuable write cycles of my internal SSD.

I think the only issue is that the internal SSD's of the PS5 & XSX are soldered. If an SSD fails or begins to fail in a PC it's not nearly as catastrophic.

 

Yea, absolutely.
Next gen will introduce 2 major factors in which failure in either will result in a lot of RMAs, imo it's likely to be a higher failure rate for next gen than this gen. This was my main concern around heat.
You've got to keep 2 things running cool if you want them to last 7 years.

 

From what I understand the PS5 is using a completely different system that doesn’t even use folders and file names. Instead assets get a unique identifier by which you can load them and you can probably load them directly with the lowest latency possible to where they are needed, including right into a shader or whatnot, which is why they talked about being able to override.

I’m really curious to hear more about this and what advantages that has. I can imagine it could be really helpful. Perhaps you can layout a 3D scene with coordinates and just a table of identifiers for different ranges that triggers the appropriate LOD mesh. That might be surprisingly painless compared to how it would work now, or at least orders of magnitudes more powerful and fast.

 

The writing habits of a console most probably doesn't make this an issue. SSD has thousands of write cycles built in, and even taking the low range of 1000 times/bit, a 800GB disk amounts to 800TB writable for the lifetime. As long as you don't replace your game files like a maniac or Sony doesn't do something extremely idiotic like writing all the play record data into the SSD (which they write to RAM, obviously), that won't be an issue. Volatile data gets stored in RAM and doesn't come out to SSD, SSD acts like a ROM, not RAM.

 

People replacing their game files is pretty much inevitable considering the low sizes of these SSDs....gonna have to switch them out for a big drive ASAP

 

It doesn't have to be 6GB of unique data every second (or every 100m). It could be 10GB + 90GB. 6GB/s of data can be pulled from that 90GB.

This should also be true for open-world games. Taking advantage of the ultra-fast and I/O doesn't mean games should start occupying 500GB+ of SSD space. A game could take advantage of 9GB/s of loading details in and out. Those details (sound, animation, polygons, textures, etc.) don't have to be unique every second (or every 10x10m).

Say an open-world game set in a suburban neighborhood with 50 houses all explorable or a building with 50 rooms all explorable. All those 50 houses/rooms can be very detailed using 10GB of assets, texture and geometry. It doesn't mean that those 50 houses/rooms will add 500GB of data to the game. It could be a pool of 50GB of arts and assets (each house/room are unique to each other). But each house/room can be super detailed because the SSD can load 9GB/s of data as soon as you open the door.

I'm sure there are better examples that will illustrate that taking advantage of ultra-fast SSD and I/O would not mean the game will start shipping in half a terabyte in size.

 

You mean the up to 15 min record of game play like that on PS4?. That is stored on the HDD and will be written to the SSD on the PS5 for people to watch later, if not Sony remove the feature altogether for the PS5.

 

Store it in the cloud. Oh dear, that's always online.

Tommy McClain

 

At first I thought the last ~15 minutes of gameplay will be cached to a RAM reserve and only written to the SSD if the user decides on it.

I was thinking, perhaps 1440/60 and 4K/30 with HEVC would be a decent compromise and maybe a feature of a future Pro could be 4K/60+ with VVC. Given the awful 1080/30, low bitrate video on PS4, I was hoping for much better quality on PS5 but availability of RAM space may put a dent in that dream.

Whichever way you look at it, there's just not enough RAM to be caching that much data without a serious hit to quality, it'll be potato quality. Given the content type a target of 1440/60 or 4K/30 4:2:0 10-Bit HDR will require ~4.5GB for 15 minutes of video at a reasonable quality. You might get that close to 3GB with a drop to SDR/8-Bit and a further reduction in quality, even then, 3GB is a big chunk of that 16GB for the game dvr. Even with a potential novel approach regarding the OS residing on the SSD, I believe at least some of it will have to reside in RAM still, which means even less for games.

This is where an extra dedicated pool of slow, high durability flash or cheap RAM would lend the system so much more flexibility. If there's nothing like that I wonder if we're gonna see any better than 1080/60 with a passable bitrate or whether they might push to 4K with a boatload of macro-blocking and banding.

Bit of a digression... but I hope that Create functionality includes a GIF maker/editor.

 

on PS4 pro at least, you can record up to 30min of video.

 

Can't you configure some of the NAND to SLC mode to use for the video stream? I was expecting a side pool of DDR4 but I guess it doesn't make sense cost-wise.

 

It's not enough writing to matter. A cheap 1 DWPD QLC would be able to do 825GB per day, and the recording would be something like 4GB per hour of gameplay in h265. It's a drop in the ocean.

 

Or they can stream it to cloud.

 

That'd impact your network data in multiplayer games.

 

No more than live streaming does now.

 

Not to mention the people in backward countries with datacaps might not like it.

 

Id rather things be primarily kept local first

 

We're not backward countries! We're proud capitalists who voted for deregulation leading to the defunding and corruption of government bodies in charge of avoiding this in the first place, bringing us back to where we were before these agencies existed. No wait... I see what you mean...

 

First.. Dirt 5 looks great and I think I'm back into racing for the first time since Motorstorm.



Second..

October 2020
PS5/PS4

 

The fact that evolution studios is taking on the dirt franchise from here on out is great. But they should have put a subtitle and not a numbering.

The other dirt games are very dry affairs with no prioritization on visuals. Exact opposite of creed of evo studios.