Sony PlayStation cross-platform game strategy

Because PS4's architecture doesn't do anything that PC can't brute force. The SSD and I/O of PS5 can change that. It'll be fundamentally different. Not unlike why the reason there are no fully-working PS3 emulators is PC just can't brute force Cell emulation.
No it won't, IF the PS5 solution is unique you bet a similar solution will be developed on PC (if not already in development), I don't think a console can outmatch PC in storage at all.

A unified memory system has advantages that PC's disparate RAM and VRAM pools cannot match
There is no "significant" advantage to this kind of separation, third party PC games never suffered because of it, in fact I'd argue the separation on a well equipped PC gives it more available bandwidth for either the CPU or the GPU, while consoles have to fight over bandwidth for both the CPU and GPU, which often made one of them suffer greatly.
 
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Is there anything that can be done on the OS side by MS through software? As far as gaming is concerned what could (realistically) be done?

As I understand it (admittedly not much so go easy), it's not just about transfer speeds, but the ability to decompress data fast enough is what is currently bottlenecking games from performing that much faster.
 
No it won't, IF the PS5 solution is unique you bet a similar solution will be developed on PC (if not already in development), I don't think a console can outmatch PC in storage at all.

There’s already faster solutions available yet more expensive. We got radeon ssg tech, Optane, Phison ssd solutions, last but not least much more and faster vram which doesnt have to be shared between cpu/gpu. Something like a rtx 3080 is going to have more vram then what a typical ps5 game is going to have allocated ti vram.
I would even be surprised if the ps5 could match what SC is doing in details, assets/asset streaming, and the ultra fast travel, reportedly by DF a Optane drive has advantages over even nvme.
Software could be a problem but who is to say that wont evolve, if even needed. The last thing one should worry about with pc is hardware. Sounds more like wishfull thinking or some backfiring after more and more ps games appear elsewhere. It is un-avoidable in the long future/run, Sony knows this and takes the slow approach there, just like MS did. Stores on pc make big money, Sony might want to join that party.
 
For now. Btw, Star Citizen doesn't really agree :)
Just to be clear - Fairly positive that @Dictator looked into this; and it's what it's doing is a ton of small block hits. So yes, SSD would be important, but pushed to the limit a SATA 3 SSD would fail if they continued to push this further. But if they had a different system in mind where the block sizes were larger and the number of hits were less, this may not be needed.
 
I would even be surprised if the ps5 could match what SC is doing in details, assets/asset streaming

Well yeah, one of them has a concrete release date this year while the other will go on milking money for years and years ...
 
There is no "significant" advantage to this kind of separation, third party PC games never suffered because of it, in fact I'd argue the separation on a well equipped PC gives it more available bandwidth for either the CPU or the GPU, while consoles have to fight over bandwidth for both the CPU and GPU, which often made one of them suffer greatly.
A lot of CPU savings though. No need to copy data. And they can actually have situations where the GPU can calculate the hard stuff and the CPU doing the branching etc. PC has traditionally not had any issues because the CPU is so strong. I'm not sure how long that will be true for when next gen matures.

Is there anything that can be done on the OS side by MS through software? As far as gaming is concerned what could (realistically) be done?

As I understand it (admittedly not much so go easy), it's not just about transfer speeds, but the ability to decompress data fast enough is what is currently bottlenecking games from performing that much faster.
Compression is one aspect. A lot of people get caught up on 'speeds'.
I'll give you simple analogy.

You need to move homes from old to new and you are driving across a very far distance. Consider what you move to be the 'amount of data'.

You can either fill a really big truck with a lot of stuff and then drive it over and unpack it. This takes a lot of time to fill and unpack a truck. But you only took 1 trip and you can go back and forth to do this. (the time it takes to pack and unpack and drive it over to the new house is called latency). You must always fill the truck to the top, so if you want something small, this is a PITA.

or you can use a car, fill it quickly and send them off to unpack and go back and forth. (because the stuff arrived faster, there is less latency). You must always fill the car as well.

The only catch is that the person at the new home tells you what to pack on the truck using a cell phone. It may not all be lined up so you're running around the old house looking for stuff. (this is called seek time)

So you have a situation where you are trading bulk data loading for faster response and vice versa.

When people talk about transfer speeds, they are only looking at the amount of data. But that isn't actually the behaviour of a hard drive. Some hard drives can get significantly more performance out of moving trucks but really suck at the whole small car bit. While others are good at both cars and trucks. Some hard drives are better at finding stuff, and others are worse at it. Some hard drives have a 'loading area' in which they search the house and fill the loading area so that the car can leave while others take the stuff from the loading area and unpack it into the house.

So in this case, SATA 3 is generally not good at Cars strategy. But SATA 3 with SSD is better and it has better seeking times. SSD and SATA 3 is really good at the truck thing, and hard drives aren't too bad at that either. NVME is just better at everything flat out. But it's truck strategies are still better performant than it's car strategies.

Or to put it in analogy sake - SATA 3 only has 100 vehicles to run, you can choose them to be trucks or cars. NVME has 10,000 vehicles it can run, you can choose them to be trucks or cars. But the more vehicles you have the more harder it is to manage, fuelling them all, parking them all, more drivers etc. (this is called overhead)

So you'd have to purposely design a game to run a car strategy to croak older technology and ensure it only runs on the new tech. I'd like to read about the use cases in which developers have always wanted to do this. Aside from SC, I haven't seen anyone else do this yet.
 
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There’s already faster solutions available yet more expensive. We got radeon ssg tech, Optane, Phison ssd solutions, last but not least much more and faster vram which doesnt have to be shared between cpu/gpu. Something like a rtx 3080 is going to have more vram then what a typical ps5 game is going to have allocated ti vram.
I would even be surprised if the ps5 could match what SC is doing in details, assets/asset streaming, and the ultra fast travel, reportedly by DF a Optane drive has advantages over even nvme.
Software could be a problem but who is to say that wont evolve, if even needed. The last thing one should worry about with pc is hardware. Sounds more like wishfull thinking or some backfiring after more and more ps games appear elsewhere. It is un-avoidable in the long future/run, Sony knows this and takes the slow approach there, just like MS did. Stores on pc make big money, Sony might want to join that party.

Phison SSD are slower. And this SSD too is slower 5,6, 7 GB/s current Consumer PCIE4 4 channel SSD doesn't make the cut.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/lexar-hits-7-gbs-with-new-m-2-pcie-4-sdd.html

file-1a58918e5937cbf008-1000x563.jpg


In theory the two next solutions are faster but you need the software to push the speed

https://www.senetic.es/product/SSDPED1D960GAX1

https://www.techspot.com/community/...ssd-can-reach-speeds-of-up-to-15-gb-s.254243/

2019-05-29-image-31.jpg


In real test this is far from what we will see on PS5

https://www.techspot.com/review/1893-pcie-4-vs-pcie-3-ssd/
 
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On a low speed devkit this is the speed of PS5


And it is a mix of SSD speed, custom controller, custom firmware and exploits well ARM CPU in SSD and fast data decompression by ASICs.
 
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No it won't, IF the PS5 solution is unique you bet a similar solution will be developed on PC (if not already in development), I don't think a console can outmatch PC in storage at all.

Sure it could, you could re-engineer the primary architecture of the PC so that SSD's can funnel GB/s of data direct to VRAM for use by the GPU. But that is not possible with the current bus arrangement on the PC.

There is no "significant" advantage to this kind of separation, third party PC games never suffered because of it, in fact I'd argue the separation on a well equipped PC gives it more available bandwidth for either the CPU or the GPU, while consoles have to fight over bandwidth for both the CPU and GPU, which often made one of them suffer greatly.

You can argue what you like but there is basically nothing you can do on PC, with any amount of money applied the fastest SSDs in any RAID arrangement you like, that will virtually eliminate load times. But this is what is being promised on nextegn console and this is possible because the SSDs have high bandwidth to this pool of fast unified RAM, for immediate use by CPU and GPU.

What makes PC's so flexible is also their weakness when it comes to moving a lot of data around for use by the CPU and GPU because you have multiple buses involved, some of which are relatively low-bandwidth.
 
And it is a mix of SSD speed, custom controller, firmware and exploit well ARM CPU in SSD and fast data decompression by ASICs.

Right. As we talked about previously, there isn't that much data actually being loaded in that initial load test [8.1 seconds vs 0.83 seconds] because it's absolutely upper limited by 4Pro. It's a really bad demo because the same thing could be accomplished using a mere 3GB RAM read-ahead buffer.

The real next-gen consoles can do so much more.
 
You can argue what you like but there is basically nothing you can do on PC, with any amount of money applied the fastest SSDs in any RAID arrangement you like, that will virtually eliminate load times. But this is what is being promised on nextegn console and this is possible because the SSDs have high bandwidth to this pool of fast unified RAM, for immediate use by CPU and GPU.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, lets see the solution in action first before we announce any impossibilities. It's common to have a lot of PR BS ahead of any console release.
 
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Do we have PC games with in-game read speed faster than 1GB/s?
I've never seen any review site benchmark hard drive performance for games. They are already dying with the amount of work they have with CPU and GPU, resolution differences.
@Dictator or @Ryan Smith Are you guys looking into read speeds for hard drives for games for next generation ?
 
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, lets see the solution in action first before we announce any impossibilities. It's common to have a lot of PR BS ahead of any console release.

I take the bet at least for first-party Sony games. Other games will probably be slower on the streaming side. But I doubt the third parties studios will not try to reduce as much as possible loading time.

An easy bet to do.
 
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, lets see the solution in action first before we announce any impossibilities. It's common to have a lot of PR BS ahead of any console release.
We've seen it in action, Sony's demonstration of Spider-Man loading already leaked.
 
And it is a mix of SSD speed, custom controller, custom firmware and exploits well ARM CPU in SSD and fast data decompression by ASICs.
Probably important to bold this separation and to encourage people not to lump it all into 'fastest disk speed'.

there are hard drive characteristics. There are controller characteristics and there is compression and decompression characteristics.

The combination of 3 could greatly enhance speed; but i suspect largely that an equivalent can be forged on PC.

A good fast PCIE 4/5 drive with NVME should knock off the first two. Leaving a strong CPU for the last bit.
 
We've seen it in action, Sony's demonstration of Spider-Man loading already leaked.
That's not in action, an off screen demo running a quick flyby (with no discernible IQ) with no gameplay or any upgraded visuals is hardly "in action", let's see the solution shipped in an actual game first. Oh and let's see the supposed "no loading time" claim hold true when developers increase the scene details and texture quality to the next level, some developers already heavily question that claim in the context of the upgraded visuals and details on next gen.

If games would stay the same in terms of scope and visual quality it’d make loading times be almost unnoticeable and restarting a level could be almost instant [in PS5 games].

However, since more data can be now used there can also be cases where production might be cheaper and faster when not optimizing content, which will lead into having to load much more data, leading back into a situation where you have about the same loading times as today.


It is almost the same as with CPU and GPU enhancements. You could do things faster or you could add more content and run things the same 30fps as before; often times it is the latter.

https://wccftech.com/ps5-ssd-may-not-translate-into-much-quicker-loading-times-says-remedy-technical-director
 
On a low speed devkit this is the speed of PS5


And it is a mix of SSD speed, custom controller, custom firmware and exploits well ARM CPU in SSD and fast data decompression by ASICs.
BTW, didn't the first Wired article said that Spidey PS4 loadtime was 16sec, and PS5 devkit 0.8s? Here we see that PS4 loads in 8s [without the subway scenes].
 
Everyone seems focused on "instant loading" but I'm more interested in how it will benefit game design and visuals at run-time by being able to swap in and out huge amounts of memory in extremely short amounts of time...if not "instant"
 
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