No shit that's what I said. This conversation going nowhere.
Sony PlayStation cross-platform game strategy
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
No shit that's what I said. This conversation going nowhere.
Interesting, so does that mean it effects the loading speed because to make it work on mechanicals it doesn't use SSD properly?
D
Deleted member 11852
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Yeah and MS will not do any games like PS5, right?And those games ofc wont ever see the light on pc either, cause you know, it will be lagging behind.
Watch the Spider-Man postmortem because it gives an insight into how dense the world can be based on the speed you know your the storage system can deliver. For PS4, because people can and do 'upgrade' the stock drive with a large, slower replacement they worked with 20 megabytes a second. This number then dominates everything else in in the creation of the city and game assets because of how the data is organised on disc.
If PS5 offers 7GB/s drive reads, thats potentially some seriously dense worlds. On other platforms you need to work what they offer. If it's more, no problem, if its less then from the outset you work with a lower I/O budget. None of this is new, because available RAM, GPU power and CPU power have dictated game design for decades. Some things can be scaled dynamically in-engine, some things cannot. For example you could not take Spider-Man and have the engine compensate for a PS4 with a really crappy drive that only managed 19 megabytes a second. If the storage system can't deliver 20, then the engine just can't be fed data fast enough and it'll likely stutter and/or have bad pop-in of textures, geometry and other objects.
I wouldn’t say it uses ssd improperly. It’s just choosing to design your game around a slower drive. If you design it around ssd then mechanical drives won’t be able to keep up.
This was described at length in the previous discussion on PS5's SSD. That topic doesn't appear to have its own thread -perhaps it's buried in the Tech Prediction thread? IIRC, Primarily, the filesystem and SSDs in PCs use less than optimal block sizes to support the data-types that they are required to work with. Changing that can greatly enhance drive performance. A console can also manage file structure a lot better where PC's current file system will put files anywhere and just point them A to B, increasing seek times. Sony has patents for file-allocation tables accelerating file access.
Maybe someone can recall the thread and link to it?
Ok I understand that, it's what I was pointing out about Star Citizen it has upped it's base storage speed requirements to above a mechanical drive.
So they can push more only problem is I'm not sure using Star Citizen for anything at this moment is a good thing though, they need to release the game first and hopefully everything works.
From the discussions and papers I've read about so far. This seems to be the largest bottleneck for faster loading speeds (wrt console vs PC). If consoles are going the 'very' compressed route, then hardware decompression will be a colossal win. You're moving less data and decompressing it into system memory likely in a compressed standard for GPUs. Then then GPUs go further. (we should also have a split thread on shader compilation)
But having written that, I see limitations on the word 'compression'; sounds very fantasy like. It is very challenging to compress that which is already compressed. Assume JPEG 92% is used. There is like JPEG 75% but the quality is seriously shit. So there is this 85% mid way in which the reproduction is pretty good. I don't buy into the whole compress a compressed texture bit. You aren't going to get much better than what you already have.
If this whole ASIC stuff is going to work then The other stuff, like models, etc, they all need compression - but not all compression algortihms are equal for each type. Audio works better with 1 algorithm, pictures and text another. I suspect that someone would have to make a compression algorithm for models and levels. I can't see how a single fully burnt ASIC will support all these different compression types.
As an example, you might be playing an open world game like Spiderman. The game developers will break the world down into some type of grid (I think spiderman may not have used squares for the grid). Your player is somewhere in the grid. The game engine knows how fast your player can travel and which are the neighbouring areas on the grid. So each frame they can decide where you are and which parts of the grid should be cached in RAM. That way as you move, the data for the next location on the grid is already in memory. When you move into a new grid location, the game engine drops any grid locations from RAM that it doesn't need anymore, and loads any new ones it does need. So for Spiderman, it sounds like they used 20 MB/s as their performance limit. So basically all of their loading and unloading of assets had to fit into 20 MB/s, including reading new tiles from the grid into memory. That means all of those tiles will be designed by artists so that they're small enough that they can fit into that limit. Also, it put limits on how fast spiderman could travel. Even if you could somehow put the fastest drive in existence into a ps4, you wouldn't notice much difference in gameplay, because spiderman was designed to swing at a certain speed based on the 20 MB/s limit, the assets were designed around the 20 MB/s limit and the caching system was designed around the 20MB/s limit. That's kind of where the PC is at with SSDs. The drives have a lot of speed that the game engines are not taking advantage of, because they want to be able to sell their games to consumers with old slow drives. So if PC games make SSDs a requirement, suddenly you'll start to see advantages.
Sometime, people will need to move on. SSD's have been around for atleast 10 years as a reasonable HDD replacement. But what the topic is about is PS5 games, if they will be able to be ported to PC or not. I think they will, perhaps with longer loading or something like that.
DavidGraham
Veteran
On Windows you can format any drive with variable block sizes, ranging from 512bytes to 4K bytes block size, which can hold huge file sizes, If needs be Microsoft can always introduce a new NTFS version which unlocks 8K and 16K block sizes, or even 32K, and without breaking compatibility with any thing else.
That's for the system drive maybe when under use, but Windows 10 always defragments itself when idle, my game drive is completely defragmented by default (all relevant files are next to each other), so the drive will always have the optimal seek time and data read speeds when gaming. I never even lifted a finger to do that, Windows took care it for me transparently.
The PC versions will just have exclusive content, like more jeep wench environment interactions or squeezing through narrow crevices or hour long un-skippable cutscenes.
I know about the benefits during gameplay I was asking about the reason why loading doesn't scale but iroboto answered my question it seems to be a CPU bottleneck.
This was in response to Scot_arm post, this thread is moving to fast.
In terms of loading, game developers notoriously do not care or optimize loading. I've seen devs talk about it on twitter. The time to hit the menu screen is basically not something game developers put time into. They rightly focus on real-time performance in game. Again, a lot of the issue is just how the game is designed vs actual drive performance.
Surely developers can minimize the need to do that by utilizing the copious amounts of RAM that PCs have over consoles. 16-32GB should be expected for boundary pushing next gen games. Sure initial loading times will be longer on PC, but I would think games designed around streaming and retaining large environments in memory could get around those design issues during gameplay.
I guess we'll see.
D
Deleted member 11852
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You may be able to compress some data more but it only makes sense to do so when the time/resources required to decompress it doesn't outweigh the time saved on the I/O.
No, I doubt many games are optimised for SSD. This is mosty because they expected to run from a HDD. Nextgen consoles will change this for console games. In his Wired interview Mark Cerny has talked about games structured differently on PS5.
With an SSD you don't want a conventional open-seek-read-close filesystem build on archaic concepts like small data clusters where every I/O works through an API, the I/O subsystem, the device driver, the interface controller, the drive's firmware and eventually the storage itself. It's too much overhead. Patents from Sony, which credibly support what Mark Cerny has hinted about about PS5's solid state storage, suggests addressing 'files' on their solid state storage is more akin to randomly addressing RAM.
Yup, and this is why whatever solutions Microsoft and Sony have created, need to be easy to implement. If they are stupidly complicated, they won't get used other than SSD reads/writes just being faster than HDDs - which may be enough.
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A file system can be made for HDD like current file system on PC. The file archive the name they give to the game file is made especially for SSD. Current file system were created for HDD not with SSD in mind.
http://kcall.co.uk/ssd/index.html
This is not what is used on Windows.
This was in response to Scot_arm post, this thread is moving to fast.
Nearly at the speed of SSD.
but if it also affects streaming the game world there may be big performance issues, kind of like the reverse of my dayz example where adding SSD improved FPS in heaving loading areas PC versions of PS5 games may suffer
How can you insert load a scene like this? God of War designer explained how they were limited during the combat against a stranger, a boss fight. They wanted each hit being able to send Kratos at fast speed in another part of the map and adding destruction on the path. It was impossible because of the HDD speed. The only way is to have the full scene in memory. I think a great way is to have the full game in memory for example.
True but sometime, people will need to upgrade to faster SSD solutions, the PC can't be stuck forever on aging hardware. Mostly when new consoles arrive, PC's need to upgrade, has been like that for every gen, except the current which had low end hardware for the most. PS5 will be more akin to mid-end and high end on the SSD side.
Or a fast SSD solution.
