Sony PlayStation cross-platform game strategy

[DavidGraham]

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.

Overhead is not the same as sequential read speeds (relevant for streaming data), overhead doesn't prevent PS5 exclusive games from running on NVMe drives for PCs, it just means PCs will have slightly longer loading times at worst. But before we make any grand conclusions lets measure the overhead of the PS5 solution in practice compared to conventional PC filesystems, and see if the reduction is even significant.

The massive PS5 storage speed will mainly come from the speed of the SSD drive, reduced overhead is just the cherry on top. And PCs can always brute force their way out of any overhead disadvantage with even faster NVMe drives.

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.

Basically this.

I am really amazed! People have gone from claiming PC can never have fast storage systems rivaling unseen console tech to claiming Windows filesystem is unsuitable for gaming, despite Windows being the fastest platform for gaming on earth.

Games on PCs are designed the same way they are designed on consoles, for the lowest common HDD drives, those 5400RPM slow as hell laptop HDDs, no game is yet ever designed for a proper SSD or NVMe driver, because that would limit the game's audience to a small fraction of the installed player base.

By just having the game structure properly designed to take advantage of the crazy minuscule latency times, burst speed and huge sequential read speeds of NVMe drives, you can have an order of magnitude game streaming speed ups, without even needing a crazy 7GB/s NVMe drive.

New 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.

Yes, every PC gamer likes to remember the game Titanfall, where the developer opted to use about 36GB of game data for audio files alone, they didn't want them audio files compressed because it would have prevented the game from running on old CPUs (and probably the Xbox One CPU as well).

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.

Exactly! Any next gen storage heavy game can always up it's RAM requirement to 32GB on old HDD PCs, then store it's relevant data on RAM for the ultimate access speeds, problem solved. This has been the standard practice even among PC titles, up the RAM requirements and be done with it.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'm assuming game devs pack their data on disc so they're mostly doing sequential reads, gathering data in blocks. Random access of small blocks is bad for NAND. I imagine that's where the block size of the file system fits in, but they should be optimizing for sequential reads anyway. The issue PC will have is they can't really force everyone to get an nvme right now, because most people don't have motherboards that support them. I guess there are pcie slot adapters. I'm not sure how long that transition would take in the pc space, but having games designed around consoles that have them will probably accelerate adaption as pc system requirements are forced to change. SATA3 SSDs can't really keep up with nvme.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Overhead is not the same as sequential read speeds (relevant for streaming data), overhead doesn't prevent PS5 exclusive games from running on NVMe drives for PCs, it just means PCs will have slightly longer loading times at worst.

Slower and more fragmented I/O, because this is how Windows' kernel manages I/O. Because it's a general operating system.

I am really amazed! People have gone from claiming PC can never have fast storage systems rivaling unseen console tech to claiming Windows filesystem is unsuitable for gaming, despite Windows being the fastest platform for gaming on earth.

Are you compelled to include some supposed claim that nobody said in multiple posts every day? Have you spoken to a doctor about this?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Looks like ntfs performance is a weak point compared to something like f2fs, which was specifically designed by Samsung for NAND (a good candidate filesystem for PS5 if they're using samsung)

 

[PSman1700]

Exactly! Any next gen storage heavy game can always up it's RAM requirement to 32GB on old HDD PCs, then store it's relevant data on RAM for the ultimate access speeds, problem solved. This has been the standard practice even among PC titles, up the RAM requirements and be done with it.

I wonder why that star wars game wanted 32GB for recommended settings?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I wonder why that star wars game wanted 32GB for recommended settings?

Because it's a horribly optimized game on pc right now.

 

[PSman1700]

The topic originally was about PS games appearing on PC, somehow the discussion is about SSD performance between those platforms, something we don't even know anything about, aside from 'insders or ppl with friends knowing final specs'. I highly doubt that 3 years in (if HZD2 appears three years later on pc), that PS5 exclusives won't be able to be ported to PC, or available on a store etc.
Since PSnow allows one to play PS exclusives, even on the dangerous PC, i don't see how a PS store on PC could be a danger to the PS as a brand. PlayStation as it is isn't just about that black box, they offer a service, subscriptions, PSNow to play their titles anywhere etc.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Since PSnow allows one to play PS exclusives, even on the dangerous PC, i don't see how a PS store on PC could be a danger to the PS as a brand. PlayStation as it is isn't just about that black box, they offer a service, subscriptions, PSNow to play their titles anywhere etc.

Who is claiming this?*

*I need to hotkey this question.​

 

[Scott_Arm]

Who is claiming this?*

*I need to hotkey this question.​

there was a guy near the start of the thread being a doomsayer

 

[PSman1700]

there was a guy near the start of the thread being a doomsayer

The defense then was that PC couldn't handle PS5 games, since the former discussion didn't really help. My thoughts are that PS5 exclusives won't be a problem on pc, in special with the tought that they will arrive some years after they have released on PS5.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

there was a guy near the start of the thread being a doomsayer

Was it the same guy on twitter who asked "Loading times? What are they?"

J/K.

 

[JoeJ]

I highly doubt that 3 years in (if HZD2 appears three years later on pc), that PS5 exclusives won't be able to be ported to PC

I know nothing about storage, but i agree because if this simple math:
Can we assume next gen games are something like 200GB at most?
And it takes say 10 hours to play through the game, assuming huge content and short playtime worst case.
Then there are about 20GB to load per hour. This isn't that much, and can't be such a problem.

What do i miss here? Open World? It will never make sense to require reading the whole 200GB in short time, because no matter how the travel happens, you only see a small fraction or a low detail level of the world and game.

Initializing stuff, decompression... all those are issues for sure, but will it become a practice to decompress stuff like the actual environment in the background, cache it to SSD so it can be streamed quickly if the player turns off / on for multiple play sessions?
That's quite the only case where i really see a fundamental change to happen eventually. A save game could become the whole current RAM. But this would hurt storage space a lot, also SSD lifetime maybe.

 

[PSman1700]

https://www.psu.com/news/ps5-wont-change-much-really-claims-eastshade-dev/

I think that article explains a little also, the whole thing around SSD's seems a tad bit hyped it seems. Saying PC is doomed is as untrue as saying PS is doomed because their games appear on PC/other platforms. Eventually all devices/games are going to rely on super fast storage, it is unavoidable. In the beginning there might be problems but i doubt it's as big as some claim it to be.
The most talked about are loading times, to a lesser degree fast travel, and streaming assets etc.

 

[MrFox]

Looks like ntfs performance is a weak point compared to something like f2fs, which was specifically designed by Samsung for NAND (a good candidate filesystem for PS5 if they're using samsung)

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.7-FS-5-Way
(ntfs is fused here, so more cpu overhead)

Some results are more dramatic than others...
I'm an xfs fanboy so I'm biased.

 

[Scott_Arm]

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.7-FS-5-Way
(ntfs is fused here, so more cpu overhead)

Some results are more dramatic than others...

I mean, file serving performance probably isn’t in the domain of a game console

 

[MrFox]

I mean, file serving performance probably isn’t in the domain of a game console

Yeah but the requirement is reading a bunch of small files (jpg textures, geometry objects, tiles, mipmaps), the benchmark is doing that. There are workaround for PC like a single contiguous file for the whole game but devs on PC don't do that, and it would require a defrag before an install, and rewriting the entire game for any patch. They just use the underlying FS with lots of small files and fragmentation so the FS is an additional problem right now. Once they solve that the decompression will remain the biggest limitation.

 

[BRiT]

I'm an xfs fanboy so I'm biased.

BTRFS seems to be in such a bad state for any non-trivial deployment, which they all seem to be (non-trivial). Nearly scary how much churn is still in the BTRFS realm (# of commits). So many posts on the server forums about BTRFS and things just breaking semi-randomly.

XFS user as well.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yeah but the requirement is reading a bunch of small files (jpg textures, geometry objects, tiles, mipmaps), the benchmark is doing that. There are workaround for PC like a single contiguous file for the whole game but devs on PC don't do that, and it would require a defrag before an install, and rewriting the entire game for any patch. They just use the underlying FS with lots of small files and fragmentation so the FS is an additional problem right now. Once they solve that the decompression will remain the biggest limitation.

So is there a difference in access patterns on console vs pc? Sequential reads seem to be the best performance, so do they bundle things into singular files or is it small files as well? I've never looked at the contents of a xbox or playstation disc before.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The defense then was that PC couldn't handle PS5 games, since the former discussion didn't really help. My thoughts are that PS5 exclusives won't be a problem on pc, in special with the tought that they will arrive some years after they have released on PS5.

The implied argument was PS5 games released within a near time-frame to their PS5 release, thereby placing the PC in direct competition with PS5. PS5 games many years later means the PC isn't in direct competition with PS5. No-one's going to argue what the PC landscape is going to look like come PS6 because anything can happen in the nest 6-7 years.

 

[PSman1700]

The implied argument was PS5 games released within a near time-frame to their PS5 release, thereby placing the PC in direct competition with PS5. PS5 games many years later means the PC isn't in direct competition with PS5. No-one's going to argue what the PC landscape is going to look like come PS6 because anything can happen in the nest 6-7 years.

Not sure if that will happen with PS5, but i see the possibility that Sony might do what MS is doing with their games, or release a short time after. Have software to just one device isn't going to last forever i think.