The need for sustained high throughput loading of data in games? *spawn*

[BRiT]

Fortunately both next-gen systems offer over 2x game memory as well as over a 120x improvement in speed of loading even non-compressed resources, or over 240x improvement if compression is 2:1 ratio.

 

[KeanuReeves]

Or maybe Sony did not test games with oodle texture for the road to PS5 video but only with Kraken. This is another possibility.

I think it is more than a possibility. It would be quite weird for Cerny to inflate the numbers of Kraken decoding by making undisclosed use of Oodle Textures.
I have a very hard time imagining that to be the case.

 

[Ronaldo8]

Interestingly Cerny said the 5GB/s raw was their target in the design phase, and he said the amount of bandwidth required to allow to load on demand as the player turns around "seems about right for next gen" with that target. So in this case he calculated what he thought was required for that specific goal next gen. He established these targets based on years of discussions with developers. Same for the kraken decompressor, these things take a long time to design.

Horizon 2 have flying mounts, so dropping from a high altitude anywhere down to the ground will needs a truckload of assets extremely quickly, same for spiderman's movements across detailed rooftops, dropping down to the street level, then back to throwing a line to land on top of a tall building, or even go through a window with detailed offices, with no transition in or out.

It's not "constantly" but it can be needed very often in multiple small bursts as the player moves. How high the bursts can go will impact the game design. It's not reaching peaks only with teleports and dimensional jumps from R&C, that would be in direct contradiction with his presentation.

How much though? GB of data? Fast travelling is a great way of sneaking in low resolution textures due to motion blurr. Just like Sebbi said back in 2013, radical change of view frustrum is how a competent streaming solution will really be challenged. And even then you can plan for it because those teleports are often scripted/predictable events. Now, if a player were to teleport from one place to another at will, that will be certainly extremely impressive.

 

[Deleted member 7537]

I agree that most games won’t utilize the SSD constantly, although I believe we’ll see some crazy examples of how to apply this tech to gameplay.

It will help for sure for a more efficient utilization of the RAM. Impact, for example, of the OS hijacking part of the RAM will be much lower this time.

The SSD and the I/O system on the PS5 have clearly one goal, remove another thing devs have to worry about. Cerny made a lot of emphasis about removing barriers and make it all transparent to the developer.

 

[DxCore]

newbie question here .. on the PS5, if a second nvme drive is added .. is that then additive to the internal nvme io if both are streaming in parallel ?! ..

apologies if what im asking is illogical!

 

[Deleted member 11852]

What are you going to be streaming at 8GB/s on a constant basis?

Something like Wipeout with tremendous amounts of unique geometry and textures?

I think Cyberpunk, which I am assuming does let you use flying vehicles, will be tough on I/O. We've seen the amount of detail and density of Night City at ground level so being up in the air and having to a lot of unique vehicles around you, them zooming down to ground level to land and disembark, is going to need a lot of data pulling it very quickly.

 

[fehu]

I'm actually playing far cry primal from 2016, in which you can call in any moment a howl to map the area, animals, and enemies. if they pulled it from an earlier attempt on a hdd, I think that any skilled developer will manage well with modern consoles.

 

[London Geezer]

I'm actually playing far cry primal from 2016, in which you can call in any moment a howl to map the area, animals, and enemies. if they pulled it from an earlier attempt on a hdd, I think that any skilled developer will manage well with modern consoles.

Yeah in the Assassins Creed games, the 'bird view' always needs time loading, and then the same to go back to your character.

Also the whole game structure of the game (and so many other games) at some point becomes all about fast travelling from point to point to collect stupid things or just to talk to one guy here, one other there, and so on.

All so very frustrating when there's a loading screen in between all these steps.

Heck, in the Dark Souls games you can't even bloody LEVEL UP or buy a bloody item without having to go to the stupid 'hub' world, which of course requires loading screens.

There are so many games that literally rely on so called 'fast travel' just to perform the most basic of tasks. It's all so frustrating, and I cannot wait to see this go away for good.

 

[Ronaldo8]

Something like Wipeout with tremendous amounts of unique geometry and textures?

I think Cyberpunk, which I am assuming does let you use flying vehicles, will be tough on I/O. We've seen the amount of detail and density of Night City at ground level so being up in the air and having to a lot of unique vehicles around you, them zooming down to ground level to land and disembark, is going to need a lot of data pulling it very quickly.

Flight Simulator 2020 (the only existing truly "next-gen" experience apart from Star Citizen) is an extreme example of asset streaming and even it does not require a ridiculous SSD to function. 16 GB of RAM recommended though.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Flight Simulator 2020 (the only existing truly "next-gen" experience apart from Star Citizen) is an extreme example of asset streaming and even it does not require a ridiculous SSD to function. 16 GB of RAM recommended though.

And that allows you land an aircraft in a busy street full of distinct shops, vehicles and pedestrians?!?!?

 

[function]

What are you going to be streaming at 8GB/s on a constant basis?

I'm just another voice in chorus at this point, but I'll add my two penn'orth.

8GB/s consistently would represent less than 100 seconds of unique data before you've spunked the contents of the entire SSD. Unless you're running a gameplay loop that involves loading and dumping the same assets repeatedly every few seconds (which would once again be back to taking a lot of work on the designers end), you're not going to be seeing 8GB/s consistently.

And I don't think that is even what Cerny was talking about in his road to PS5 presentation. The examples he gave were about freeing designers from worrying about what was in memory, by virtue of the SSD being fast enough to get whatever you wanted in the time you had available so as not to interrupt the game. Things like turning a camera, or going through a door. He wanted to remove limitations on game designers.

Its bursty workloads like these where the PS5 will excel. Even the Ratchet and Clank dimension shifting is just another example of this. It's a 1 ~ 2 second burst, followed by far more normal levels of streaming for the actual gameplay. Fast travel, where the camera cuts and you appear somewhere else is a burst too, followed by business as normal.

MS's approach is perhaps a little different, in order to keep SSD costs down. With SF* and SFS they're offering tools to minimise data transferred, predict ahead of time (some of) what is needed and massage transitions over frames if necessary. PC can combine a number of approaches. These are common problems shared across the industry.

(* which PS5 might have some form of, and PC Ultimately will)

I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that 99% of the time the PS5 SSD is going to be used far, far below maximum capability. Same for XSX too, though probably to a lesser extent. And that's why I don't think it'll be such a big deal for PS5 NVMe expansion drives if they might throttle after 60 seconds of going full tilt at 7 GB/s read. Because they probably won't ever being doing that during actual gameplay.

 

[function]

And that allows you land an aircraft in a busy street full of distinct shops, vehicles and pedestrians?!?!?

Would be kind of sick though if GTA VI was an Easter egg if you parachuted out over San Andreas....

 

[pjbliverpool]

Take 8GB/s as a worst case and make it work on a rainy day. Not every day needs to be rainy though. Player starts the game and we need to fill in full memory. i.e. super short load time. Another case could be a zoom in while playing fifa/nhl or the dimensions jumps in ratchet&clank. Another example could be car game using similar technology as unreal5. Ridiculously high asset quality and unique content everywhere and mm accuracy on road surface. And there is the whole open world aspect where you could use piperun assets in openworld thanks to fast streaming. Or at least in openworld you could go into buildings without having to limit the level of detail in interiors to fit ram/wait load time. Especially VR lends itself for high quality assets as it's typical to pickup/manipulate things and look them very closely.

Perhaps you sometimes stream nothing, sometimes you stream 8GB/s. Just make the HW so that disk storage is not issue. Allow developer to worry about game rather than having to concentrate on caching/load times/asset optimization for specific memory sizes.

Often console manufacturers over compensate when going into new generation when fixing previous gen issues. It will be tremendous to see if current level of ssd is over compensation or if in 5 years we end up wishing ps6/xbox foo would have even faster ssd or even optane.

Something like Wipeout with tremendous amounts of unique geometry and textures?

I think Cyberpunk, which I am assuming does let you use flying vehicles, will be tough on I/O. We've seen the amount of detail and density of Night City at ground level so being up in the air and having to a lot of unique vehicles around you, them zooming down to ground level to land and disembark, is going to need a lot of data pulling it very quickly.

I'm not saying you there are no use cases for the ability to stream 8GB/s into VRAM on a constant basis. Of course there are, they are practically infinite. What I'm saying is: where are you pulling all this new data from? 16GB VRAM is a good 10% of your entire game content. If you're refreshing it every 2 seconds then you've used up your entire game content in 20 seconds. If we had 20TB game installs then this would surely make for some amazing looking games. But we have 100GB game installs so the super fast IO system is limited by the amount of content available to load.

That's why I think it's real utility will come in during loads and fast travel, i.e. events that move you to an entirely new environment that the system wasn't able to predict for pre-caching. There will of course be other game play uses for this from imaginative developers, but the main point I'm making is that what the fast IO won't be used for is what Cerny suggested during the reveal, i.e. that you only keep 1-2 seconds worth of game play in VRAM and refresh it on a constant basis rather than the next 30 seconds like last gen.

This gives the impression that games will have access to the equivalent of ~30-60x the amount of data in VRAM compared to last gen which while theoretically that may be accurate, in practice you don't have enough game content to support that amount of data.

 

[iroboto]

I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that 99% of the time the PS5 SSD is going to be used far, far below maximum capability. Same for XSX too, though probably to a lesser extent. And that's why I don't think it'll be such a big deal for PS5 NVMe expansion drives if they might throttle after 60 seconds of going full tilt at 7 GB/s read. Because they probably won't ever being doing that during actual gameplay.

Indeed. But all the talk is around that 1%

 

[Ronaldo8]

And that allows you land an aircraft in a busy street full of distinct shops, vehicles and pedestrians?!?!?

Landing? How about flying over an entire city (with road traffic) of it accurately mapped with photogrammetry? And of course, nothing beats low altitude bush flying in FS 2020. If ever there was a game that screams PCMR, its FS 2020.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I'm just another voice in chorus at this point, but I'll add my two penn'orth.

8GB/s consistently would represent less than 100 seconds of unique data before you've spunked the contents of the entire SSD. Unless you're running a gameplay loop that involves loading and dumping the same assets repeatedly every few seconds (which would once again be back to taking a lot of work on the designers end), you're not going to be seeing 8GB/s consistently.

And I don't think that is even what Cerny was talking about in his road to PS5 presentation.

We seem to be in full agreement here. I also don't think that Cerny meant to imply that you would always only keep 1-2 seconds worth of data in VRAM, it was just an example of the theoretical capability of the IO. However people have picked up on it to mean just that. So we probably need to change that way of thinking.

 

[Ronaldo8]

We seem to be in full agreement here. I also don't think that Cerny meant to imply that you would always only keep 1-2 seconds worth of data in VRAM, it was just an example of the theoretical capability of the IO. However people have picked up on it to mean just that. So we probably need to change that way of thinking.

I think the confusion comes from what memory efficiency really means. Current gen games designed for mechanical HDDs are bloated with repetitive assets so as to reduce seek times. Next-gen games, while being mostly of similar size, will consist vastly more of "unique" data. That's where your "richer worlds" (as per PR) will come from.

 

[London Geezer]

I'm not saying you there are no use cases for the ability to stream 8GB/s into VRAM on a constant basis. Of course there are, they are practically infinite. What I'm saying is: where are you pulling all this new data from? 16GB VRAM is a good 10% of your entire game content. If you're refreshing it every 2 seconds then you've used up your entire game content in 20 seconds. If we had 20TB game installs then this would surely make for some amazing looking games. But we have 100GB game installs so the super fast IO system is limited by the amount of content available to load.

That's why I think it's real utility will come in during loads and fast travel, i.e. events that move you to an entirely new environment that the system wasn't able to predict for pre-caching. There will of course be other game play uses for this from imaginative developers, but the main point I'm making is that what the fast IO won't be used for is what Cerny suggested during the reveal, i.e. that you only keep 1-2 seconds worth of game play in VRAM and refresh it on a constant basis rather than the next 30 seconds like last gen.

This gives the impression that games will have access to the equivalent of ~30-60x the amount of data in VRAM compared to last gen which while theoretically that may be accurate, in practice you don't have enough game content to support that amount of data.

But next gen consoles don’t actually have 16GB of VRAM. PCs can have that much VRAM plus substantial amounts of system RAM.
So the usable pool of VRAM in consoles is quite a bit smaller than that, and since when do we scoff at fast things? We’re getting them, they will he used!

 

[Ronaldo8]

But next gen consoles don’t actually have 16GB of VRAM. PCs can have that much VRAM plus their system RAM.
So the usable pool of VRAM in consoles is quite a bit smaller than that, and since when do we scoff at fast things? We’re getting them, they will he used!

Of course they will be used.You only invest in silicon if you meant to use it. But how would they be used? Whatever it may possibly be, cycling through GB of data as an intended design won't be it. The game with a petabyte of assets (FS 2020) certainly doesn't.

 

[London Geezer]

Of course they will be used.You only invest in silicon if you meant to use it. But how?

For one, the top speeds will make loading of levels that much faster. As for streaming, we will have to see how it pans out!