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

[eloic]

And the point you continue to ignore is that flying over a city means most objects are far away meaning you do not need vast amounts of detail because everything on screen is small. The example which you also ignore would be a game like Cyberpunk, i.e. the sci-fi setting of being in a flying car then quickly zooming down to ground level, which would require require loading all that ground-level detail in really quickly. None of the FS20 pictures or videos show that game doing this so it's a baseless to hold it up as an example.

Ok, I think that's clear. Can we compare Cyberpunk to Cities: Skylines, now? Thanks!

 

[Ronaldo8]

Ok, I think that's clear. Can we compare Cyberpunk to Cities: Skylines, now? Thanks!

I see the bait....but I shall resist.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I introduce FS 2020 as an example of not requiring a high throughput despite still depicting a huge amount of assets on screen.

It's not the number of assets but the rate of change that requires higher streaming performance. High detail requires lots of RAM to store them (assuming we're not using tiled resources). As that area of visibility changes, the new data needs to be swapped in. That could be many gigabytes of a new distant city one has teleported to, or many gigabytes of street-level assets in people and cars. The I/O consideration is how much of the already-present data is made redundant by the change in view.

In the case of FS2020, the rate of change is low. In the case of the other examples presented, from flying high to dropping to street level, the rate of change is about as high as it'll get for a computer game. Whatever FS can achieve doesn't represent the limits of challenge to next-gen games with much more severe changes in view.

Of course, in support of your view that streaming doesn't need be high, we can see what SM and GTA are already achieving on slow HDDs.

 

[Ronaldo8]

And the point you continue to ignore is that flying over a city means most objects are far away meaning you do not need vast amounts of detail because everything on screen is small. The example which you also ignore would be a game like Cyberpunk, i.e. the sci-fi setting of being in a flying car then quickly zooming down to ground level, which would require require loading all that ground-level detail in really quickly. None of the FS20 pictures or videos show that game doing this so it's a baseless to hold it up as an example.

Check out FS 2020 landing in city airport.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Check out FS 2020 landing in city airport.

I looked at a bunch of videos. None of them demonstrated a need for a game that requires a gigabytes of I/O. Principally because it's a simulation and the goal is simulate physics so you would never have an aircraft land within seconds and have to aggressively steam in crazy amounts of city in seconds. The simulated aircraft simply don'y move that way that quickly.

 

[Ronaldo8]

It's not the number of assets but the rate of change that requires higher streaming performance. High detail requires lots of RAM to store them (assuming we're not using tiled resources). As that area of visibility changes, the new data needs to be swapped in. That could be many gigabytes of a new distant city one has teleported to, or many gigabytes of street-level assets in people and cars. The I/O consideration is how much of the already-present data is made redundant by the change in view.

In the case of FS2020, the rate of change is low. In the case of the other examples presented, from flying high to dropping to street level, the rate of change is about as high as it'll get for a computer game. Whatever FS can achieve doesn't represent the limits of challenge to next-gen games with much more severe changes in view.

Of course, in support of your view that streaming doesn't need be high, we can see what SM and GTA are already achieving on slow HDDs.

At FL100, ground features move past ridiculously quickly, as anyone who took an airplane can attest. This effect is faithfully reproduced in FS 2020. Also, you do in fact need an SSD for FS 2020 due to the amount the stuff being streamed (it is a mandatory requirement for alpha participation).. just not an extremely quick and responsive one like in the PS5 or in very high end PCs.

 

[Ronaldo8]

I looked at a bunch of videos. None of them demonstrated a need for a game that requires a gigabytes of I/O. Principally because it's a simulation and the goal is simulate physics so you would never have an aircraft land within seconds and have to aggressively steam in crazy amounts of city in seconds. The simulated aircraft simply don'y move that way that quickly.

That's the point: there is no such thing as a GB burst of I/O. At FL 200 and below, relative perceived speed to the ground becomes much greater and assets are streamed in extremely quickly, especially if it is a city airport and yet I am sure that no GB worth of data was required. If by GB burst of I/O you mean a quick fast travel (with heavy motion blur) to an area that cannot be predicted and hence effectively pre-cached, then you have just effectively described a player-controlled teleport of view frustrum which I agree is very impressive if pulled off.

 

[MrFox]

FS is a bad example that doesn't fit what Cerny was talking about to explain the architecture of the PS5.

You can't turn fast (it can predict just what to preload towards the velocity vector versus loading everything in every direction). You can't drop fast and suddenly (cannot go from very low LOD to the highest LOD at a moment's notice, while having to deal with all the other directions you might go). The spacial detail doesn't look very dense.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

That's the point: there is no such thing as a GB burst of I/O.

That's ridiculous, how about booting games? Loading a save file of a game? Fast-travel in RDR2? How much data do you think is being transferred in PS5 Ratchet & Clank when they slip between worlds?

 

[fehu]

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

 

[Ronaldo8]

I want to emphasize that the whole point of the 1s of gameplay paradigm is that we can predict and budget for the data required for the next 1s of gameplay. If you can't, then the SSD will have to provide the data on the fly ( a big no no for some).

 

[manux]

Another example is gtav which has those teleport moments all the time. Is gtav streaming at all or everything cached in ram?

i.e. parachute out of plane, run in a street and enter random car/building. Fast ssd would allow open world to have similar asset quality as pipe runs have instead of trying to cache 20 different compromised car interiors in ram and recycling assets making interior of every building look same.

Best example would be the spiderman gdc talk. They go to extreme lengths on explaining how they got around ps4 hdd streaming speed limitations.

 

[Ronaldo8]

You can land on your house. How about that for distintiveness.

 

[Ronaldo8]

That's ridiculous, how about booting games? Loading a save file of a game? Fast-travel in RDR2? How much data do you think is being transferred in PS5 Ratchet & Clank when they slip between worlds?

I meant the rate of transfer, not the absolute size of transfer obviously. Between the time the portal becomes visible (not the time Ratchet enters it) and the moment Ratchet gets to the other end, you have enough time to pre-cache. Your classic loading screen accelerated by an SSD down to 2.5 s. A GB/s order of I/O data burst though? Na.
I am not saying that the PS5 cannot do it. In fact I think that it is the only consummer class device that can pull off a random teleport of view frustrum, if ever such a thing is achievable.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Check out FS 2020 landing in city airport.

Can you please furnish people with the evidence rather than request they go searching for it? I've already spent quite some time watching through videos to try and find evidence to support your argument.

Furthermore, airport detail can be cached within the area of the player, which is very localised and a very different ask to arbitrary transitions in completely free-roam games. At high speeds, potentially low LODs can be used. I don't know if FS2020 maintains high LODs as you take off in a light aircraft or not because I haven't seen any videos of that. The videos I've seen have all the cities viewed at a distance, and all the airports viewed with the plane stationary. If there is a video clip showing a city of, say, Forza Horizon quality, please show it to prove your argument is right.

You can land on your house. How about that for distintiveness.

Can you? Is there a video of this level of detail?

 

[Ronaldo8]

Can you please furnish people with the evidence rather than request they go searching for it? I've already spent quite some time watching through videos to try and find evidence to support your argument.

Furthermore, airport detail can be cached within the area of the player, which is very localised and a very different ask to arbitrary transitions in completely free-roam games. At high speeds, potentially low LODs can be used. I don't know if FS2020 maintains high LODs as you take off in a light aircraft or not because I haven't seen any videos of that. The videos I've seen have all the cities viewed at a distance, and all the airports viewed with the plane stationary. If there is a video clip showing a city of, say, Forza Horizon quality, please show it to prove your argument is right.

Can you? Is there a video of this level of detail?

You can land/crash anywhere in the game. You can't predict where a player will land.

 

[Ronaldo8]

Can you please furnish people with the evidence rather than request they go searching for it? I've already spent quite some time watching through videos to try and find evidence to support your argument.

Furthermore, airport detail can be cached within the area of the player, which is very localised and a very different ask to arbitrary transitions in completely free-roam games. At high speeds, potentially low LODs can be used. I don't know if FS2020 maintains high LODs as you take off in a light aircraft or not because I haven't seen any videos of that. The videos I've seen have all the cities viewed at a distance, and all the airports viewed with the plane stationary. If there is a video clip showing a city of, say, Forza Horizon quality, please show it to prove your argument is right.

Can you? Is there a video of this level of detail?

If your house is part of a city that has been scanned, you can distinctively recognise it. Some users even report seing their car in front of their porch.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Another example is gtav which has those teleport moments all the time. Is gtav streaming at all or everything cached in ram?

In the base game GTA V plays with the physics to prevent you ever going too fast. On PC you can mod around these limits, e.g. there are SR-71 mods that let you fly at approximately mach 3 where GTA V's engines does admirably well, but it does so getting really aggressive with LOD models, textures and tossing out almost all ground detail. When you swoop to the ground and slow quickly, it takes the engine a while to catch up - even when running off an SSD.

You can land/crash anywhere in the game. You can't predict where a player will land.

Other than the fact that you're in an aircraft with limited speed and where the game knows your exact trajectory?

I meant the rate of transfer, not the absolute size of
transfer obviously. Between the time the portal becomes visible (not the time Ratchet enters it) and the moment Ratchet gets to the other end, you have enough time to pre-cache. Your classic loading screen accelerated by an SSD down to 2.5 s. A GB/s order of I/O data burst though? Na.

But it's not a loading screen is it, it's having to keep all the current world assets visible in RAM while furiously loading all the assets for the world you are about to be in.

 

[Ronaldo8]

No. The SSD is not as fast as PS4's RAM. It's not as fast as PS3's RAM. If you massage the numbers as much as possible, accept a typo of 'PS4' for 'PS3', and pick the worst case example of the average obtained transfer rates for PS3...

...with 'as fast as PS3' being 15.5 GB/s, the latency of SSD is still an order of magnitude off. It's a nonsense statement that cannot sanely be rationalised. If you really want to argue it's not nonsense and the guy just said the wrong thing, try suggesting he meant Cell Read Speed from Local Memory.

Seriously, no-one should be trying to justify this one. It's plain wrong.

Latency is not a problem if you can afford to wait for the data.

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

If your house is part of a city that has been scanned, you can distinctively recognise it. Some users even report seing their car in front of their porch.

... like Google Earth?

Also, you do in fact need an SSD for FS 2020 due to the amount the stuff being streamed (it is a mandatory requirement for alpha participation).. just not an extremely quick and responsive one like in the PS5 or in very high end PCs.

So, in spite of playing a game that requires an SSD, you're questioning the utility of a moderately faster SSD?