Epic disagree:
Like mots features of previous version of UE, it's scaleable.
Yes UE5 is scalable, there's absolutely no argument there as I've pointed out several times. But Epic made quite clear in the Edge article that HDD's are a limiting factor of their next gen tech (specifically Nanite, I'm not too sure about Lumen). The following statements from the Edge article are specifically in reference to Nanite:
"Sweeney says. Their discussion wasn't just about graphics, but about the growing realisation that storage architecture in game hardware – having to load data from a hard drive, the huge amounts of latency between mass storage and a processor – was a limiting factor in Epic's and all developers' future plans for game-making"
"The previous generation of consoles required you to support spinning hard disks, which means you have variable latency time, and it's not totally predictable how long it's going to take to get a piece of data. With the flash storage, you have way, way more predictability and much, much lower latency to be able to get those reads into memory."
"It's a key unblocker for what Brian and team have built here," Sweeney confirms."
The statement you've linked by Sweeney:
"You could render a version of this [demo on a system with an HDD], it would just be a lot lower detail," in no way says that Nanite is supported on HDD's - at least not in it's full form. It sounds much more like a confirmation of the earlier Sweeney tweet that I linked which said:
"The Nanite and Lumen tech powering it will be fully supported on both PS5 and Xbox Series X and will be awesome on both. *And high end PCs. * And with features for scaling the content down to run on current generation platforms using traditional rendering and lighting techniques"
Where are you getting this information about Direct Storage?
You're asking where I am getting the information about Direct Storage that it makes the process of IO more efficient and reduces CPU overhead? Basically any source of DirectStorage information on the internet. This is the main purpose of it's existence. Here's one of many examples:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-inside-xbox-series-x-full-specs
"The final component in the triumvirate is an extension to DirectX - DirectStorage - a necessary upgrade bearing in mind that existing file I/O protocols are knocking on for 30 years old, and in their current form would require two Zen CPU cores simply to cover the overhead, which DirectStorage reduces to just one tenth of single core."
Relative to what?
Total CPU power of course. Or are you suggesting that 2 full CPU cores worth of IO overhead for a modest 2.4GB/s throughput isn't relatively high?
Disk operations should not be using significant CPU usage on any platform. Windows is the outlier here because of Window's architecture. But your average sustained I/O on any typical device shouldn't be using more than 5% of your CPU. Window's issue isn't that it causes high CPU usage, it's just the fundamental model bottlenecks I/O and introduces latency. You can test this on your own PC. Unless you're runing an IDE controller from the 1990s, you should not be having issues.
I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make anymore. We're discussing Windows IO performance/overhead and Direct Storage. I've provided you with direct quotes from Digital Foundry's interview with Microsoft stating specifically that the CPU overhead associated with streaming 2.4GB/s of data off the SSD is 2 Zen2 cores without DirectStorage. Are you suggesting Microsoft are wrong?
Can you provide a link to this? I've seen this oft quoted on resetera but never seen the article itself.
I already did, literally in the same post and response you're quoting here. I can't understand how you could have missed it. I've provided the same link and quote above.
You need to accept that he references to CPU usage are not about I/O but the way data is stored and the data flow for getting it into a usable state, not inherently the I/O itself. This is different.
You're simply splitting hairs. Again, read the Digital Foundry quote that I've provided several times now. It's completely explicit that the old IO protocols are resulting in unnecessarily high IO associated overhead on the CPU. The
DirectStorage blog posted above by chris1515 describes in detail how they achieve this.
You also need to stop making assumptions about Direct Storage given Microsoft themselves have said very little about the implementation on Windows.
You want me to not assume that DirectStorage will reduce CPU overhead related to IO operations despite Microsoft explaining in intricate detail
here and in the article quoted above that this is exactly what it will do? I'm starting to wonder if you have any idea at all what DirectStorage is.
Here is one of several examples from the blog:
"In addition, existing storage APIs also incur a lot of ‘extra steps’ between an application making an IO request and the request being fulfilled by the storage device, resulting in unnecessary request overhead. These extra steps can be things like data transformations needed during certain parts of normal IO operation. However, these steps aren’t required for every IO request on every NVMe drive on every gaming machine. With a supported NVMe drive and properly configured gaming machine, DirectStorage will be able to detect up front that these extra steps are not required and skip all the necessary checks/operations making every IO request cheaper to fulfill".
I really don't know how much plainer I can make this.
I'm stating neither. I've made literally no references to lumen or nanite.
Then what exactly are you arguing with me about? Here is your original comment that sparked this entire debate, made in response to my stating that no-where in the Edge article is it mentioned that the UE5 demo is dependent on the PS5's specific IO:
Dsoup said:
If it's just an SSD, why is Tim Sweeney banging on about nextgen consoles and their I/O? Why did Epic just not demo this on a PC with a fast NVMe drive?"
You're clearly implying here that there is something about the next gen consoles IO that is enabling the UE5 demo which is not possible on current PC's. So if it wasn't your intention to imply this, and you in fact agree with me that the demo will (and does, according to multiple Epic sources) then what was the purpose of this comment? If it's to simply highlight that there is more to the consoles IO than a simple move from HDD to SSD then that has never been in dispute.
What's the big deal with the Chinese stream? They're playing an mp4 recording of the PS5 UE5 demo. It's not running on the PC :/
No-ones claimed that they were running the demo on a PC in the livestream. It's the comments that the Epic engineer makes about the demo running on his own PC that are under discussion. It has absolutely nothing to do with the video of the demo they played in the livestream.
And they basically said that running it on a 2070 with an SSD might be possible but it really requires a fast I/O subsystem coupled with a fast SSD. That's the tech that Epic were working with Sony to perfect, the ability to place high detail models straight into the right location in memory without the usual overhead.
This is absolutely not what the engineer said, at least not according to every translation I've seen. He specifically stated that it was running on his own development laptop at around 40fps. He also states that the streaming requirements of the demo aren't particularly high, and don't require something as fast as the PS5 IO.[/quote]