SSDs are a substitute for ram not processing power as i understand it. There is nothing the SSD affords that more ram would not. Processing power however is irreplaceable.
Basically, yes. Years and years ago in the one of the next gen console threads in this forum when people were talking about next gen consoles (this current gen) coming out with 24+ GB of storage, I'd mentioned that this was not practical unless we had a massive increase in storage speeds. With 8 GB of memory, load times on consoles were already getting to to point where they were insanely long and mechanical HDDs had basically plateaued WRT speed (there are minor year over year increases) due to R&D in mechanical storage devices not seeing an easy path to cost reductions and long term reliability with next gen HDD platter innovations (HAMR for example) that would make them economically feasible for the consumer market.
I'd postulated that the next gen consoles would need at a bare minimum of an SSD in order to support more memory. However, there was a significant counterpoint to SSDs being included in consoles at the time and that was cost per GB. I felt that at the rate SSDs were cost reducing at the time that it would be feasible that it could potentially be used in the next generation of consoles (this generation), but others obviously felt differently. Then we had a relatively massive decrease in the rate at which NAND was cost reducing a few years back and I stopped talking about it.
And here we are. SSDs in consoles which allow for the usage of larger pools of memory without massively increasing (doubling or tripling) load times compared to the previous generation of consoles. However, 2 things.
- Memory only doubled (not even doubled going from XBO-X to XBS-X), limiting to some extent how much we can benefit from SSDs if I/O subsystems remained the same
- SSD storage capacity is greatly limited, thus limiting the size of a game and thus the fidelity of the textures and art assets used in the games.
- XBS systems get around this via Hot Swappable storage modules, effectively giving the console unlimited storage if you can afford multiple storage modules.
- PS5 systems will eventually get the use of NVME drives, but maximum storage will be limited by the maximum available NVME drive that can be used in the system.
- Greater compression ratios in this generation of consoles also help with this.
That said, for the first bullet point above, both Sony and MS have come up with changes to the I/O subsystem (hardware and software) that allow for lower latency streaming of data from the SSD which amplifies the effect of memory capacity. IE - when compared to previous I/O subsystems the current generation of consoles have a greater than 2x increase in effective memory capacity since you can stream in some data
on demand to be used in rendering the next 1-2 frames.
As to the second bullet point. While this will reduce overall what the current gen consoles and I/O subsystems are capable of (the size of the game and thus assets is far more limited due to the size of the SSD drives), it's still going to be very significantly improved compared to the previous generation of consoles.
All of which means that games will have greater graphical fidelity combined with increased convenience (greatly reduced loading times versus 2-3x increase in loading times) than if we'd kept using mechanical HDDs and used those savings to instead increase the transistor count of the SOCs with an attendant bump in the GPU (don't forget the cooling system needed for an SOC that would consume even more power).
As I said long before the consoles came out. The rumor that the current gen consoles would be using SSDs was far more exciting than if they had more powerful GPUs. The other thing that excited me was the audio, but thus far the only next gen audio experience I've had is with Cyberpunk 2077 ... on PC. So ... hopefully some developer really uses the audio hardware that Microsoft and Sony have put into their SOCs at some time.
Regards,
SB