Jack The Nipper
Banned
They never played playstation one
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Kotaku: Why Games Still Have Bad Loading Times
- Thread starter LordOfLore
- Start date
General Lee
Member
SSD's are still too expensive for the low end consoles. My guess is with next gen they might use a caching solution like Intel Optane. I think Micron is making their own version of it, so I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a 32/64 GB cache of that in the 7 nm console generation. I think the console prices are pressured to go up after Pro and Scorpio since they have to be noticeably faster, but the time to market is shorter. They still want to use hdd's since the capacity is needed, but they don't necessarily need all of the storage to have NVMe speeds, so a smaller fast cache would make sense.
Mr_Antimatter
Member
Even the ps1 had some games with short load times. Soul Reaver, for example, had none outside it's initial load. It used a lot of long animation elements and linear level design to hide loading zones.
The HDD issue is legit though. Moving from my stock 5400 rpm 500 gig drive to a 5400 rpm 1 TB + 8GB nand SSHD made a huge different in many games. I'd love to go full SSD, but I don't think it will be fully utilized for the money.
Next gen though, it would be nice to at least get faster SATA, combined with faster drives, though, it honestly becomes an issue of price to performance. And I doubt many gamers today really care, blaming load times more on the game then the console.
The HDD issue is legit though. Moving from my stock 5400 rpm 500 gig drive to a 5400 rpm 1 TB + 8GB nand SSHD made a huge different in many games. I'd love to go full SSD, but I don't think it will be fully utilized for the money.
Next gen though, it would be nice to at least get faster SATA, combined with faster drives, though, it honestly becomes an issue of price to performance. And I doubt many gamers today really care, blaming load times more on the game then the console.
TransTrender
Gold Member
Intel and Micron have the same stuff and it will still be too expensive even in that time-frame. QLC NAND might be a cheap and 'good enough' solution at that point but definitely not 3DX-Point.
CamHostage
Member
Well, yes, of course -- if the menu stays in RAM, something else can't go in.
And that was a problem with PSX, PS2 sometimes, even the beefy Xbox and other machines from back when every bit of RAM was precious and every graphic element a complication to render. But now we have lots of RAM to play with and 3D engines that are flexible and relatively efficient (albeit there is bloat) despite the demands of the game and its high-quality assets. We also have massively powerful GPU and CPU hardware that can quite easily compute complex vector effects and radiant arrays of colors with high fidelity and fast motion, all of which could be put together for great realtime background effects to enliven the choosing and keep energy high with very little if anything needed to come in from storage. Something that would take up a good percentage of the overhead on past-gen consoles to produce and display would now take fractions of availability on a modern machine. And even if we wanted to spruce up the process with high-res character art and voice samples before the character models load in, we can position those materials optimally on the disc (well, we could before BD) and/or compress and rapidly decompress them in delivery so that the assets needed are ideally loaded by the time we need them if those materials cannot remain in memory.
If Capcom is honestly claiming that it uses every bit of RAM every single bout in its fighters (which I question, and also double-question since MvC loads 3X the characters and then some while still looking damned fine, but I would understand if there are efficiencies limiting tag based games,) so be it. But even with the jump between PS3 and PS4, the basic menu doesn't need to be 16X more detailed than what came before, so its footprint would be a percentage of an impediment if it were just the exact same character select menu as past-gen games. (Also, didn't some of the PS1 versions of SF have a simplified menu for text-based choosing? We have a replay function now, but if only one character wants to change or if the background can still stay, it all gets dumped and you load into that menu to start from zero again.)
Just saying, if there's not a better reason why it takes so long to load out of matches in SF4/5 other than, "the menu is so high-fidelity that it's worth it!", then my argument is that it is not at all worth it.
asset complexity and required power/memory usage scales with power available.
i bet if you map the memory usage of a fighter through every console Street Fighter has been on, it'll probably be about the same percentage from SNES to now.
PS4 uses SATA for the internal hard drive. Apparently PS4 Pro is a bit faster. See http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...pro-ssd-upgrade-does-sata-3-make-a-difference
A SSD can in best case scenarios halve the loading times. The rest is up to developers to have sensible loading schemes. For example Souls games are pretty terrible in the way they reload the whole level if you die even though they can reset it on spot if you rest at a bonfire. By comparison Nioh resets the level much faster if you die.
Sorry this is nonsense.
All big games use very, very aggressive compression and usually multiple layers of it. They wouldn't ship otherwise. It's a basic requirement of modern development.
The real advancements are in clever asset reuse, intelligent prioritization (really tough), faking detail (repeating patterns, tiling), layering to hide patterning, etc. Basically doing more with less to make things look much more detailed than they really are.
In some cases you see current gen assets that aren't much larger than last gen ones. Just *much* more work put into asset optimization and authoring techniques so they have less unique data. You can see it in most modern games, characters have tonnes of repeating details, etc.
Even things like faces often have multiple repeating detail layers over a fairly low resolution base.
Hmmm I actually can't think of the last instance a long ass loading time bothered me.
I mean maybe Battlefield 1 with how long it takes to load into a map but I can forgive DICE because of the map size, 64 players and destructibility etc.
If anything load times are better than they've ever been this gen.
This was a great article by Kotaku though, I enjoy reading this sort of dev tech stuff.
I mean maybe Battlefield 1 with how long it takes to load into a map but I can forgive DICE because of the map size, 64 players and destructibility etc.
If anything load times are better than they've ever been this gen.
This was a great article by Kotaku though, I enjoy reading this sort of dev tech stuff.
CamHostage
Member
Again, agreed, it can take a tremendous amount of RAM to make a Street Fighter fight inside a game. That, I'm fine with.
But to select a Street Fighter, that need not be such a big deal. It takes essentially the RAM to store the text string "Ryu" and some rendered fire or flying cubes or floating logos or brush-metal plates slamming together to constitute a Character Select menu in UHD as it did back on previous consoles. A button-prompt at 4K or 480p is still the same command: "Press Start".
The more you sweeten that menu up with high-res bitmaps (which, even at 4K, shouldn't be that serious a drain, especially for easily-compressible animated art, right?) and full character models animating their choose-me pose and voicing their taunt, the more I'm waiting to fight.
Not according to this:
It's all done through USB even though the APU has built in SATA support, oddly enough. Personally with that in mind even the thought of buying an SDD for the thing conjures up thoughts of lighting money on fire.
SirPinkyNose
Member
960 EVO still not fast enough?
RAM disk or get fucked imho tbqh
On a serious note, I thought it was kind of cool on my mobo my 960 evo actually runs through a DIMM2 slot.
PleaseDontBanMe
Banned
I grew up on PS1s load times so modern load times is pretty much something you will never hear me complain about
Well, bloodborne at launch certainly was nostalgic I'll say that much...
boneyjangles
Member
Updating to SSD will only net you personally the ability to load into a typical multiplayer game earlier. You still have to then sit and wait on everyone else's shitty old hard drives to get them in.
And let's face it, games are primarily multiplayer now.
Old coal-fired spinning hard drives need to go away already. But when the primary problem people seem to have with their, for example, PS4, is running out of storage space, I don't see a rush to move to a generally smaller capacity more expensive storage solution.
Of course eventually SSD's will be cheaper than spinny-discs, maybe even in the next 2 years.
And let's face it, games are primarily multiplayer now.
Old coal-fired spinning hard drives need to go away already. But when the primary problem people seem to have with their, for example, PS4, is running out of storage space, I don't see a rush to move to a generally smaller capacity more expensive storage solution.
Of course eventually SSD's will be cheaper than spinny-discs, maybe even in the next 2 years.
Negotiator
Member
Self-explanatory:
Even without an SSD the load times in Bayonetta on PC are like 1 second.
Honestly, since most games are designed towards console specs, load times have barely been an issue on a decent PC in forever.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Same, I use a USB SSD and can't be happier with the gains.
However, the consoles (PS4 at least) still use the USB standard for data transfer even if you connect the SSD internally. That and the system is probably applying some bottlenecks as it needs to juggle background apps as well.
Boaty McBoatface
Member
I still don't get it. I use a 7200rpm drive in my PC and load times are pretty super quick, way faster than any console I've used even with a quick drive.
Negotiator
Member
"To further enhance optical drive performance, the PS4 features a hardware on-the-fly zlib decompression module (a special piece of hardware used to quickly decompress the data on the Blu-ray disc, which has been compressed to save space and bandwidth), allowing for greater effective bandwidth"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_technical_specifications#Storage
Don't worry, 8GB are still enough, I rarely see my ram usage above 8GB and I have 16GB of it.
I've done this too. It's a nice improvement but it's nowhere near the increase you get on PC.
Inspector Jones
Member
Bloodborne at launch tested my patience. Grand Theft Auto 5 tests my patience all the time and hampers my ability to just pick up and play it.
Mr. PlayStation
Member
When it come to new gen systems, i think it's safe to say nothing loads as fast as Driveclub!
Velocity:Design:Comfort
Banned
Self-explanatory:
I don't really understand. 3.5-4x more data to load, 3x the time to fill with data, 3x more bandwidth, but also it didn't "grow on the same order" (of magnitude I assume it means)? It seems like its about 3-4x more intensive but also had 3-4x more bandwidth.
Negotiator
Member
It's like 10x more data to load... 512MB vs 5GB
GifGafIsTheBestGaf
Member
Good times.
This gen is light years ahead compared to last gen, well at least coming from ps3 to ps4
DirgeExtinction
Member
Nowadays, it feels like we really on videos/gifs just as much as screenshots.
Mexen
Member
I was being sarcastic but yes, I was referring to GotP.
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