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Next-Gen PS5 & XSX |OT| Console tEch threaD

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Imtjnotu

Member
Well, FF15 was one of the shittiest looking games this gen with the worst draw distance ever, and played it on performance instead of resolution on PS4 Pro. Still, I give it 9/10 and squeezed every bit of it!
the demo of it looked so damn good too. i see why they had to downgrade it
 
Normal will be 8-9GB/s. But SONY uses its own protocol that supports 6 Tiers of data priorities instead of 2 of NVMe, together with the inclusion of the Kraken chip for hardware accelerated decompression that is integrated in the main SoC, they can manage to handle rates of up to 22GB/s at best.
Do those numbers matter to a developer at all? I would guess you would care about the number of guaranteed sustained GB/S, so you can know how much data you can actually rely on having available. And I think somebody said that was 7.4GB/s.
 
Your speculating that streaming assets directly off of ssd requires more than 1.5-2GBps which and has shown to be adequate.
It's not just the speed that's important. It's the latency. It doesn't matter if your bandwidth is enough to stream an asset off the SSD if it can't do it when you need it. That's why the PS5's SSD controller has 6 priority channels while the XSX likely only has 2. The XSX simply wasn't designed to be used as a substitute for RAM. It was designed to load ram fast, not replace it.

If you can't get the data when you need it from the SSD, you have to cache it ahead of time in RAM so you can retrieve it from there instead. In fact that is exactly what Microsoft says is a good use for its 3.5 GBs of slower memory used by games. Meanwhile Cerny made a specific use case of its fast SSD being the timely streaming of assets like audio directly from it when the game requires it. Because the PS5 can get SSD data much quicker, it doesn't have to waste as much RAM to preload assets that it might need.

Finally, the overall SSD speed does matter. Data requirements aren't uniform. A game might require new audio while at the same time a player goes through a door requiring the game to load all the assets for a new part of the level. That's going to need far more bandwidth than the loading of any single asset. To compensate for a slower I/O, a game will have to do some combination of the following...
  • Cache more data in memory, divide the level up, and force a slow transition between each part
  • Reduce the data density in the level to the point where the I/O can handle the worst case scenario
There is no free lunch where a slower and higher latency I/O doesn't have drawbacks compared to a faster and lower latency I/O. At least not at the speeds we are talking about.
 

Imtjnotu

Member
Do those numbers matter to a developer at all? I would guess you would care about the number of guaranteed sustained GB/S, so you can know how much data you can actually rely on having available. And I think somebody said that was 7.4GB/s.
yes it does matter. check the road to ps5 12:08 time of road to ps5

youre able to load textures in an out in a half second. no need to have all the textures loaded for a big area if they dont need to be
 

SonGoku

Member
Do those numbers matter to a developer at all? I would guess you would care about the number of guaranteed sustained GB/S, so you can know how much data you can actually rely on having available. And I think somebody said that was 7.4GB/s.
Guaranteed throughput is 5.5GB/s for PS5 and 2.4GB/s XSX
The rest depends of how well assets compress on the disk/install, devs don't have to worry about that since they can stream at 5.5GB/s on demand.
 
who said it and where?

cernys push for it was sending textures and objects out in a half second and removing them just as fast. so to a dev yes it would matter if youre streaming in textures and loading them in a half second and removing them in a half second with out the user being able to notice
What I'm saying is that the theoretical max speed or even the most common speed of the SSD doesn't matter, because those are not sustained numbers you can rely on. What matters is the minimum speed guaranteed, because that's the speed at which you can actually be sure the data is going to be available.

If you design your game around having 8 GB of assets streamed every second and sometimes the speed is 7.something, there are assets that are not going to be there on time. You would be seeing textures appearing in front of you.
 
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GetSchwifty

Banned
SSD didn't fix it, seems to be an issue with UE4 borked LOD transitions
I thought SSD on PS4 doesn't improve loading speeds because the SATA and USB share a controller.

Anyway, it does look like something that can be fixed through a patch... I'll hold off getting it until they do. Thanks for the headsup.
 
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SonGoku

Member
I thought SSD on PS4 doesn't improve loading speeds because the SATA and USB share a controller.

Anyway, it does look like something that can be fixed through a patch... I'll hold off getting it until they do. Thanks for the headsup.
That too but this seems like a engine issue, i agree it should be fixed
 
What I'm saying is that the theoretical max speed or even the most common speed of the SSD doesn't matter, because those are not sustained numbers you can rely on. What matters is the minimum speed guaranteed, because that's the speed at which you can actually be sure the data is going to be available.

If you design your game around having 8 GB of assets streamed every second and sometimes the speed is 7.something, there are assets that are not going to be there on time. You would be seeing textures appearing in front of you.
A developer isn't going to leave performance on the table by coding to minimum I/O bandwidth specs. What they'll do is use memory as an SSD cache to average out I/O bandwidth requests. That way the game can be designed around the average I/O bandwidth. That's why bandwidth is so important. The more of it you have, the less RAM you need to waste being used as a cache.
 
Normal will be 8-9GB/s. But SONY uses its own protocol that supports 6 Tiers of data priorities instead of 2 of NVMe, together with the inclusion of the Kraken chip for hardware accelerated decompression that is integrated in the main SoC, they can manage to handle rates of up to 22GB/s at best.


I'm struggling to understand what you mean by data priorities. It seems like a pretty important feature but I just don't understand it.

Could you please give an explanation?

I would really appreciate it.
 

BGs

Industry Professional
Do those numbers matter to a developer at all? I would guess you would care about the number of guaranteed sustained GB/S, so you can know how much data you can actually rely on having available. And I think somebody said that was 7.4GB/s.
It is always important to have a good margin of maneuver. Especially in a system like PS5 designed to be as efficient as possible from the beginning. Variable speeds, SmartShift, ...

Edit.- Tomorrow from the computer I can make a better explanation. Morpheo owns me right now.
 
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Gamerguy84

Member

Excellent read, for me anyways because Im trying to learn about this, from Toms Hardware about the difference between GCN, RDNA, RDNA2.

It also made me realize just how powerful these consoles are going to be. We are going to see amazing games that will blow our minds.

The part that really blew my mind was the comparison between Radeon VII (GCN 13..8 TF) vs 5700XT(RDNA1 9.75TF). The 5700 was very comparable to the more powerful Radeon.
 
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psorcerer

Banned
I’m still intrigued by the number of priority levels mentioned. Anything more than two levels (high, low) hasn’t really been viable - without using a ring-bus - because a bridged type bus at saturation is so preoccupied with binary-back-off collisions for accessing the bus that providing any sort of isochronous throughput is too difficult at high load. I will be surprised if the PS5 doesn’t have at least one ring bus to accommodate those 6 levels of priority under heavy load.

This patent describes how priorities work. Are you fluent in Japanese? :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
I'm struggling to understand what you mean by data priorities. It seems like a pretty important feature but I just don't understand it.

Could you please give an explanation?

I would really appreciate it.
Data priorities allow urgent data requests to jump to the head of the line. It allows the SSD to be more fully utilized. As a simple example, lets compare two phone systems. One with two priority levels and the other with only one. Now imagine you are expecting an important call. The caller knows its important so if they call and the line is busy, they'll call again.

Now if your phone only has one priority level, you'd not want to use it much so that it'd be free when that important call comes in. When you do use the phone, you'd want to keep the call short so that if you're unlucky and the important call comes during that time, there won't be too much of a delay. Even though you didn't know the call came in, shortly after you hung up, you'd get the important call.

On the other hand, if you phone had two priority levels, you could make all the calls you wanted on the low priority line and talk for as long as you liked. The important call would come over the high priority line and you'd get it immediately no matter what. The extra priority level means there is less delay between when something important happens and when it is dealt with. It also means you can more easily make full use of a resource.

Sony gave an example of streaming in level data at a low priority level when the player's actions require an audio clip to be played immediately. That would go on the high priority level that jumps it to the head of the line. Without that ability, either the level data couldn't be streamed to keep the SSD ready for any audio requests, or the audio file would have to have been loaded ahead of time and sitting in memory just in case it was needed.

Edit:
Another way to look at this is that the PS5 will allow normal 2 priority level SSDs to be hooked up to it. Its software can simulate the 6 priority levels it needs on top of the two real ones...except that in order to do that, the 2 priority level SSD has to be faster than the 6 priority level one in order to have the same performance. In other words, the 6 priority levels of the PS5's SSD actually make it perform like an even faster drive.
 
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GermanZepp

Member
Guys, with the power of both nextgen consoles we get 4k assured, probably 60 fps too *if the devs want it. The CPU jump is massive.

So with both consoles hitting 4k60, 4k30, 3800p/60 and with improved checkerboard solutions resolution is not going to be a problem at all. The 60 fps games are going to be a lot more common too.

My point is, with both consoles running the games almost the same way, the power advantages of the xbox aren't gonna make a big difference. Perhaps the x is a more stable console with better raytracing.

That Sony SSD though, I mean, damn. If it is like the rumors suggested, like, no loading, zip, zero, nada and games can be designed around that. We need to see proof first but I'm starting to think Sony make the right calls with the ps5. I mean, we can expect:

4k60
Faster SSD
Dualsense full of *newtech stuff to experience
PSVR2

If Playstation is going to push VR to the next level the ps5 then was probably designed to an extent to high performance, high locked framerates. How the fastest SSD can impact on VR games. I'm excited.
 
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From my understanding , the main issue is that in XSX the RAM pool is unified. So we are not talking about 10 GB of RAM working at 560 GB/s and 6 at 336 GB/s. If the console needs to access more than 10 GB of RAM at any given moment, all RAM is accessed at 336 GB/s, even the faster 10 GB pool.

This is why just saying XSX's RAM runs at 560 GB/s is really not a good approximation, since that is only true when the console uses less than 10 GB at one time, and we simply don't know how things will turn out in practice. For all we know, for 20%, 50%, 80%+ of the time XSX's RAM could effectively be operating at 336 GB/s.
Where has anyone said that? Please post a link?
 
From my understanding , the main issue is that in XSX the RAM pool is unified. So we are not talking about 10 GB of RAM working at 560 GB/s and 6 at 336 GB/s. If the console needs to access more than 10 GB of RAM at any given moment, all RAM is accessed at 336 GB/s, even the faster 10 GB pool.

This is why just saying XSX's RAM runs at 560 GB/s is really not a good approximation, since that is only true when the console uses less than 10 GB at one time, and we simply don't know how things will turn out in practice. For all we know, for 20%, 50%, 80%+ of the time XSX's RAM could effectively be operating at 336 GB/s.

I think you missed this part.
"We call this standard memory. GPU optimal and standard offer identical performance for CPU audio and file IO. The only hardware component that sees a difference in the GPU."
Anything working with the GPU is at max speed, and only the CPU, io, and audio is using the lower speed.

GPU to cpu 560GB/s
GPU to io 560GB/s
GPU to audio 560GB/s
CPU to io 336GB/s

560 is @320bits
336 is @ 320bits
446 IS @ 256bits PS5 max

So any way you look at it it's clear that the Xsx is on another level.
 
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Tripolygon

Banned
I'm looking for that info in bold. I'm also looking for the PS5 having access to anything in 100Gb worth of SSD as a Virtual Ram pool sitting behind Video Ram but before it has to stream from the SSD. Point it out for me so that I can read up on it.
When you have near just in time access to any data in the 825GB SSD, you don't need a 100GB partition of virtual memory.
There's low level and high level access and game-makers can choose whichever flavour they want - but it's the new I/O API that allows developers to tap into the extreme speed of the new hardware. The concept of filenames and paths is gone in favour of an ID-based system which tells the system exactly where to find the data they need as quickly as possible. Developers simply need to specify the ID, the start location and end location and a few milliseconds later, the data is delivered.
With latency of just a few milliseconds, data can be requested and delivered within the processing time of a single frame, or at worst for the next frame.
This combination of hardware and software to enable near instant access of data is what Microsoft termed "Velocity Architecture" only Sony does not give it a fancy name and PS5 is faster at it based on specs of the storage and IO.
 
kLklbUR.jpg
 
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When you have near just in time access to any data in the 825GB SSD, you don't need a 100GB partition of virtual memory.

This combination of hardware and software to enable near instant access of data is what Microsoft termed "Velocity Architecture" only Sony does not give it a fancy name and PS5 is faster at it based on specs of the storage and IO.

XSeX SSD and I/O is manifestly a lot slower than the one in the PS5. The Crytek developer affirmed this when he confirmed that XSeX loading is not instant and still at the realm of about 5-10 seconds (he used the xbox official video as an example to avoid NDA).

The same bottleneck in the PC is present in XSeX (probably sped it up a little).

PS5 has 6 custom chips to ensure loading is INSTANT. XSeX only has one custom chip, the decompressor, which is not even as fast as the one in the PS5.

Xbox Velocity Architecture is a marketing talk. No wonder developers are not talking about it and not excited about it. It's the same slow ass architecture in PC sped up a little.
 

rnlval

Member
Data is spread across all chips evenly, for GPU to access data from the 16bit half it would limit bandwidth to 280GB/s and CPU to 168GB/s
This is an undesirable outcome

edit: and the net results the same 160GB used 80GB gained= 80GB/s used for average CPU access of 48GB/s
AMD GPUs use the "combined scatter" and "combined gather" methods.
 
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rnlval

Member
Look it'd be neat if they did something like this to work around that possible quirk, but the problem is we've seen the chips on the XSX motherboard and they're arranged three to one side, three to the other side, and four along the top. The graph here doesn't match up with the actual PCB's chip layout, and we can assume the four chips along the top are the 1 GB modules.

I'm not completely dismissing your general idea, but it wouldn't be using what's suggested in that graph because the module layout on the graph doesn't match the actual module layout on the real motherboard.
This is XSX's CG render die shot and PCB. This is not the real world PCB and die shot.

digitalfoundry-playstation-5-vs-xbox-series-x-specs-comparison-cpu-gpu-storage--1584554631072.jpg


My guess is eight normal 32 bit physical PHY GDDR6 controllers (like NAVI 10) with two extra 32 PHY GDDR6 controllers above the two CCX CPU modules.

I placed 2GB chips closer to the CCX CPU modules i.e. locality design rules?

XSX's CG render die shot reminds me of X1X's die shot layout.

Microsoft-Xbox-One-X-Scorpio-Engine-Hot-Chips-29-02.png



NAVI 10 PCB example

4-1080.254b13a3.jpg
 
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pasterpl

Member
Thanks for your correction.:lollipop_raising_hand: And it can hit around ~20GB/s randomly as well as seen by our friend BGs.

Seriously? He responded to you yesterday. He said he have not seen it. Stop spreading lies and making up sh*t.

That I say that the theoretical peak is +20GB/s does not mean that it is a constant or that I have seen it. Let's try not to read beyond my words.
 
XSeX SSD and I/O is manifestly a lot slower than the one in the PS5. The Crytek developer affirmed this when he confirmed that XSeX loading is not instant and still at the realm of about 5-10 seconds (he used the xbox official video as an example to avoid NDA).

The same bottleneck in the PC is present in XSeX (probably sped it up a little).

PS5 has 6 custom chips to ensure loading is INSTANT. XSeX only has one custom chip, the decompressor, which is not even as fast as the one in the PS5.

Xbox Velocity Architecture is a marketing talk. No wonder developers are not talking about it and not excited about it. It's the same slow ass architecture in PC sped up a little.
Damn, right on the money!
 

rnlval

Member
XSeX SSD and I/O is manifestly a lot slower than the one in the PS5. The Crytek developer affirmed this when he confirmed that XSeX loading is not instant and still at the realm of about 5-10 seconds (he used the xbox official video as an example to avoid NDA).

The same bottleneck in the PC is present in XSeX (probably sped it up a little).

PS5 has 6 custom chips to ensure loading is INSTANT. XSeX only has one custom chip, the decompressor, which is not even as fast as the one in the PS5.

Xbox Velocity Architecture is a marketing talk. No wonder developers are not talking about it and not excited about it. It's the same slow ass architecture in PC sped up a little.
XSX's SSD area has two hardware decompressors which are
ZLIB path for general data
BCPack path for texture data


AqdXPGy.jpg
 
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rnlval

Member
Mate, you're trying to diss Cerny for saying full 4K gaming needs 8TF... RE3 released on X1X with terrible framerates. It got patched today and the resolution was reduced down to 1620P. Same as the PS4 Pro version. Do you not think if X1X had 8TF it would have been able to run RE3 at full 4K/60? I do.
From DF, PS4 Pro's 1620p is checkerboard.
 

FeiRR

Banned
Tht shit would be bonkers lol I still sit in awe of what thy accomplished with share play. Playing a game and passing the controller to a friend to play tht same game or adding them to mp without them having the game is fucking crazy and works great on my connection.
I think the way it's going to work will be: your friend is playing a game, you go into their profile. On PS4 you can see what game they're playing and in some games what mode/level (doesn't work that well too, sometimes it's outdated info). To see the game itself, you have to ask for shareplay. On PS5, the system will quickly load the game your friend is playing (provided you have it too, of course) and show you exactly what they're seeing. Then you can join or shareplay. The difference is, this won't be streaming video you see but in-engine graphics. This would mean, with good internet connection the lag would be exactly the same you have in multiplayer games, so not noticeable. And for people who have datacaps - huge savings in transfer.

We can go even further (if the game editing rumour is true): you can also see a game you don't have. Which will, of course, require a certain package of data (say, engine and one level worth of assets) to be send over Internet. In this case, your friend's console is sharing this portion of the game with you on p2p basis or it comes from the Sony storage server (I think the latter is a more probable solution). Technically speaking it's doable but would require some system-level management of install packages, like: package1 (engine), package2 (level1), package3 (level2) and so on. This would also allow you to use that 'create' button to make a demo for friends. Let's say you'll be allowed to share one level of the game or 30 minutes of gameplay. You decide which level (map) you like the best, you put it in a 'demo' package and send to your friend. After playing the level for 30 minutes/once, etc. (publishers decide, of course), your friend will be prompted with PS Store question if he wants to buy the game.

HOWEVER, if SSD is so ground-breaking as devs say, we might see the departure from the traditional level/map system in games. Imagine a military FPS MP where you don't play on maps but certain areas of, say, Europe at war. When one side (this could be thousands of players now thanks to upped CPUs) has an advantage and pushes past the frontline, you don't load another map like, for example, in Battlefield V. You can run/drive a tank/fly a plane from one end of the whole virtual battlefield to the other because now the technology allows it.

I think the implications of fast data access are much more exciting than upping the graphics to 4k in all games or even locking FPS at stable 60. We're going to like it a lot.
 
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draliko

Member
kraken is proprietary from RAD Game Tools, Sony bought a licence to pack it inside the ps5 (a price you as the user will pay). And we don't really know in reality how much better it will be, as always there is a diminishing return after a treshold, so maybe the real world difference (not some synthetic bench) will be irrelevant. Until we see some games, this is all speculation.
 
I'm still mightily confused as to how a GCN @ 13.8TF can be worse than an RDNA1 @ 9.75TF.

To me, it's like someone telling me that a ton of bricks is heavier than a ton of feathers.

Is a teraflop really such a bad measurement of things? After all, a flop is the measurement of floating point operations per second. A terraflop is a billion floating point operations per second.

Therefore, is one piece out hardware is outputing 13.8TF per second, while the other is outputting 9.75T per second, it should follow that the one with the higher number is handling more of these calculations per second and therefore is the better device.

What else is going on to affect the performance?
 
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