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If MS and Sony launched optional systems with a "hybrid SSD/HDD", would you buy it?

Which next gen system would you buy?

  • The current models how they are now (small SSD + next gen visuals + super fast loading)

    Votes: 221 98.2%
  • New model (bigger storage + next gen visuals + shittier old gen load times)

    Votes: 4 1.8%

  • Total voters
    225
I'm not sure if this has fully been said yet but without the ssd for streaming the consoles would need much more ram to fill a scene and to fill that extra ram would take even more time loading than you think on a mechanical drive. So with more ram and a slower drive there might not even be any cost savings.

Basically the reason consoles can get away with having only 16gb ram is because of ssd.
 

scydrex

Member
Next gen visuals the same.

Comes down to storage space vs loading times.

Only that? What about the abysmal pop in and LOD in Fallout 4? Aside the loading... I thought sometimes i was playing a PS3 game not a PS4 game. One time i played for 2hr doing a quest on survival. I was on the dlc island. Running in the world map the game froze like for 10 or 15sec don't know exactly. I thought the game froze... I was mad as hell... I almost was turning of the PS4 slim and before doing it the game was fine. It was loading something about the world or some streaming issue who knows what the hell it was doing. So no is not only 1 or 2 min loading.
 
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Great Hair

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I would take a tiny 250GB SSD over a 5TB HDD if I could only have one drive. Absolutely the performance/loading speed benefits of even a SATA SSD outweigh the storage space issue.

PC games that are tiny in size (most indies, really old games) I'll leave on the HDD and just play it from there. Most games default to one of the SATA SSDs and newer/large texture file games will be put on one of the NVMe drives. When I'm done with a game it gets moved to the big bulk drive. Moving it back if I want to play it again is faster than re-downloading and most of my games are at least mildly modded so all of that remains intact this way.
 

German Hops

GAF's Nicest Lunch Thief
damn, the poll is currently at 185 - to - 1. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

So, who's the contrarian in here?
 
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RoadHazard

Gold Member
That's the worst idea I've seen in a long time. The SSDs aren't just about eliminating load screens, they completely change what can be done in-game through data streaming (although we haven't seen much of that yet because we're stuck in this cross-gen limbo).

But also, instant(ish) loads are amazing, I never ever want to go back to staring at 30-60 second load screens.

I also don't really have an issue with the PS5's SSD size. I don't need to have 10 different huge games installed all at once, a few at a time is enough.
 
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Artistic

Member
If it meant a cheaper entry point for the Series X/PS5, I would definitely choose the hybrid options.

Don't mind the longer load times.
 
I first picked slower loading times till I read that op mean 1 minutes plus. Wtf that's not even the case on pc really except when you have a max shitty laptop HDD. Even decent drives load everything in below one minute.

Someone buys a PS5, experiences the BEST feature… and goes “remove this shit.”

I cant take a bathroom break from my 24/7 marathons anymore.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
damn, the poll is currently at 185 - to - 1. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

So, who's the contrarian in here?
Me. The OP! lol.

Oh shit There's now 3 others. lol.

People were looking too much into my message. What I should had said is simply: All other things being equal, would you trade some loading speed for double/triple the storage space.

Many people were digging into it too much. When I put into quotes SSD/HDD I didn't even mean having an HDD drive in the console. Just that it would be a storage medium that was kind of the best of both worlds at a happy medium.
 
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Topher

Gold Member
What I should had said is simply: All other things being equal, would you trade some loading speed for double/triple the storage space.

That's pretty much what you said. Think everyone is clear.....they just wouldn't want to sacrifice storage speed for more storage. The entire gaming industry is moving towards faster IO and storage solutions. More storage just isn't as exciting as that.
 

RCU005

Member
Next gen visuals the same.

Comes down to storage space vs loading times.
The SDD on the PS5 and the XSX are not just about loading times. It allows to have worlds and levels designed in completely new ways. Those games will come later in the generation of course, and you will see that load times will come back in some way, when developers are taking advantage of them in a much higher capacity. (Levels won't have loading times, but starting the game will still have them).
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
The SDD on the PS5 and the XSX are not just about loading times. It allows to have worlds and levels designed in completely new ways. Those games will come later in the generation of course, and you will see that load times will come back in some way, when developers are taking advantage of them in a much higher capacity. (Levels won't have loading times, but starting the game will still have them).

There shouldn't really be load times at all, no matter how complex the games get. If we take PS5 as an example, the raw speed is 5.5GB/s, but with compression (and hardware decompression) you get at least 8-9GB/s. That's fast enough to fill the entire RAM in less than 2 seconds, and once you do that you can't load any more data until you throw something else away. Then there might be some processing needed to set everything up in the game world etc, but in general I don't see why any game optimized for the platform should ever take more than a few seconds to load.

(Procedurally generated worlds are different, as "loading" those will be limited by how fast the CPU can complete the work, but here I'm talking about loading a traditional game where the main limiting factor is how fast you can get the data across.)
 
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