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[NightmareFarm]

No game ever loads a full planet into RAM at once, and most don't load full levels either (few games even have those nowadays). Almost all games, whether linear or open world, use data streaming, because not doing that would be a huge waste of memory. You load what you need when you need it (or when you think you WILL need it, rather), and with an SSD you can do that at a much later point, meaning you don't have to waste as much memory on stuff the player might never even see. So you can use more memory for stuff the player DOES see by loading it just in time, and that means you can pack environments with more detail and variety. And that goes for these small environments you warp between in R&C too. They're small but detailed.

Well we're supposed to hold the SSD to a better standard right? In that case it should be able to load much more than just a tiny boat or empty pocket area of a planet.

>small but detailed.

Lol, in the nefarious fight mid game you're warped to one tiny walled off arena in one of the planets and its pretty much empty. There's basically nothing there besides ratchet and the boss. Graphically speaking, it should be more detailed than previous R&C games since it is a PS5 game.

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

Dumb question.
Cross-gen is the answer.

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

I really hope so too but the SSD is starting to smell like a nothing burger.

You'd think if it was able to "rewrite the rules of what a console can do" and be the "biggest leap since 2D to 3D" there would already be many games showing off this new tech.

What a

 

[Topher]

What do you expect to get more than loading times?

A ssd is literally storage that can be accessed faster than a old hdd.

This gens secret sauce lol.

Did you read what I said?

"In any case, if all we get out of SSD is faster loading times, smaller game footprints and no pop-in then that is fine too."

I don't know what to expect, but I'm not going to write the tech off entirely. You tell me why Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, and AMD are putting so much effort into tech and software beyond the actual SSD?

 

[RoadHazard]

Well we're supposed to hold the SSD to a better standard right? In that case it should be able to load much more than just a tiny boat or empty pocket area of a planet.

>small but detailed.

Lol, in the nefarious fight mid game you're warped to one tiny walled off arena in one of the planets and its pretty much empty. There's basically nothing there besides ratchet and the boss. Graphically speaking, it should be more detailed than previous R&C games since it is a PS5 game.

No, we shouldn't except an SSD to load more, just faster. You still can't load more than the amount of memory you have, which has "only" doubled since last gen.

I'm talking about the sequences you fly through in that video. They are rather detailed I would say. Them being small doesn't mean they're not using a lot of memory.

 

[Topher]

Seems like Cerny was OPs first meeting with a car salesman.

"The Xbox Velocity Architecture was designed as the ultimate solution for game asset streaming in the next generation. This radical reinvention of the traditional I/O subsystem directly influenced all aspects of the Xbox Series X design. If our custom designed processor is at the heart of the Xbox Series X, the Xbox Velocity Architecture is the soul. Through a deep integration of hardware and software innovation, the Xbox Velocity Architecture will power next-gen gaming experiences unlike anything you have seen before."

Xbox Velocity Architecture: A Closer Look at the Next-Gen Tech Driving Gaming Innovation Forward on Xbox Series X - Xbox Wire

When we set out to design the Xbox Series X, we aspired to build our most powerful console ever powered by next generation innovation and delivering consistent, sustained performance never before seen in a console with no compromises. To achieve this goal, we knew we needed to analyze each...

news.xbox.com

Is that a car salesmen pitch as well?

 

[Stuart360]

You will always have pop in of some kind, even 20 years from now. SSD's, IO tech, etc, it all helps but there is still a limit to the amount of poly's a gpu can throw around on a single frame.

 

[diffusionx]

Putting in the secret sauce SSD doesn’t make a lick of difference if you also have to make the game work on a 5400rpm hard drive or a SATA III drive that runs at 1/10th the speed at best. It probably won’t be another 5-10 years before the LCD hardware supports speeds comparable to the drives on PS5/XSX, so yea it’s not happening this gen.

 

[Seider]

Popping in Nintendo 64 was due to low speed of its cartridge system?

I dont think so.

 

[skit_data]

Are we getting threads about Mesh Shaders, VRS and Sampler feedback as well?

 

[ReBurn]

Popping in Nintendo 64 was due to low speed of its cartridge system?

I dont think so.

Then what was the cause?

 

[Seider]

Then what was the cause?

Overload of the polygon count in screen that the console could compute.

 

[waquzy]

Dumb question.
Cross-gen is the answer.

No such thing as a dumb question mate, only a dumb answer.

 

[playsaves3]

This is relevant to both Xbox and PS5, but as PS5 has a faster SSD it's even more of a glaring example.
So we an SSD in the PS5 and XSX that promised us no load times and no pop in.
Well, 3 years in and we still have the same issue with pop in that we had in the HDD era of last gen.
Wether its first party games or third party, there is no difference.
With the PS5 we have the SSD giving the maximum speed straight out of the box, unlike the XSX which relies alot more on software, so it's not going to get any faster in the future than it is now.
To me it looks like the cause of the pop in has nothing to do with the SSDs, but rather it is always going to be limited by the RAM and bandwidth, so by my reckoning it's something that we will still have throughout this generation.
With the XSX maybe the Sampler Feedback Streaming could help mitigate this once it gets exploited, but we don't know yet.

Do any of you still think the SSDs are going to erase pop in down the track?

Isn’t it cpu related?

 

[anothertech]

Technology is hard

 

[playsaves3]

It's not about SSD speed at all. It's about how I/O is used. On PC I/O (decompression and stuff) is done by the CPU. Now just look at Spiderman and what kind of CPU it needs just to run above 60fps. And even with the most powerful CPU the game still drops under 60fps in some scenarios where it's locked 60fps on PS5 with a potato CPU (around Ryzen 2700).

Im still sad the current Gen used Zen 2 instead of 3 it’s the only flaw with the consoles and Spider-Man for example would be performing even better if they had done it

 

[playsaves3]

It's so funny we live in a time where there's one platform (NSW) that's so ridiculously underpowered, developers are basically forced to put some effort into optimization and then still games run at sub 30 most of the time. And then there're two other platforms (XSX/PS5) that are so powerful that the same developers just don't care about proper optimization, they just shave off a couple months development time and throw their assets into their engines build tools and call it a day, again resulting in subpar performance but for different reasons.

The ps5 and series x are powerful (sometimes even feel overspecced) on the gpu side but Poor on the cpu side

 

[Topher]

Isn’t it cpu related?

Isn't the whole point of the IO block to bypass the CPU?

 

[cireza]

but as PS5 has a faster SSD it's even more of a glaring example

PS5 SSD is so fast that the textures and polygons are unable to stop at the right place, they actually clip through the scenery. Then they have to come back at the right place. That's why you still get pop-in.

 

[LostDonkey]

PS5 SSD is so fast that the texture and polygons are unable to stop at the right place, they actually clip through the scenery. Then they have to come back at the right place. That's why you still get pop-in.

I heard it was so fast that it actually breached the physical limitations of speed of light. So the graphics are actually already there it's just our slow human brains have to rebuild the temporal vortex created and this is why it appears to pop in to existence.

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

No such thing as a dumb question mate, only a dumb answer.

You are right

 

[Lumpyoatmeal]

This is where nanite comes in.

This is Only streaming around 300 MBps of data. So less than the speed of those SATA SSD drives.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Well we're supposed to hold the SSD to a better standard right? In that case it should be able to load much more than just a tiny boat or empty pocket area of a planet.

>small but detailed.

Lol, in the nefarious fight mid game you're warped to one tiny walled off arena in one of the planets and its pretty much empty. There's basically nothing there besides ratchet and the boss. Graphically speaking, it should be more detailed than previous R&C games since it is a PS5 game.

The loading times on standard PS4 with GoT are fast enough to handle R&C, so it is very possible that this game only switched to next-gen only part way through development and the reason areas like that are still confined is that they were designed around PS4/Pro and never got updated.

Same with the earlier issues you mentioned with the sails on the boat not loading in. They are probably resident in memory but rendering them at full fidelity - in the distance - without major engine modification was probably the limiting factor, because most engines render data detail inversely proportional of the asset distance to the frustum near clip plane. So, distance objects have lower LoDs compared to near objects.

 

[ChiefDada]

I think PS5 lumen demo has already proved that developers can leave pop in in the past IF they are able and willing to leverage the new hardware. If you can show me one instance of geometry or texture pop in from the lumen demo then I'll eat my shoe. To my knowledge, Lumen demo is the only playable app for PS5 that utilizes the geometry engine, which Cerny mentioned allows for smooth LOD transition.

If the SSD was such a fundamental gamechanger in game design then Sony would pump out at least one game which showed the full extent of it's capabilities 2 years in to the PS5 life cycle. What they have produced so far hasn't shown this at all.

Often times tech innovation and economically sound business decisions don't operate in parallel timelines. The extended cross-gen period has undoubtedly held back new pipelines and designs useable in new consoles, but PS4/XBONE can't manage. And even without cross gen, it often takes a few years before developers get their bearings on new hardware.

 

[Dust-by-Monday]

It's not pop in due to the SSD not being fast enough to load the data, it's geometry and object culling because only so much data can be drawn by the GPU at once.

 

[Chronicle]

My bet is full next gen not utilized cause of cross gen and sadly.... series s.

 

[PonyStation4]

Rift Apart didn't revolutionise gaming at all. The part where you keep travelling through portals at the start were a series of disguised loading screens. Then the rest of the game is just semi-open world ratchet.

Real SSD revolution would be being able to rift yourself over to other planets almost instantly rather than use the spaceship like in previous games.

In other words, you want a RAM Disk. If you want to skip load times then put in 128gb of fast RAM in your PC

 

[ChiefDada]

Rift Apart didn't revolutionise gaming at all. The part where you keep travelling through portals at the start were a series of disguised loading screens. Then the rest of the game is just semi-open world ratchet.

But those transitions were literally less than a second. Are you arguing for the removal of transitions going from one world to the next? Do you realize how jarring that would be?

 

[playsaves3]

Isn't the whole point of the IO block to bypass the CPU?

I was trying to come up with an answer for the pop in

 

[adamsapple]

My bet is full next gen not utilized cause of cross gen and sadly.... series s.

Series S has the same SSD as Series X, just lower space.

So in the context of this topic, Series S is an absolute non issue.

 

[diffusionx]

It's not about SSD speed at all. It's about how I/O is used. On PC I/O (decompression and stuff) is done by the CPU. Now just look at Spiderman and what kind of CPU it needs just to run above 60fps. And even with the most powerful CPU the game still drops under 60fps in some scenarios where it's locked 60fps on PS5 with a potato CPU (around Ryzen 2700).

Console CPUs are Zen 2. Ryzen 2700 is Zen+. Zen 2 is Ryzen 3700. And no, Zen 2 is not potato-tier.

Before these systems came out, people were quite keen on the CPU, especially coming off Jaguar. It’s weird to hear people call it poor now. It’s just not.

 

[Bulletbrain]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't pop in more a function of rendering power as well as I/O? A given GPU doesn't have enough horsepower to render infinite amount of objects at full detail in any given viewspace, so Devs prioritise objects that are closer/prominent, while cutting detail from far away objects or choose not to render them at all. The required objects can be held in memory or directly accessed from the SSD, however the main bottleneck is rendering power (how much GPU Power is required to render X Amount of objects at Y Detail, rather than how many assets need to be fed to the engine) . At least, it's how I understand it.

 

[Hoddi]

Console CPUs are Zen 2. Ryzen 2700 is Zen+. Zen 2 is Ryzen 3700. And no, Zen 2 is not potato-tier.

Before these systems came out, people were quite keen on the CPU, especially coming off Jaguar. It’s weird to hear people call it poor now. It’s just not.

For real. PC gamers collectively lost their shit when Zen 2 released but now everyone's acting like it's this completely outmoded CPU architecture.

It's not.

 

[Amiga]

2. Draw distance related pop-in. To reduce load on cpu, gpu objects at a greater distance are shown with less detail or are completely removed. Has nothing to to with the harddrive.

Guerrilla Games frequently have pop-in issues in their games likely because of this.

 

[NightmareFarm]

But those transitions were literally less than a second. Are you arguing for the removal of transitions going from one world to the next? Do you realize how jarring that would be?

The video is timestamped at 28:42 This is just before ratchet enters the portal.



28:47. Ratchet enters a disguised loading screen where you literally just ride on one rail and can't do anything else.



28:51. Ratchet leaves the rail set piece and enters another portal



28:54. Ratchet enters another disguised loading screen where you just slide down a wall



28:58. Ratchet enters another portal



29:02. Ratchet yet again enters another disguised loading screen where you have virtually no movement or control over your character whatsoever.



29:06. Ratchet enters another portal



29:08. Yet again, another disguised loading screen...



29:15. Another portal...



29:18. Another disguised loading screen where you can at least move about and fight but you're placed onto a puny little boat fighting against 4 pirates

https://youtu.be/beaH_CCw-vA?t=1767

29:27. Fight ends, cutscene begins.

https://youtu.be/beaH_CCw-vA?t=1941

32:21. Finally you are free and not in a scripted on rails set piece anymore. The game has finally loaded a level.

 

[existensmaximum]

It's not about SSD speed at all. It's about how I/O is used. On PC I/O (decompression and stuff) is done by the CPU. Now just look at Spiderman and what kind of CPU it needs just to run above 60fps. And even with the most powerful CPU the game still drops under 60fps in some scenarios where it's locked 60fps on PS5 with a potato CPU (around Ryzen 2700).

It's amazing how many people have misunderstood the hardware advantages the PS5 has thanks to the tailored I/O system and try to downplay it to "it's just an SSD LOL".

 

[Three]

There have been various next gen exclusive games which still haven't shown it off.

If the SSD was such a fundamental gamechanger in game design then Sony would pump out at least one game which showed the full extent of it's capabilities 2 years in to the PS5 life cycle. What they have produced so far hasn't shown this at all.

They did with Ratchet but "full extent of its capabilities" it isn't until engines start relying on it. A lot of games have been crossgen. You've seen tech demos of its use already too.

At the end of the day it's fast storage and you can achieve similar results with lots of faster RAM. SSD isn't magical but I'm not sure why people downplay a massive pool of fast storage for game development as if it provides nothing.

 

[Black_Stride]

Isn’t it cpu related?

The whole point of DirectStorage and the PS5s custom I/O block is to basically alleviate strain on the CPU.

It's amazing how many people have misunderstood the hardware advantages the PS5 has thanks to the tailored I/O system and try to downplay it to "it's just an SSD LOL".

Until Devs start using GPU de/compression on PC.

 

[NightmareFarm]

They did with Ratchet

No they didn't.

 

[01011001]

When will people realize ssd's are not magic unicorns. I cant wait till ratchet and clank gets ported to pc and people are running it on potato ssd's.

nah, if that day ever comes I sure hope someone connects a stock PS4 HDD via a USB adaptor and runs it on that.

that's the first thing I'd do, mainly because I literally have a stock PS4 HDD connected to my PC via USB
(when I bought my PS4 Fat I instantly removed the stock HDD and replaced it with a 2TB one. I did the same with my Pro, whose stock HDD is now my Emulation drive on the Series X)

I uploaded a video in an older thread where I ran the Matrix UE5 demo on that drive... and it ran basically the same as on my internal Samsung SSD, maybe some small load stutters.
but the initial load took ages lol

 

[sinnergy]

Because SSDs don’t render images …

 

[Three]

No they didn't.

If you just want to be a contrarian then ok.

 

[NightmareFarm]

If you just want to be a contrarian then ok.

So not taking developer statements at face value(who benefit from sales for both the console and the game) and using simple logic instead is being a contrarian now?

 

[Three]

So not taking developer statements at face value(who benefit from sales for both the console and the game) and using simple logic instead is being a contrarian now?

I can understand not taking things at face value but simply not believing them just because is contrarian. You posted a bunch of videos from ratchet and argued that it's some hidden loading screen, it's not.

What about the crystals you hit? Could you at least accept that it is using it to achieve that quick transition?

 

[NightmareFarm]

I can understand not taking things at face value but simply not believing them just because is contrarian. You posted a bunch of videos from ratchet and argued that it's some hidden loading screen, it's not.

What about the crystals you hit? Could you at least accept that it is using it to achieve that quick transition?

I explained all of this already previously in the thread.

Yes they are disguised loading screens. You have hardly any movement during the transitions.

The blizon crystals load up small areas just like the pocket rifts you can open up with the rift tether.

 

[01011001]

I can understand not taking things at face value but simply not believing them just because is contrarian. You posted a bunch of videos from ratchet and argued that it's some hidden loading screen, it's not.

What about the crystals you hit? Could you at least accept that it is using it to achieve that quick transition?

play Titanfall 2's time travel level.

2 different level layouts loaded in at the same time, hit the crystal, your character gets teleported to the other version of the level.

both versions of the level use similar assets, which saves VRAM space, and the destroyed version of the level uses sparsely placed terrain at close proximity instead of the way more complex version in the intact version of it, meaning the destroyed version most likely needs way less VRAM space.

so one way you could do that is to have hidden background streaming of the needed assets from the other version every time you get close to one of the crystals.
the fact that you can't just switch any time you want makes this all way easer than if you could switch at any time like in Titanfall 2 for example.



Rift Apart can most likely have more detail in that level than it could have on a PS4 for example, but such a level can be done on last gen. it would simply need to be paired back a bit like any other game too.
smaller textures, some detail dialed back, and maybe a tiny transition animation if absolutely necessary.

 

[Three]

Rift Apart can most likely have more detail in that level than it could have on a PS4 for example, but such a level can be done on last gen. it would simply need to be paired back a bit like any other game too.
smaller textures, some detail dialed back, and maybe a tiny transition animation if absolutely necessary.

That's true but nobody is saying a transition isn't possible on a HDD they are saying that the faster storage is being used in games to provide that detail and transition. Matrix Awakens demo too.

Insomniac have confirmed they stream it from the SSD and don't keep two worlds in memory. As you say it's pretty simple to keep multiple worlds in memory but say you want to keep just 2 worlds your memory budget for each world (or tile) halves or you need a machine with double the memory when defining min spec.

The idea that some massive pool of fast storage isn't useful though is what's an absolutely bizarre take from some users. All they need to do is go look at some developer videos or something to see how that fast streaming is useful and being utilised. Even ones from insomniac themselves would help:

 

[Three]

I explained all of this already previously in the thread.

Yes they are disguised loading screens. You have hardly any movement during the transitions.

The blizon crystals load up small areas just like the pocket rifts you can open up with the rift tether.

Rift Apart uses an open world engine. It's loading what's around the player. What's your point though? You have hardly any movement because they want jumping to be fast paced portal jumping not because giving the player "more movement" would mean anything for loading. If it were because of loading, they know the players max moving speed and giving you more movement would mean nothing in terms of loading. If anything it would give them more time to load the next section.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Rift Apart can most likely have more detail in that level than it could have on a PS4 for example, but such a level can be done on last gen. it would simply need to be paired back a bit like any other game too.

So it could not be done on PS4 as it is, glad we agree .

 

[01011001]

That's true but nobody is saying a transition isn't possible on a HDD they are saying that the faster storage is being used in games to provide that detail and transition. Matrix Awakens demo too.

I already said it in a post above, but I actually played the Matrix Demo on my PC on literally the stock PS4 HDD connected via USB, and aside from the long initial load time it ran perfectly fine (well as perfectly fine as that horribly optimised demo can run)