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How much difference does the improved SSD + io make in series S/X and PS5?

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
The Series S has 8gb for games and the XSX has 13.5gb, the PS5 likely has a similar amount to the XSX.

Now theres been more concern over the seriesS's smaller amount, but all the current gen systems do have small gen on gen RAM increases.

So how much will the ssd and better io alleviate this issue?

Will the SSD be able to be used like RAM as cerny and Microsoft have said?

Will these consoles have the equivalent of like 64gb ram + HDD? or better, or worse?

Because if the better io and ssd is as good as they say, games made exclusively for these consoles may be better then we anticipate?
 

Trimesh

Banned
I think a lot of developers will simply use them as faster mass storage and otherwise carry on just as before. I also suspect that in a lot of cases this will be "good enough" to reduce loading times to the point where they are no longer a significant annoyance, and allows the use of transition zones that are sufficiently short that most players won't even notice them.
 

Hoddi

Member
It's kinda hard to say but it definitely frees up a decent amount of memory. Games like Doom Eternal already rely fairly heavily on streaming and going from the largest texture pool to the smallest saves around 3GB of VRAM if I remember correctly. Being able to feed that pool from an SSD means that it can stay smaller because the SSD can repopulate it at a faster rate.

Textures are only a part of the equation though. The average last-gen game only spent 1-2GB on textures in a frame while the remainder could be twice that at 4k.
 

Darius87

Member
:messenger_grinning_smiling: 64GB of RAM not the case, but you can count easily for PS5 streaming at best case if it could stream 5GB/s after decompression it's 8-9GB/s then add 14GB of PS5 RAM and it's 22-23GB of data.
 

JimRyanGOAT

Member
I feel like most devs will just use the SSD's to decrease load times and increase amount of shit on the screen

I wonder if the SSD's can be used to improve animations in games

Imagine sports games like NBA 2k or EA UFC, where players cycle through so many animations with different scenarios in an instance

Can the SSD's be used to allow more animation variety all while keeping the transitions seamless? Cause right now you can tell when one animation is cancelled the transition to the next animation looks robotic and stiff

Can the SSD's take some load of the CPU and allow for 1000's of different animation scenarios be quickly loaded in?


Like look how stiff this game looks. Fucking laptop CPU's on last gen
 
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RoadHazard

Gold Member
Nobody has ever said the SSD can be used "as RAM", but with faster data streaming you don't have to preload data as far in advance. Instead of loading what you MIGHT need 1 minute from now, you can load only what you need in the next 5 seconds, which means you waste a lot less RAM and can use it much more efficiently for the stuff you actually want to display. So you effectively get more memory per moment of gameplay, making the on-paper small jump from 8 to 16GB larger than it first seems.
 
After cross gen Series S will limit devs so it won't get that much better :messenger_tears_of_joy:

curses-foiled-again.gif
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Big difference, I can definitely see a big difference going back to my pc with gen 3 m.2
 
It's no magic bullet. But with faster texture streaming you can have smaller set of textures resident in the memory and use that saved memory for higher resolution textures. SFS helps here as well.

Also, faster loading times are always beneficial, for players.

Disk I/O will get faster, fastest PCIE5 SSD's have 14 GB/s transfer speed, but so will volatile memory as well. DDR5 will have marked speed increase over DDR4, for example.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
SHITTON and that it's said very conservatively.

Source: I did quite a bit of background streaming on KC: D or "did" rathe refine, so it would run on PoS consoles (X1S, PS4S)

Just a shittiest SATA3 SSD, like....the whole code could have been half if for just a bottom tier SSD there.
 
One of the benefits SSD’s bring is they allow multiplier effect on the RAM pool size.

As others have pointed out, the SSD’s allow for only the next 1-2 seconds of gameplay to be loaded into RAM where as on PS4/XboxOne it was around the 1 minute of gameplay. So the RAM is being used extremely efficiently.

Of course developers have yet to fully optimise their asset streaming pipeline around the large bandwidth and low latency’s of the SSD’s, similar to what UE5 is doing.

Also regarding Series S, wasn’t it a matter of memory bandwidth speed rather than the actual pool size? Anyways I don’t want to open that can full of worms lol
 

Armorian

Banned
- Topic specifically about the SSD and I/O
- Manages to show deep, entirely genuine concern about the Series S... which has an SSD and hardware decompression
Animated GIF

Okay, okay. In terms of IO XSS is fine and combined with CPU bottom tier in this aspects is a big jump from previous gen. GPU will always scale even with 720p resolution etc. But memory... there is a whole topic of discussion about this and it does not look pretty for third party games this gen.

Here I was told ps5 will get better after cross gen? This doesn't apply to xss why?

PS devs will jump from jaguar to Z2, from ~2TF to ~10TF and from ~5GB of memory to ~13GB (?). Massive jump right there in every aspect. Not to mention shit tier HDD to v. fast SSD.

But for all third party devs this jump will be much smaller in GPU and RAM. As I said above I doubt GPU will be much of a issue if devs want to go low enough with resolution but XSS will give developers only ~25% more memory than consoles from 8 years ago (I don't know if OS footprint is 2 or 3GB so I will stay with 2.5)...
 
As a recent example, Death Stranding loads in 2-3 seconds on PS5 compared to over a minute on last gen. No longer have time to make a cuppa when waiting on open world games to load. Hopefully a sign of things to come
 
Okay, okay. In terms of IO XSS is fine and combined with CPU bottom tier in this aspects is a big jump from previous gen. GPU will always scale even with 720p resolution etc. But memory... there is a whole topic of discussion about this and it does not look pretty for third party games this gen.



PS devs will jump from jaguar to Z2, from ~2TF to ~10TF and from ~5GB of memory to ~13GB (?). Massive jump right there in every aspect. Not to mention shit tier HDD to v. fast SSD.

But for all third party devs this jump will be much smaller in GPU and RAM. As I said above I doubt GPU will be much of a issue if devs want to go low enough with resolution but XSS will give developers only ~25% more memory than consoles from 8 years ago (I don't know if OS footprint is 2 or 3GB so I will stay with 2.5)...
I just find we are always discussing optimizations for everything and New engines doing this that and other things, but none of it seems like it will help the XSS.
 
It’s such a significant upgrade. Load times have been reduced so much and assets stream in so much faster. SSD has been essential since they first came out though, for PC boot times drop to next to nothing. I would never go back to HDD, ever.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
It's been said in one of MS' presentations about XSX architecture that they went with an SSD because it was simply a much cheaper solution than adding more RAM, which only gets more and more expensive nowadays, so that they can rely on streaming data on the fly instead of loading everything into one huge RAM pool they can't afford. But then again, the cost of an SSD is still skyrocketing when going for anything above 1TB, while the games sizes only keep getting larger, hence why all the compression/decompression came into play as well. The same rules apply to PS5 design - same issues/cost constraints, similar solution.

So all in all, the solutions found in the new consoles are basically nothing but a workaround for the increasing memory prices, everything to keep the consoles cost-effective, when it would've been so much simpler and easier for the devs to just give them like 32GB RAM and 2TB of storage. The consoles will just run things differently under the hood, but the end, on-screen result will be exactly the same as if the consoles just had more memory, that's all.

Their solutions will however greatly benefit every other platform once fully adopted after the cross-gen era is over, given the constant RAM price increases that affects all electronic devices out there.
 

Tqaulity

Member
The answer is that the IO acceleration/SSDs will make a huge difference for developers in particularly. The end users will see a difference as well but it won't be as obvious as it is to the developers making the game (and not always visual). This is the true "next gen" aspect of these platforms and it will bring about a paradigm shift in how games are made (a la 3D, HD resolution etc).

Unfortunately, we are not seeing the results of that tech at all as of yet and won't be for probably another 1.5-2 years.. To fully leverage the SSDs and fast I/O, developers need to rewrite engines from scratch as they are a huge deviation from existing engines. This takes time of course but many developers have been delayed and slowed by the COVID shutdowns. This in effect has extended the "cross gen" phase well into 2022. But trust, there are a number of developers working on brand new "next gen" engines that will fully utilize IO acceleration, rapid asset streaming, ray tracing, enhancing physics and AI etc. Don't let any of the marketing fool you. EVERYTHING that is releasing through this year is still based on last gen engines (including the likes of Battlefield 2042 and Ratchet and Clank). That's just the now cliché "upscale the resolution, double the framerate, use the raw SSD speed for a free loading speed up, and/or add RT bit or 2 type of an upgrade" 🥱. Remember many of these games have been in development for 3+ years, well before there were PS5 or XBOX Series dev kits available.

But the real advances are coming. Sucks that the consoles will be over 2 years old by the time the first wave starts :pie_smirking:
 

winjer

Gold Member
The Series S doesn't need as much ram as the PS4 and Series X. But still, I think they should have given it 12GB for games, instead of just 8.
Because it uses a lower resolution, it spends less memory form frame buffers. Also, it doesn't have to load in higher quality MipMaps as soon as the other two consoles.
Sampler Feedback Streaming will save a ton of memory, but it will do the same on the Series X.
But one thing to consider is that, although these SSDs are fast, GDDR6 is much faster. Not only bandwidth, but especially latency.
An nVme SSD ha access times in mili seconds. But GDDR6 has in nano seconds.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
I don't think much of anything is using them as fully prescribed yet. Cross gen games just get faster loading, this first inning of current gen games do even better on the loading times and are starting to get better at hiding them completely, but DF said most games aren't even using the new IO block on the PS5 yet and offloading those CPU decoding and check in etc tasks because it's not much needed yet and most games are still built with last gen storage in mind, and nothing is using it as a slower RAM backend yet.

Once we start to saturate these consoles mid gen we may see leaning on the SSD get more common to work around the small for a generational increase in RAM. Like they envisioned, turning a corner and having a whole new working set of RAM loaded in just in that few seconds, that kind of thing.
 
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th4tguy

Member
I feel like most devs will just use the SSD's to decrease load times and increase amount of shit on the screen

I wonder if the SSD's can be used to improve animations in games

Imagine sports games like NBA 2k or EA UFC, where players cycle through so many animations with different scenarios in an instance

Can the SSD's be used to allow more animation variety all while keeping the transitions seamless? Cause right now you can tell when one animation is cancelled the transition to the next animation looks robotic and stiff

Can the SSD's take some load of the CPU and allow for 1000's of different animation scenarios be quickly loaded in?


Like look how stiff this game looks. Fucking laptop CPU's on last gen

Can SSD be used for varied animations? Yes. Animations take up memory and have to be loaded into ram to be used on screen. Fast IO means animations can be swapped in and out more frequently.
Will it stop stiff animations like what you showed in the video? Hello NO. That's poor blending between animations, most likely engine limitation. You can literally see small hitches when one animation ends and the next begins.
Fastest ram and IO wont fix that.
 

3liteDragon

Member
We haven’t seen the results of what these I/O advancements can do since most of these games are cross-gen. Once cross-gen is over, there’s definitely gonna be an improvement in visuals & possibly game design for games coming out on Series X|S, PS5 & PC.

It’s also gonna be interesting to see how much of a leap we’re gonna see with first-party PS5-only titles & compare it with third-party. Regardless, we’re gonna see significant leaps when it comes to the visual fidelity of these games because of how fast storage is being used here (and yes, a ridiculously fast SSD along with a robust I/O pipeline does improve graphics).
 
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RoadHazard

Gold Member
It's been said in one of MS' presentations about XSX architecture that they went with an SSD because it was simply a much cheaper solution than adding more RAM, which only gets more and more expensive nowadays, so that they can rely on streaming data on the fly instead of loading everything into one huge RAM pool they can't afford. But then again, the cost of an SSD is still skyrocketing when going for anything above 1TB, while the games sizes only keep getting larger, hence why all the compression/decompression came into play as well. The same rules apply to PS5 design - same issues/cost constraints, similar solution.

So all in all, the solutions found in the new consoles are basically nothing but a workaround for the increasing memory prices, everything to keep the consoles cost-effective, when it would've been so much simpler and easier for the devs to just give them like 32GB RAM and 2TB of storage. The consoles will just run things differently under the hood, but the end, on-screen result will be exactly the same as if the consoles just had more memory, that's all.

Their solutions will however greatly benefit every other platform once fully adopted after the cross-gen era is over, given the constant RAM price increases that affects all electronic devices out there.

Yeah, waiting while 32GB is filled up from an HDD sure sounds like fun. If you thought load times were bad last gen, oh man...

The SSD is essential. It's not a "workaround", it's by far the best way to do it. Just having more memory while still having slow storage would have been terrible. Of course, having both a fast SSD and 32GB of RAM would have been even nicer, but in terms of cost vs performance they did the only right thing.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
Yeah, waiting while 32GB is filled up from an HDD sure sounds like fun. If you thought load times were bad last gen, oh man...

The SSD is essential. It's not a "workaround", it's by far the best way to do it. Just having more memory while still having slow storage would have been terrible. Of course, having both a fast SSD and 32GB of RAM would have been even nicer, but in terms of cost vs performance they did the only right thing.

The fast loadings are an obvious added bonus, which again, an ordinary SATA SSD would do the job just fine.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
The fast loadings are an obvious added bonus, which again, an ordinary SATA SSD would do the job just fine.

Then we'd still have ~60 second load times (given a SATA III SSD and 32GB RAM), and I really never want to go back to that. Games loading in 2-3 seconds is amazing, it's the most next-gen-feeling thing about the new consoles. 10x the read speed (SATA SSD vs what the PS5 has) is much better for gaming than 2x the RAM.
 
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Rikkori

Member
You can NOT use the SSD as RAM, it's many times slower. What it actually helps with is in terms of CPU utilisation for asset streaming, but fundamentally it's still all about the VRAM. The way they will deal with the low V/RAM of the Series S is that they will simply have lower res textures & switch LODs more often, no different than how it's done with consoles right now & as an extreme example you can see how it's done for Switch ports particularly demanding games like Doom Eternal etc.

As has been said before: the real advantage of SSD this gen is for the actual game development part, much less so for the gaming experience itself (though there's obviously some large benefits there as well).
 
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LordOfChaos

Member
You can NOT use the SSD as RAM, it's many times slower. What it actually helps with is in terms of CPU utilisation for asset streaming, but fundamentally it's still all about the VRAM. The way they will deal with the low V/RAM of the Series S is that they will simply have lower res textures & switch LODs more often, no different than how it's done with consoles right now & as an extreme example you can see how it's done for Switch ports particularly demanding games like Doom Eternal etc.

As has been said before: the real advantage of SSD this gen is for the actual game development part, much less so for the gaming experience itself (though there's obviously some large benefits there as well).

RAM wouldn't need to exist if the SSD fully replaced the RAM, but that's not the idea here. With a fast SSD where all the loading and unloading is offloaded to dedicated hardware, the idea is you can pack less idle assets into RAM as you would when thinking of a hard drive, and only hold enough for the gameplay immediately around the player. Instead of packing the RAM with the next level as you walk through a portal or something you can reload the entire contents of the RAM in a 2-3 second transition, which means more RAM can be used for what you're actually seeing at any time.
 

KAL2006

Banned
It makes me want native ports of some PS4 games. Going through loading screens in Street Fighter V is exhausting.
 

JimRyanGOAT

Member
Can SSD be used for varied animations? Yes. Animations take up memory and have to be loaded into ram to be used on screen. Fast IO means animations can be swapped in and out more frequently.
Will it stop stiff animations like what you showed in the video? Hello NO. That's poor blending between animations, most likely engine limitation. You can literally see small hitches when one animation ends and the next begins.
Fastest ram and IO wont fix that.

SMH

Sports games are the definition of doing the bare minimum
 

Md Ray

Member
I feel like most devs will just use the SSD's to decrease load times and increase amount of shit on the screen

I wonder if the SSD's can be used to improve animations in games

Imagine sports games like NBA 2k or EA UFC, where players cycle through so many animations with different scenarios in an instance

Can the SSD's be used to allow more animation variety all while keeping the transitions seamless? Cause right now you can tell when one animation is cancelled the transition to the next animation looks robotic and stiff

Can the SSD's take some load of the CPU and allow for 1000's of different animation scenarios be quickly loaded in?


Like look how stiff this game looks. Fucking laptop CPU's on last gen

There's a technique called motion matching in animations that exactly solves the problem you're describing here. It was developed by Ubisoft and was first used in their For Honor game. And to my knowledge, the second game to use was The Last of Us Part II. Since then I don't know how many games have been implemented with it, Naughty Dog made brilliant use of this technique for TLOU2. The animations were quite "next-gen" on a last-gen console. With SSD, I'm sure they can iterate more and do even better anims.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
Then we'd still have ~60 second load times (given a SATA III SSD and 32GB RAM), and I really never want to go back to that. Games loading in 2-3 seconds is amazing, it's the most next-gen-feeling thing about the new consoles. 10x the read speed (SATA SSD vs what the PS5 has) is much better for gaming than 2x the RAM.

And yet there is literally zero difference between 500MBps SATA and 5000MBps NVME drives on PC, not even tenth of a second despite 10x the bandwidth. Because you don't have to fill all the available RAM to be able to start the game, just the main character, HUD/UI, and the nearest environment, the rest can be filled on the go, just look at what GoT is doing on PS4 as the very best example. Plus let's not forget that the data has to be processed by the CPU/GPU first before it hits the display.

Besides, who cares about literally just a mere couple of seconds here or there? Only console warriors that were stuck on HDD for the last decade while glorifying their plastic boxes, when in the meantime the rest of the world was already experiencing quick loadings whether on smartphones, tablets, laptops, PC etc. 10s vs 20s is nothing when going from 3-5min already, and like I said, a cheap SATA drive would do more than enough job for the vast majority of mentally sane people out there who are not interested in comparing loading times in DF videos. So that being said, no, having more RAM would be much better that cutting down just a few seconds because not every dev out there will be able to utilize streaming efficiently, some will even be terrible at it. There's a reason every single dev on the planet was so happy to hear the PS4/XB1 will be getting 8GB RAM instead of having to yet again relying so heavily on streaming like during PS360 era after all.

But it is what it is, the consoles are already shipped and we can only speculate "what if?", but bottom line is, here are slides from MS' presentation when they said that going for the SSD was motivated by saving on the RAM pool, because it's not me who made that up:

CYM5xpC.png


AGtyppU.png
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
And yet there is literally zero difference between 500MBps SATA and 5000MBps NVME drives on PC, not even tenth of a second despite 10x the bandwidth. Because you don't have to fill all the available RAM to be able to start the game, just the main character, HUD/UI, and the nearest environment, the rest can be filled on the go, just look at what GoT is doing on PS4 as the very best example. Plus let's not forget that the data has to be processed by the CPU/GPU first before it hits the display.

Besides, who cares about literally just a mere couple of seconds here or there? Only console warriors that were stuck on HDD for the last decade while glorifying their plastic boxes, when in the meantime the rest of the world was already experiencing quick loadings whether on smartphones, tablets, laptops, PC etc. 10s vs 20s is nothing when going from 3-5min already, and like I said, a cheap SATA drive would do more than enough job for the vast majority of mentally sane people out there who are not interested in comparing loading times in DF videos. So that being said, no, having more RAM would be much better that cutting down just a few seconds because not every dev out there will be able to utilize streaming efficiently, some will even be terrible at it. There's a reason every single dev on the planet was so happy to hear the PS4/XB1 will be getting 8GB RAM instead of having to yet again relying so heavily on streaming like during PS360 era after all.

But it is what it is, the consoles are already shipped and we can only speculate "what if?", but bottom line is, here are slides from MS' presentation when they said that going for the SSD was motivated by saving on the RAM pool, because it's not me who made that up:

CYM5xpC.png


AGtyppU.png

The reason there's no difference on PC is because there's no good storage API and I/O pipeline. That's what DirectStorage and RTX I/O are going to solve. On PS5 there would be a HUGE difference. Consoles are just far, far ahead of PC in this respect at the moment.

And yes, you're right that you don't have to load everything right away. You CAN'T. But you don't seem to understand that faster storage means what you do load right away (and what you then stream in moment to moment) can have much more detail because you don't have to waste memory on stuff you might need 1 minute from now (this is how all last-gen streaming engines work, to deal with the slow storage).
 
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ZywyPL

Banned
The reason there's no difference on PC is because there's no good storage API and I/O pipeline. That's what DirectStorage and RTX I/O are going to solve. On PS5 there would be a HUGE difference. Consoles are just far, far ahead of PC in this respect at the moment.

And it still won't translate to how the games look or perform, as seen with the consoles already that at the end of the day are limited by how much the CPU/GPU can process and output on your display. If anything, Mesh Shading, UE5's rendering or similar tech will have a much bigger impact than the use of SSD that is a workaround to expand the usable memory pool.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
And it still won't translate to how the games look or perform, as seen with the consoles already that at the end of the day are limited by how much the CPU/GPU can process and output on your display. If anything, Mesh Shading, UE5's rendering or similar tech will have a much bigger impact than the use of SSD that is a workaround to expand the usable memory pool.

Of course it will translate, once games start being made with the new consoles in mind.

Then, no, it doesn't mean infinite detail, but it will mean far more variety etc, and no more tricks to hide loading. Also smaller game sizes, because assets won't need to be repeated over and over again.

But again, you're incredibly wrong about SSD being a "workaround". It's essential. If anything, having lots of RAM is a workaround for main storage being too slow. We could do with a much smaller amount otherwise.
 
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