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[splattered]

Faster loading yes, zero loading no... esp as games get larger and more complex.

 

[Blond]

Ps3 outperformed by 360? When?

In multiplats until the final 2-3 years of the console? Exclusives blew the 360 away though.

 

[YORHA SINNER]

If there are be less load times, great! Otherwise, what'st the fuss? So many other improvement in games I'd rather have than less load times. This is only a talking point because we haven't gotten to play the games. So we cling on to the thin dribble of information to discuss. Once we play the games, this will be the last thing on our minds.

Think about it this way: N64 had no load times. PS2 had plenty. But who in their right mind, looking back, would dwell on worsened load times over all other improvements the generational leap brought? But that was a different time. Thanks to diminishing returns, the visual leap is so underwhelming thus far, people (and Sony itself) has chose to focus on "improved load times" as something worth drooling over.

I think this is more than load times though as previously with slow ass HDDs the devs vision for the world design were interrupted by the fact that those HDDs are slow af. Well, maybe limitations are the birthplace of innovation and all that. But I guess we'll just wait and see

 

[RoadHazard]

A game that's fully utilizing the memory will take 2-3 seconds to load. Then depending on the game there might be some processing needed (think the "loading screens" when jumping between solar systems in No Man's Sky - that's mainly the game generating the new planets, not loading data), and the SSD won't help with that.

Not sure what was going on in that demo exactly, but no, loading screens won't be completely gone, but they will be fast enough that they will be more like a transition than an actual screen.

 

[Hawking Radiation]

It was never going to be instant.

Even old carts took a few seconds to load data.

This.

What i think Sony and MS are trying to market here is the fact that loading will be drastically reduced compared to current gen which is fine by me.

I don't mind sitting through a 6-8 second load screen. It's way better than waiting a minute and a half for a level to load.

Division 2 on my PS4 Pro is a good example of the crap load times we have now. With my normal stock HDD it took between 1 minute - 2 minutes to load the game at the start. Fast travelling took me 35 seconds from one point of map to another.

Now with Samsung SSD installed, fast travel is like 7 seconds to anywhere on the map and initial loading of the game from start is like 28 seconds. That is more than enough for me and I'm assuming everyone here will be happy with something similar (or faster) as well.

 

[Vaelka]

I think that as with FPS, there's pretty huge diminishing returns.
There's a huge difference for example between 30 and 60fps, less between 60 and 144 but still very noticeable but after that it becomes way less. The difference between 144 and 244 is much less than 60 and 144 or 30 and 60.
It's the same with load times, there's not much of a noticeable difference between 2 sec and 5 sec, but 30 sec? Yeah you'll feel it a lot.

Removing them altogether seems like a very niche thing to me that would only really truly benefit VERY specific types of games. And even so those games tend to have cinematic moments either way where they can hide the load times anyways.

 

[RoadHazard]

It was never going to be instant.

Even old carts took a few seconds to load data.

Actually they didn't. Old carts were basically RAM containing the game code that plugged directly into the console. The console had direct access to all data, nothing really needed to be loaded into the console's memory.

(I know there are some exceptions where there actually are loading screens, not entirely sure what's going on there.)

 

[TheGreatWhiteShark]

 

[Tulipanzo]

But that doesn't make sense at all, they could just do 1.5 second transitions. Claiming it's a 6-8 sec. Transition because the dev thought that would show the transition better is complete nonesense. No player would be like "Oh look all those flashy effects mean he is really transitioning". If they could do loadtimes much less than that, they could just make a door that opens in 1.5 second [a door would make the world feel smaller, and also require major level design changes so that it doesn't feel like the levels are overlapping (think Dark Souls 2) or that they should be visible one from the other] and be done with it. Nothing changed, the flashy effects etc. are not there to show a transition, they are there to mask loading times.

Also, the rc example really doesn't hold,because it felt like a techdemo [ok, we ignore the thing that makes you wrong because it looks too good, gotcha]. I am pretty sure that the whole sliding on rails, will be like one or two scripted sequences. And most of this dimensional rift thing will be how we saw in the gameplay, the same as in bioshock infinite.

It shows how transitions are not a good metric for hidden loading, because they need to serve more than just one purpose.
If Astro had a "cut-to-black" load-screen, then obviously that's how long it needs to load, as devs would generally make it as short as possible.

Transitions however may need to be lengthened, as Cerny already pointed out. Within the fictional world of Astro's Playroom, you're travelling through a PS5, and a 2sec transition would communicate that idea rather poorly.
Still, you'd have a point with a long transition (as GoW's crawling), but considering the transition is not at lengthy, it's far from unreasonable.

 

[Tulipanzo]

Let's try to unpack a few things here.

Ignoring the trolling from @CptPusheen , if a stage transition really *DOES* takes 7 seconds, it immediately invalidates EVERYTHING Cerny said about the PS5 having such fast data loading capabilities that the PS5 could load and disload assets while the player was rotating the camera. The whole point is to remove loading screens and to make entire stages load in 1-3 seconds. Which Ratchet and Clank prove it *does* happen.

Now, we have two 'laoding screen' lookalikes so far on the PS5. The UE5 demo (where the heroine moves through a tight crack in the cave) and the astrobot stage transition.

We already had Epic confirm that the moving through the crack was not a loading screen, but it was made in order for the viewers to appreciate the texture detail and the effects.

So it is quite possible to guess that the stage transition was purposefully long in order for the player to experience specific vibrations in the controller in relation to what was happening on screen.

I wouldn't lose sleep over it, personally.

We literally had quotes from Cerny commenting on how devs may need to lengthen transitions, and has you brought up, they make for poor parallels to actual loading.

At 6-7s, they're exactly long enough, from a brain perception POV, for the player to notice stuff ("I'm travelling a lot" in Astro, or "wow, wall pretty" in UE5) without getting boring. Obviously games with more frequent transitions would move to make them shorter/more diverse.

I also feel that discussing one transition (not even an actual load screen), when we've seen ones as short as 1.5s already is kind of a waste of everyone's time.

 

[vkbest]

Ghost of thushima have 3-8 second load times on my PS4 Pro with SSD. Feels fantastic. I wonder what magic SP did.

 

[cormack12]

What's interesting is that sort of ties in with the R&C demo that I pointed out a while back. Not saying I'm right, just curious that the same times in the negative loads is around the same as the astrobot clip.


The Ratchet and Clank demo wasn't impressive because it loads a level in a couple of seconds. It's impressive because of the reduction in time between those sections. It's the 'negative' time you need to focus on to realise the benefits. The first rift jump could be done now by caching all that secondary level, but then it would have to refill it's cache again to load the next rift, which you're talking probably 3 minutes+. The demo showed it was ready to do subsequent rift jumps after 7 seconds each time, at:

1:05
1:12
1:19

It's the 7 seconds over literal minutes that should be the talking point. It's the fact you don't need to see another loading screen in between those jumps, in can be streamed in during gameplay which is what makes the difference. In those 7 seconds, an entirely new level is loaded, ready to go while still in the old environment. Then the discussion can move onto how beneficial is this in most cases? I guess the quickest example is when you load into a game like Horizon then choose to Fast Travel and have to see another loading screen right away and wait until the hard disk uploads those assets into memory. These can be zipped down to the initial load time - for example, it takes 5 seconds on an NVMe to load into the Witcher 3, then another 5 seconds if you Fast Travel right away. Different games behave differently though and take longer.

 

[Valonquar]

Well when I fast travel in Ghost of Tsushima on PS4Pro w/hybrid drive, the game loads faster than I can read most of the tooltip screens.

 

[Allandor]

What's interesting is that sort of ties in with the R&C demo that I pointed out a while back. Not saying I'm right, just curious that the same times in the negative loads is around the same as the astrobot clip.


The Ratchet and Clank demo wasn't impressive because it loads a level in a couple of seconds. It's impressive because of the reduction in time between those sections. It's the 'negative' time you need to focus on to realise the benefits. The first rift jump could be done now by caching all that secondary level, but then it would have to refill it's cache again to load the next rift, which you're talking probably 3 minutes+. The demo showed it was ready to do subsequent rift jumps after 7 seconds each time, at:

1:05
1:12
1:19

It's the 7 seconds over literal minutes that should be the talking point. It's the fact you don't need to see another loading screen in between those jumps, in can be streamed in during gameplay which is what makes the difference. In those 7 seconds, an entirely new level is loaded, ready to go while still in the old environment. Then the discussion can move onto how beneficial is this in most cases? I guess the quickest example is when you load into a game like Horizon then choose to Fast Travel and have to see another loading screen right away and wait until the hard disk uploads those assets into memory. These can be zipped down to the initial load time - for example, it takes 5 seconds on an NVMe to load into the Witcher 3, then another 5 seconds if you Fast Travel right away. Different games behave differently though and take longer.

Well, 7 seconds would mean that around 35GB of Data (uncompressed) could have been loaded. That is a bit to much for the "tiny" memory update of the next gen consoles.
But I get the traversal time of ratched because this animation is just cool ^^
But the traversal time of astro bots seems to be much to slow for an uninteresting "loading" screen. A 2 Second screen would be much cooler with an animation like this. After all, we don't see much high res stuff there, so it really shouldn't take so long. But maybe he wasn't playing on a PS5 but just on the computer with a standard SSD, because he should just test the controller and not accidentally leak something about the PS5 OS or something like that.

 

[BootsLoader]

Only in like 99% of the games.

As far as I remember that happened only in multi platform games. The exclusives blew the 360 far away. 360 can’t handle ps3 exclusives even in its wildest dreams.

 

[BootsLoader]

On multiplats. A lot of games ran horribly on PS3 and developing for it was a nightmare.

Ok I can agree for the multi platforms. That happened because developers could not manipulate all the processors and couldn’t afford the money and time to figure out the way ps3 handled games. If you take a look at exclusive games, it was by far the best looking games in console gaming. 360 would never handle God of war 3 or The last of us.

 

[Blond]

What I'm more curious about how would remasters work with the SSD, a Yakuza game like 0 would pretty much be 100% seamless from start to finish especially since those games are more about hub worlds than anything else. No loading in a game like that would make the city feel really alive.

God of War 18, as a I mentioned, would have to redo their entire fast travel structure and reshoot scenes since they would have a need for the Dwarf hub anymore you just open a portal and jump through.

I do not at all believe it's going to make it "punch above it's weight" but I would love to see all the possibilities of loading assets ridiculously fast with their I/O operation can do in terms of design. Maybe we can get a new Darkstalkers finally since they said it's the biggest reason for not returning?

 

[reptilex]

After watching Geoffs reveal of the controller today and seeing the demo of Astrobots Playground, is the dream of no load screens dead before it happened?

Its obvious and takes 6-8 seconds before the game launches (in the best case scenario.)

If they can’t get it right on prerecorded and scripted demos, what chance does real world games have?

Do you actually believe loading screens will be gone, or are they always going to be a problem we have to deal with?

This is the most striking thing from the presentation when the level was loading, I was like "wait, what happened to "no loading screen"".

Then when he said Astrobot is a showcase demo I was like "really, a showcase demo is not going to showcase one of the few hardware incentives Sony showed off about"?

 

[diffusionx]

Ok I can agree for the multi platforms. That happened because developers could not manipulate all the processors and couldn’t afford the money and time to figure out the way ps3 handled games. If you take a look at exclusive games, it was by far the best looking games in console gaming. 360 would never handle God of war 3 or The last of us.

I don’t know. Part of the problem is that MS kind of gave up making top tier AAA games late in the gen. But for my money Halo 4 looks as good as either of those, the original Forza Horizon looked amazing, Gears 3, etc.

 

[LordOfChaos]

Wasn't the pitch no "elevator scenes" or compromised level design meant to mask loading? A 6 second load to start a game and then never seeing a stall again is still huge progress, I can live with 6 seconds...