qthaumaturge
Banned
And never port in to PC?
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Ok, time to ask, SSDs and still we have pop in.
- Thread starter In Cold Blood
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Insane Metal
Member
I absolutely HATE pop-ins. It breaks the imersion 100% for me.
NightmareFarm
Member
By the time they do SSDs wont be too unattainable
Topher
Gold Member
I didn't say it was a game changer. I don't get this idea that it is must be either revolutionary or it is "nothing". I certainly would rather have the SSD we have than go back to elevator and subway rides. Or, on topic, removing pop-in. Like I said, if devs can do more than just loading then that is great. I'm not ready to write off the possibility anyway.
NightmareFarm
Member
Various sony devs and 3rd party shills all kept jerking their dicks off on how it's going to be the biggest gaming leap since 3D and revolutionise game design completely. So far all we've seen is fast loading times.
Topher
Gold Member
No shit. Marketing exists. I'm not talking about any of the hype Sony (and Microsoft as well) put behind selling their consoles. The flip side of overhyping the tech is calling it a "nothing burger" like you have and I don't think either extreme is accurate. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between.
Dee Dah Dave
Member
Because the SSD is still slow as shit compared to RAM and VRAM.
So if your bottleneck is closer to the metal then what can the storage do about it, that’s even slower!
So if your bottleneck is closer to the metal then what can the storage do about it, that’s even slower!
Hoddi
Member
We already have tech demos on PC showing off what can be done with SSDs. Intel released an SFS + DirectStorage demo where you can literally throw in terabytes of texture data if you want to. And it has zero effect on performance because your 4k display only has 8.3 million pixels onscreen.
People severely underestimate how much memory is wasted on texture data that they never end up seeing. You should ideally never need more than one texel per pixel which is just 24.3MB of textures at 4k. This obviously isn't realistic but SSDs can still mean the difference between needing 8GB of textures in memory instead of just a few hundred megabytes.
To paraphrase a MS Executive:
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!
There is no HW strong enough to offset lack of manhours and QA (and potential lazyness). Most of the bugs and performance issues you are experiencing, developers are well aware of. They just know that since its an entertainment product and nothing serious like a car or house, consumers will bend over and take it.
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!
There is no HW strong enough to offset lack of manhours and QA (and potential lazyness). Most of the bugs and performance issues you are experiencing, developers are well aware of. They just know that since its an entertainment product and nothing serious like a car or house, consumers will bend over and take it.
64bitmodels
Reverse groomer.
SLB1904
Banned
I'm not assuming nothing. Developers have confirmed time and time again. You guys just pretend to not listen
SLB1904
Banned
Lmfao. You guys are trippin
Even though 3D gaming has been the norm for 20 years or more, we still have a ton of hack devs that either still don’t understand how to optimize code or don’t get the time because they’re pushed by publishers to divert their attention to something else so it never gets done and it’s deemed “acceptable“.
RoboFu
One of the green rats
This topic has already been throughly dissected by multiple tech outlets.
It’s not a magic ssd .. it’s clearly more software and design driven.
I remember a few people were showing the Miles Morales exiting a building instantly with no loading back to the city as THE POWER OF THE SSD.
But the game does the exact same thing on a PS4 Pro(probably PS4 too, but I only played it on Pro).
Hoddi
Member
The cool thing about PS5 supporting regular NVMe drives is that they all track how much data has been read from the disk. So, we can simply check that by plugging it into a PC. It looks like this.
Those dimensional jumps in R&C read ~500MB from disk each time. This would take up to 10 seconds from an HDD and it would be dreadful.
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SLB1904
Banned
Yeah and so happen to never be done before. Sure Jim.
This topic has already been throughly dissected by multiple tech outlets.
It’s not a magic ssd .. it’s clearly more software and design driven.
I bet the loading times in prey was design choice.
I really don't get why some of you are against the benefits ssd bring to the table.
Is that because is Sony pushing it?
Keep fighting these good fight. Numbers don't lie.
Laptop1991
Member
It is the engine, not the SSD, im playing Fallout 3 at the moment, i've had ssd's for years, you still get pop in now and then, depends on the game engine used.
Irobot82
Member
Isn't that Ratchet and Clank? Don't they load in entire new worlds through portals in real time with non pop in?
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
An Nvme SSD isn't a steep PC requirement. My sub $500 walmart laptop came with one and that was over a year ago.
NightmareFarm
Member
They must have felt foolish when it was revealed that game was cross gen
NightmareFarm
Member
Explained earlier in the thread, the portals are disguised loading screens and so are some of the on rail set pieces in between them. They only load up very small areas as well not an entire planet level you have to use the spaceship to access different levels like in the previous games.
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kruis
Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
If the developers are creating a game that's supposed to run on any old PC or last-gen console, it's the low-specced device that's determining what the visuals on a high-specced PC or next-gen console are going to look like. If the average throughput of a HD is 60 MB per second, then the developers of an open world game will make damn sure that the player won't encounter a situation where the game world becomes so complex that the hd can't keep up. Developers use tracing tools that monitor the HD throughput. The complexity of any section in a game where the HD throughput exceeds 60 MB per second will be cut down until the section loads within those artificial limits.
That's why most games still look and play the same on a PC with a blazing fast SSD or on a PC with a crappy old HD. All you're going to get are faster loading times and less pop-up, nothing more - until developers start developing games that officiea
Irobot82
Member
Outside of the PS5 the only defense I can make is watch some of those Star Citizen SSD vs HDD videos. HDD has trouble loading in assets quick enough.
Topher
Gold Member
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
SSDs can load assets fast but they can't overcome inherent engine issues.
RDR2 has minimal and/or non-existent pop-in even on stock platter HDD's on PS4 era hardware, for example.
RDR2 has minimal and/or non-existent pop-in even on stock platter HDD's on PS4 era hardware, for example.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Thats because games are still being designed around HDDs. How many games actually require an SSD? Surely, you know this has more to do with cross gen being shoved down our throats then anything else.
Pop-in happens when the game pulls in the object from the HDD into VRAM. Most games nowadays are open world and use streaming to pull in data on the fly instead of storing everything in vram. With vram in consoles and PCs exceeding 10GBs, double that of last gen, it should not be an issue on next gen consoles and yet it is because devs still need to go in and change what gets streamed in and when. And no one is doing that for 10 different consoles. PCs have had this issue forever because devs simply dont bother creating versions specifically for PC. I think the only game that had a Draw Distance slider was GTA4. Even then you still have to manage LODs for every single building and texture and no one is doing that.
I dont remember much pop in in Demon souls and Ratchet. They both use VRAM and SSDs to stream in higher quality models. Matrix has very little pop-in, but that game is using a completely different next gen design paradigm. Last gen games being passed off as XSX and PS5 games are still handicapped by the same last gen engines and design. HFW looks absolutely amazing and better than Ratchet and Demon Souls and yet it has pop-in galore while flying even at low speeds.
Here is what the Avatar devs had to say about streaming in data.
You can have the most powerful GPU in the world and still be bottlenecked by the SSD, and at the same time, you will need a powerful GPU with an adequate amount of VRAM and bandwidth to ensure it looks good while you traverse through it. Both are needed.
Why do you think we have all these slow walking sequences and tunnels? Its because they are streaming in data in the background. Spiderman devs had to account for custom HDDs people could put in their PS4s so they were limited to 20 MBps. Now that we have 5,500 MBps, surely they can stream in that data faster, no? Of course they are limited by the GPU tflops and vram bandwidth so simply increasing speeds by 200x isnt going to magically improve graphics by 200x. They still need a GPU that can render those large distant LODs that are now sitting in the VRAM. 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.
EDIT:
I see a bunch of posters mocking Cerny. Yeah... the guy brought receipts. Not his fault the current gen of developers are complacent millennials more focused on telling stories than pushing the medium.
Cant do this on PS4. They showed a clip of how the engine literally stops to load for 3 seconds every 2 seconds. Obviously the vram is maxed out here but they are able to stream in data really fast.
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Low Moral Fibre
Member
Ratchet and Clank has pop-in on the more open world levels and they look like they have come from a different game as the fidelity and world detail is really poor compared to the smaller denser levels. They have to cut the detail as the GPU needs to render it.
Compare these two. One is a small linear(ish) level and the other open(ish) world.
The rifts are just disguised loading screens and have zero impact on gameplay. I don't know what new gameplay mechanics I was expecting from the SSD but Ratchet and Clank ain't it.
Nanite might help once we start seeing more UE5 games but we'll be pretty far into the gen before any big hitters land.
Compare these two. One is a small linear(ish) level and the other open(ish) world.
The rifts are just disguised loading screens and have zero impact on gameplay. I don't know what new gameplay mechanics I was expecting from the SSD but Ratchet and Clank ain't it.
Nanite might help once we start seeing more UE5 games but we'll be pretty far into the gen before any big hitters land.
wvnative
Member
spons
Gold Member
The hardware is fine, but in a sense they've sold it almost as if directly compared to the previous generation.
You can't ignore software becoming more complex, so yeah obviously previous-gen games would run great on current gen hardware.
But next-gen games are much more demanding, so ultimately you don't gain shit.
You can't ignore software becoming more complex, so yeah obviously previous-gen games would run great on current gen hardware.
But next-gen games are much more demanding, so ultimately you don't gain shit.
DarkestHour
Banned
It's not so much SSD, but NVMe that is the gamechanger. The PS4 used SATA II and PS4 Pro used SATA III which severely hampered throughput. Using an SSD on both platforms helped, but only until you hit the throughput cap. At most we're just going to get dramatically reduced loading times as we've seen already and have been seeing on PC for a long time.
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Topher
Gold Member
What about the IO subsystem and the hardware compression though? Microsoft has been pushing DirectStorage. Nvidia has RTX IO. AMD SmartAccess. This is new tech for PC.
EverydayBeast
thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
You cannnot say storage is an issue for next gen consoles I think they pushed traditional hard drives out of the way.
ReBurn
Gold Member
A lot of people seem to believe that we're at a point where hardware capacity can overcome software design and implementation issues with sheer horsepower, but we never have been, we aren't now, and we probably never will be.
RoadHazard
Gold Member
Except a PS4 with a 5400rpm HDD couldn't load the next section in just a few seconds. The sections might be small, but they are rather high detail and each uses completely different assets from the last.
That doesn't mean those rift jumps couldn't be done on PS4 period, but they would have to be a lot less detailed or you'd be floating in the "rift void" for 20 seconds instead of 2 seconds between each one.
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
I'll give these devs, a lot of which work very hard, a break. Granted, we have direct storage and things here that need to be taken advantage of (especially on PC).
We've had killer HW years before the current gen consoles to not be able to see more benefits than just brute force better graphics.
We've had killer HW years before the current gen consoles to not be able to see more benefits than just brute force better graphics.
PaintTinJr
Member
The cause of pop-in in most cases isn't an item appearing from nowhere, that wasn't being rendered, as (exponent) depth cueing fog to the horizon is typically used to blend visibility when an item first appears.
The pop-in is typically caused by the LoD transitions, where a lower order LoD - with far less polygons - is replaced by a higher order representation - with more polygons. But what the gamer sees in that transition is the volumetric size change because the low order representation using less polygons can't bound the volume of the highest quality representation as tightly as the next detailed LoD - that replaces it all the way until it is using the highest LoD with the correct model volume. So, this problem is typically a game engine rendering issue.
Compare with how nanite works where the transitions of LoD look seamless with polygons smaller than pixels - when using mega-scanned assets, as they did in the original showing of UE5 with the PS5, when the LoD transitions were under great stress with scene traversal being fast and far, and the view going all the way to the horizon - as the demo finished.
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ChorizoPicozo
Member
Technology is not magic. This is why I chuckle at people using tech buzzwords as the secret source.
NightmareFarm
Member
Seconds are irrelevant, the point is it's still a disguised loading screen. We already know the SSD is responsible for much faster loading times.
And what it's able to load in 5 seconds or so isn't all that impressive. Like it can load a small pirate boat(as in the boat appears completely flat on the floor with no sails) and then in another portal sequence it loads an empty tiny arena the size of a few houses which is walled off from the rest of the planet that you need to travel to with the spaceship to actually explore.
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RoadHazard
Gold Member
Yeah, I'm not saying it does anything "magical", just things that would involve a lot more waiting if the loading had to be done from an HDD. The SSD makes it a fast, snappy experience. If there was a 30 second break between each of the environment such a sequence would be a lot less enjoyable and impactful, and would probably not have been attempted because of that. So no, it's not impossible with an HDD, but impractical.
NightmareFarm
Member
I guess so but the only things it seems to be loading in 5 seconds are walled off pocket areas the size of a couple houses. Not actual levels or planets.
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The_Mike
I cry about SonyGaf from my chair in Redmond, WA
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.
RoadHazard
Gold Member
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.