Ugh, this thing again... Look its impressive, of course it is. But its also not exactly what you think it is. First of all, both machines will be offering increased loading speeds on backwards compatible titles. The current mid gen refresh consoles already do this, however, the memory jump wasn't good enough, coupled with the same-ish CPU lock, and the fact they still used the same storage medium. But in all honesty, there is a very specific reason they keep using spider man to hit this point home. If you had spider man on a PC with an SSD and some decent memory, then the same thing would likely happen. To understand it, you have to understand how some engines load assets into memory. Spider man is one of the titles that will call an asset into memory and load its lowest LOD first, then load everything else. Once all essential assets are loaded, the game will load, and THEN the world will be populated by higher density media and higher quality LODs. In other words, its a game where you can load up a save, and see things pop in, textures increase in resolution etc, once the games loaded. A totally valid form of media memory usage, btw. But its also very quick. If you were to load a COD game, for example, it would take longer.
Now, this next point is the kicker.. Spider man has very low quality compressed assets. This means that not only is the memory footprint very small for an asset its calling into memory, but also that it needs CPU time to decompress the asset. This means that an increase in CPU power will see this happen very quickly, and even more so when you use lower resolution assets. Spider man is a very nice looking game, but not up close. Its asset recycling is very heavy, as is most open world games of its type. Again, not a fault on the game or engine at all, that's just how its built. But its not a very intensive game memory wise, not even current gen wise. Now, do you REALLY think Spider man is going to be up there with a common next gen title? We will be looking at 4096x4096 being the norm for a texture res, with player models far exceeding the polycounts we have now, and animations being far more in number (which again adds up when you have a higher density model). Its all exponential, and will always increase with each new real generation of systems. You will be looking at, at the very least, a 3x to 4x increase in memory usage for a decent next gen title.
In other words, yes, the early games for the next gen systems will be very quick on loading ,even more so with the SSD install type ideas floating around and higher bandwidth memory. But as the games increase in fidelity, you will see the normal long loading times. The only way you wont see them, is with masked loading, i.e. an initial load, and then all loading is done in the background in some form.
Now, this is in no way a slag off towards Sony. Microsoft and indeed PC users will see these same benefits and ideas.
But what I AM saying is: As always, keep your expectations in check. Sony are being very cleaver here in the way they have shown this feature off and its got people talking. But just... Keep your expectations in check.
