ManaByte
Gold Member
“For a system to take the full advantage of the next gen CPU/GPUs, the amount of data needed to be streamed in and out of memory is pretty big,” Peklar explained. “That’s the main reason why both console manufactures went with the SSDs and a specialized I/O approach. This approach was pretty much a necessity. You could, for example, get similar results with average SSD speeds and more memory. You would have to preload more game data into memory, but on the other hand your SSD wouldn’t need to fetch that much data every second. When next-gen engines start to incorporate these kinds of workflows, some new possibilities will open up in theory. Like having an open world game with high fidelity assets found in smaller scale games, or as they said in the Unreal 5 tech demo, movie quality assets.”
“There are two reason why this is not possible on current gen. One is hardware,” he said. “Mechanical drives simply can’t keep up with the amount of data- there’s not enough memory, current CPU/GPU would struggle to compute it all adequately etc. Second is the amount of work/time needed for developers to create all these very high quality assets, for any game size, let alone for a large open world game. I feel that this second problem will stand as a decent obstacle, even with Unreal 5 automatically helping with optimization. And if developers foolishly decide to go for even bigger size maps, and they will, because bigger is always better in their minds, then these open world games will look beautiful at first glance but end up even more copy-pasted and padded with samey content than they are now. And it’s already a sad affair in that regard.”
“I’m positive that down the road, developers will find a way to create experiences that would be impossible to realize on current gen, but that journey starts with interesting concepts that will be organically realized by having these technologies available,” he said. “You shouldn’t design solely from the perspective of technology, as you could end up having peculiar things like a game with all reflective surfaces just so you could show off ray tracing.”
Peklar suggested in conclusion that as far as the difference between the SSDs that both next-gen consoles employe is concerned, it’s effectively not going to seem as big as it seems on paper right now. “As for differences between the two solutions I feel that it will end up a matter of diminishing returns,” he said.