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[mneuro]

Lmfao sure Sony. Nobody minds a few seconds of loading times. This is Sony's blast processing

 

[bitbydeath]

Re-reading the wired interview and there definitely are some PR smokescreens going on in relation to the claims made by Cerny regarding loading speeds. He compares the next gen dev kits running Spiderman verses a PS4. Of course it will load faster. The rumored dev kit sports 7xs higher specs. Pair a SSD with 7x more powerful GPU, a CPU that makes Jaguar look like a word processor, and a new memory structure with tons more bandwidth, and you'll get ridiculous performance on a game designed to run on the ps4. I dont doubt Sony has put their own spin on a SSD, but it's being overblown with PR rhetoric.

Shaving 14.2 seconds off a 15 second load is far from anything we’ve seen before.

 

[Agent_4Seven]

PCs today don't use SSDs on PCI 4.0 bus though.

The speed of high-end PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs is way more than enough for anything on PC, but for games it is overkill, regular SATA 3.0 SSD will be more than enough.

Are you trying to be ignorant on purpose? Just read any one of the many articles on this here on GAF. I posted an article on the tech that Sony maybe using on the last page. Update your knowledge.

There's nothing to update, really. SSDs are nothing new these days and again, everyone can replace regual HDD in PS4 / XONE and add SSD to reduce load times. So why are they tellling us that it is a game changer and that it's something revolutionary when it actually isn't anymore? Most of the people already have access to this technology and its cheap now too, well, if you're not counthing high-end stuff.

 

[LuvOfThaGame]

Shaving 14.2 seconds off a 15 second load is far from anything we’ve seen before.

I'd be willing to wager that if you was to upgrade a PS4 with this 'new' 'Ultra-speed' SSD, it wouldn't yield anywhere near those results. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I loathe loading times this gen. I got an external SSD for Scorpio, but still can be annoying. I would love to see a world where Apex loads a match in less than half the time it does now. Oh, to have those hours of my life back. Lol.

 

[mckmas8808]

The speed of high-end PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs is way more than enough for anything on PC, but for games it is overkill, regular SATA 3.0 SSD will be more than enough.


There's nothing to update, really. SSDs are nothing new these days and again, everyone can replace regual HDD in PS4 / XONE and add SSD to reduce load times. So why are they tellling us that it is a game changer and that it's something revolutionary when it actually isn't anymore? Most of the people already have access to this technology and its cheap now too, well, if you're not counthing high-end stuff.

But what they are talking about is new technology that's NOT in PCs today. Check this out.

PCI 4.0 is new.

PCIe 4.0 is the fourth generation of the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) motherboard interface and will double the bandwidth available to graphics cards, hard drives, SSDs, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet cards. Courtesy of AMD, new CPUs and motherboards that support the faster speeds will come to market this year, paving the way for a new wave of speedy PCIe 4.0 devices.

PCIe 4.0 Is Coming to Market in 2019
The PCIe 4.0 generation follows PCIe 3.0, which was released in 2010. The PCI-SIG group that develops the PCIe standard completed the PCIe 4.0 specification in 2017 (seven years after it finished the previous generation).
Also in January, Phison demoed the world’s first PCIe 4.0 SSD that supports sequential read speeds of 4GB/s and 4.2GB/s sequential write speeds. The company used Micron’s 96-layer TLC flash, but it intended to switch to Toshiba’s BICS 4 flash technology, which will increase the sequential read performance of its SSD to 4.8 GB/s and sequential write performance to 4.4 GB/s.

For now, the only PCIe 4.0 GPUs come in the form of AMD's 7nm Radeon Instinct MI60 for the data center. AMD released the Radeon VII for gamers based on the same 7nm design, but the company disabled support for PCIe 4.0, saying that desktop GPUs don't need the throughput of PCIe 4.0. At least not yet. That means SSDs will be the first PCIe 4.0 devices to come to market for desktop PCs.

What We Know About PCIe 4.0 So Far

AMD's support for PCIe 4.0 in its CPUs and chipsets will usher in a new wave of high-performance devices, with SSDs leading the way.

www.tomshardware.com

Take a look at that. And read the bolded carefully. This is brand new tech that the world has never seen, so you can't compare it to today's PCs.

 

[bitbydeath]

I'd be willing to wager that if you was to upgrade a PS4 with this 'new' 'Ultra-speed' SSD, it wouldn't yield anywhere near those results. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I loathe loading times this gen. I got an external SSD for Scorpio, but still can be annoying. I would love to see a world where Apex loads a match in less than half the time it does now. Oh, to have those hours of my life back. Lol.

Same, it takes like a good two minutes to load up Days Gone. So hopefully that’ll be a thing of the past next-gen.

 

[Dr.brain64]

Since streaming consoles will have short loading times (i think?) therefore sony has to do something (!??)

 

[FranXico]

Same, it takes like a good two minutes to load up Days Gone. So hopefully that’ll be a thing of the past next-gen.

It will likely get much better, but I seriously doubt that their solution consists only of the SSD. I'm guessing there is also other dedicated hardware involved to speed up some tasks (such as decompression, for example).

 

[recklesscognition]

Would they develop a game with loading screens for other platforms then? Or would they put the loading screens in and then just let the hardware determine how long they're up there?

 

[A.Romero]

I belive it. I mean, why not? It's totally possible.

Loading times exist in PC (in some games they are barely there) but the games are not made to run on NVME. This technology is fairly new to the consumer market.

You can save this post and throw it at my face if it turns out I'm mistaken but I doubt it.

(I have some sense of what's possible because I'm an IT professional and mid/high end PC gamer).

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

Yeah ok Sony. But will this console have anime tiddies and games that aren't a cinematic experience third person shooter?

 

[Gavin Stevens]

The Spider-Man loading thing was bullshit though. First of all, the game is designed to be loaded based on lowest lod and near range assets first while drawing in everything else second. That means the game can load once and “be done”, while still calling assets in for later.

But people keep going on about the fast load... while ignoring the fact that the game will load a transition screen (in that example the subway scene) and then load the main game. Once you factor in that, the load becomes less impressive, because the game already uses a masked load.

It’s essentially the same as any modern day single player title, in that it will do an initial load, then through smart tricks and sight of hand will load in the rest of the game without you seeing another loading screen. An example of this is a credits movie (multi thread loading of assets in background for initial load), then I ahem cutscene (gameplay assets loading), then gameplay. Then while in gameplay, possibly you will see an ingame cutscene, while older assets are culled from memory and new ones are loaded. In short, no load screen.

So yeah, play a first party title and likely you won’t see a load screen. But if you think you won’t see them for the next gen call of duty, then you clearly don’t understand the basics of how asset loading into memory works and have drank the Sony coolaid. Neither console will offer this.

 

[Valonquar]

But with no load times how will games like Destiny & Anthem pad out the amount of gameplay time?

 

[bitbydeath]

It will likely get much better, but I seriously doubt that their solution consists only of the SSD. I'm guessing there is also other dedicated hardware involved to speed up some tasks (such as decompression, for example).

PlayGo 2.0

 

[wordslaughter]

@mcmass8808 is very likely correct.

From the Wired Cerny article...

"Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs"

This is VERY LIKELY a reference to moving from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0.

If you're not following PC tech, what's happening right now is that Zen 2 (and associated motherboards) are the first chipsets to move from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0...... and the PS5 CPU will be Zen 2, so this makes perfect sense. Any PCIe 4.0 system will have far more RAW BANDWIDTH than any current PC (and it's SSD).

But also to be fair, Cerny goes on to say....

"That’s not all. “The raw read speed is important,“ Cerny says, “but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. "

So there likely is some kind of secret sauce. Or that secret sauce may not have much to do with Sony and simply be a part of any NVMe drive that was designed for PCIe 4.0.... which will be releasing shortly. Expect to start seeing them as soon as Computex at the end of this month.

It's possible that what Cerny is talking about has less to do with the PS5 specifically and is really just what will be common for near future PCIe 4.0 based NVMe SSDs.

 

[BlackTron]

I put my broken laptop's SSD in my PS3 an eternity ago, and it caused a huge difference in performance. You know the checkdisk thing it does if it loses power? It went by so quickly it was no longer a hassle.

Let it sink in that I did this with a PS3, with a leftover laptop part (purchased at Staples).

Going from HDD to SSD as standard is great and all, but I can't understand the level of hype and excitement. Yeah, I'm sure it'll work better than what I did with my PS3, but that already felt "good enough". Like going from 4k to 8k, yeah it's better but my needs were met awhile ago so is it really THAT big a deal?

 

[its_justJEFF]

@mcmass8808 is very likely correct.

From the Wired Cerny article...

"Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs"

This is VERY LIKELY a reference to moving from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0.

If you're not following PC tech, what's happening right now is that Zen 2 (and associated motherboards) are the first chipsets to move from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0...... and the PS5 CPU will be Zen 2, so this makes perfect sense. Any PCIe 4.0 system will have far more RAW BANDWIDTH than any current PC (and it's SSD).

But also to be fair, Cerny goes on to say....

"That’s not all. “The raw read speed is important,“ Cerny says, “but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. "

So there likely is some kind of secret sauce. Or that secret sauce may not have much to do with Sony and simply be a part of any NVMe drive that was designed for PCIe 4.0.... which will be releasing shortly. Expect to start seeing them as soon as Computex at the end of this month.

It's possible that what Cerny is talking about has less to do with the PS5 specifically and is really just what will be common for near future PCIe 4.0 based NVMe SSDs.

I think most ppl are just thinking its just an SSD. Like today, when you replaced your HDD and SDD, you get a few seconds shaved off. Like I referenced before, none of these games are developed with SSDs in mind, cause they can't rely on it being there. I imagine replacing your HDD with an SSD is like replacing your current GPU with a new one... it's just brute forcing that code/data.

What happens you have developers that code specifically for a hardware, even though it's under powered when compared to PCs? You get consoles. You get games that run 4K60 on the X. You get games that look like God of War running on hardware will less than 1/2 of the TFlops, and much slower CPU's, of high-end PC rigs. I think we might be surprised as to how PS/Xbox will be using these SSDs and what kind of results they'll get.

 

[SoulChamber]

SSD is a massive upgrade for consoles.. not only in the hardware itself, but SSD is finally the baseline.. after a bloody decade of them being available.

That's because SSD's are expensive. And they still are today.

 

[Dr.brain64]

I want to hear Cerny's beautiful voice explaining this tech to me like i'm 5

 

[Agent_4Seven]

But what they are talking about is new technology that's NOT in PCs today. Check this out.

PCI 4.0 is new.

Look, man, everyone whos working with PC hardware, interested in buildong and own gaming PCs knew everything about PCI 4.0 and 5.0 long before Sony even started thinking about PS5. PCI 4.0 and 5.0 is nothing new when it comes to PC and from news stand point. We expectiong PCI 4.0 to arrive for 5 years or so (if not more) at this point and as you can see in the grap up there it's x2 improvement over PCI 3.0, but the thing is and when it comes to SSDs, there's absolutely no need for NVMe type of SSDs with 3000K+ read and write rates cuz standard SATA 3.0 SSDs is more that enough for games and you won't notice the difference in gaming. If they're talking about PCI 4.0 then they for sure mean NVMe type of SSD cuz standard SSDs use SATA 3.0 connection or M.2 SATA 3.0.

Now, on the plus side of what they're saying is that more and more developres will adapt this technology to make their games work faster when it comes to loading stuff, and it is very good news cuz not all that much games using full potential of even standard SATA 3.0 SSDs on PC and as we look into the future while also reading about reduction in production and supply of HDDs, in about 10 or so years everyone will be using SSD in their PCs and HDDs will be no more. So yeah, overall it's a good thing that console makers starting to adopt this PC technology to make their games better, but the fact of the matter is, you can start to use this technology right now and see the difference and it doesn't matter if its SATA 3.0 SSD instead of NVMe - when it comes to future games, maybe it will matter, but not right now for sure.

 

[MaulerX]

No loading time sounds good but it also seems like they are pumping this aspect a little hard. I hope it isn't to deflect from the fact that their console isn't shaping up to what they had hoped it would be.

Yep. They are making it their main selling point. Perhaps for a reason. This quote from Sony says it all:

An ultra-high-speed SSD is the key to our next generation

 

[scalman]

From one side this great , those days gone loading times on ps4 are pretty long , from other side it will add to price but mayne then its good investement into future.

 

[VooDooChicken]

to keep in mind. consoles are pcs. not just computers, but current generation also uses the same processor family (x86) as pcs. 2. in consoles, the whole machine is dedicated to run the game and it is not running background things as a pc would; this also includes using the hard disk bus
on the other hand load screens are not just to read data; it also includes to prepare that data to make it usable during the game

 

[onQ123]

Some times I think Cerny be reading my posts before interviews & events

Me

If you care this much about having over 16GB of GDDR6 Ram why are you not excited about the thought of having 1TB of NVMe? To me this is one of the best things that could happen Next Gen , you see it as storage I see it as a big pool of Ram

Me

With ReRam you wouldn't have to load a game because the game would basically be in main memory & there is other benefits & from the look of things Crossbar & others are preparing ReRam for the mass market

Cerny

“An ultra-high-speed SSD is the key to our next generation. Our vision is to make loading screens a thing of the past, enabling creators to build new and unique gameplay experiences.”

Or I'm actually Cerny

 

[lynux3]

I'd be willing to wager that if you was to upgrade a PS4 with this 'new' 'Ultra-speed' SSD, it wouldn't yield anywhere near those results. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I loathe loading times this gen. I got an external SSD for Scorpio, but still can be annoying. I would love to see a world where Apex loads a match in less than half the time it does now. Oh, to have those hours of my life back. Lol.

Of course the PS4 wouldn't yield those results nor would any current generation device (besides Switch in some cases).

 

[LuvOfThaGame]

Of course the PS4 wouldn't yield those results nor would any current generation device (besides Switch in some cases). What are you trying to say here and what "rhetoric" are you referring to? Why not just take what Cerny said at face value and be done with it? Is it because it came from Cerny or is it because it has to deal with the next generation PlayStation? I'm thinking that if it was the Cerny equivalent on the Xbox side you probably wouldn't be responding in this manner.

There are some here, now including you, saying that he should just be trusted. It's PR. Just like from every company, including MS. Game loading and asset streaming is a sum of all parts. It's not just because of some magic SSD special sauce. It only aids in the process. I said nothing that wasn't true.

 

[lynux3]

There are some here, now including you, saying that he should just be trusted. It's PR. Just like from every company, including MS. Game loading and asset streaming is a sum of all parts. It's not just because of some magic SSD special sauce. It only aids in the process. I said nothing that wasn't true.

You're blowing it out of proportion. It was a demonstration and he's the lead architect of the next generation PlayStation. There's nothing more, nothing less.

 

[bitbydeath]

There are some here, now including you, saying that he should just be trusted. It's PR. Just like from every company, including MS. Game loading and asset streaming is a sum of all parts. It's not just because of some magic SSD special sauce. It only aids in the process. I said nothing that wasn't true.

Cerny isn’t part of public relations.
He’s the lead architect on the PS5.
He was talking about what he is building.

 

[Da-Kid]

I think next gen should focus on seamless Dynamic Loading. I'm surprised this didn't take off as much when Metroid Prime introduced it.

 

[Shangounchained]

Nonsense, there's still plenty of loading in modern AAA games on PC with high end hardware incl NVMe SSDs.

Spoiler

Yes, I took the bait of the tittle

When will people understand that pcs aren't consoles, once again to Ur thick head "a console is a special computer professionally engineered and configured to run games efficiently. Kumamako

 

[Wolfgang Jr]

So all games will have elevator sections now?

 

[One smexy gam3r]

I honestly don't care. Give me games at a stable, consistent 60fps, and give me 1080p games that are pop in and play(like 6th gen). I am sick of graphics boasting, I am sick of hdd boasting. I am sick of exclusives boasting. I am sick of UI boasting. Doesn't mean crap when you have to constantly wait however long it takes to install patches and updates. Give me a blend of 6th gen, with improved current gen technologies and I will be a happy camper. This gen here made me truly long for 7th gen, and I spent most of that longing for 6th gen.

 

[One smexy gam3r]

Edit


*****on a side note wwz is the most unfinished game to be released this gen. It should be given an award for how bad it is. progress save bugs, no friend invites, weird pc agreements in order to play the game online, hackers on mp, most crashes I've ever experienced on ps4(13-17 over 2 days), patch to dumb down ai, and more. It kills me when people praise it and call it a spiritual successor to L4D. Whenever I think of wwz, I imagine nigerian russians wearing 1980s tracksuits and sony walkmans high fiving one another over a bottle of vodka. WWZ is like some game a 3rd world dev would make, if they are out of touch with stuff stateside. WWZ made me redownload L4D2 on my xbox one s today, how is it a 2009 game is better made than a 2019 game? How do you make a 2019 game with no cutscenes? Even L4D2 opens with a cool cutscene. Damn I hate wwz*******

 

[LuvOfThaGame]

You're blowing it out of proportion. It was a demonstration and he's the lead architect of the next generation PlayStation. There's nothing more, nothing less.

Cerny isn’t part of public relations.
He’s the lead architect on the PS5.
He was talking about what he is building.

Which, he has an obligation to Sony to promote the product he has designed. It's literally business 101. PR. While I'm not claiming he's lying, he IS exaggerating and being obtuse to the true reasoning behind game loading and asset streaming gains. MS has garnered alot of flak behind the "uncompromised 4k" message behind X1X. This is no different. It's ignorant to believe so.

 

[lynux3]

Which, he has an obligation to Sony to promote the product he has designed. It's literally business 101. PR. While I'm not claiming he's lying, he IS exaggerating and being obtuse to the true reasoning behind game loading and asset streaming gains. MS has garnered alot of flak behind the "uncompromised 4k" message behind X1X. This is no different. It's ignorant to believe so.

He's the lead architect. If I was leading design/development on a next generation product and got the opportunity to speak about minor details of the system publicly I'd be excited to share my vision.

The only one exaggerating here is you, nitpicking and trying to tear apart something regarded by many as a positive proof of concept. What's your end goal here?

 

[bitbydeath]

Which, he has an obligation to Sony to promote the product he has designed. It's literally business 101. PR. While I'm not claiming he's lying, he IS exaggerating and being obtuse to the true reasoning behind game loading and asset streaming gains. MS has garnered alot of flak behind the "uncompromised 4k" message behind X1X. This is no different. It's ignorant to believe so.

Why do you think he is exaggerating?
And which statement is obtuse?

 

[Ar¢tos]

Is there any pc game build specifically for SSD, so we can have a real comparison?
I can see a 256gb nvme soldered directly to the board + a removable/upgradeable 7200rpm hdd. The nvme used as cache together with some decompression hardware and a few dev tricks can very easily make it seems like there are no loadings, and the Sdk can easily be built around this.

 

[Three]

I'll believe it when I see it.

Until then this is the console version of Apple pretending they invented a thing and are introducing it to their wide-eyed audience for the first time.

Not really. An SSD as a standard will make certain things possible in games that would be annoying or unplayable to those using standard HDDs meaning new game experiences.

 

[Dontero]

The situation with SSD's right now is very strange.

The difference in loading times between HDD and SSD is HUGE. But the difference between a regular sata based SSD and an NVMe SSD is practically nothing. Usually about 1 second difference. But the difference in actual speed between an SSD and NVMe is about 5x faster for NVMe. It should be loading games much faster, but it's not.

I have heard people say that the reason is because games aren't designed to take advantage of that speed. But I'm not happy with that answer. Feels like part of the answer is missing but I don't know what.

Games didn't have to be "designed for SSD's" when they first came out to get a benefit. The benefit was immediate and obvious. But for some reason the jump to NVMe is practically nothing in game loading times.

I really wish I knew why.

Not it has nothing to do with it. When nVME/M2 drives states state speed they usually mean sequential read, meaning linear flow where you have 1 to 100 things in complete order and all of them are big chunks that are placed one after another in memory.

But games and most of applications do not behave like that. For example if game wants something it can try to load 1 000 small 2kb files and all of them are in different places at different levels of folder structure. So that sequential read doesn't mean anything and seek time takes prime.

This is why going from HDD to SSD is such a huge change because you improve seek times for small files.
Then nVME/M2 improve a lot sequential read but it doesn't improve much seek time which is why there is barely any difference between them in games.

Finally loadings in games are more than just loading files. Calling up servers, simulating data, creating worldspace etc all of those things require not files but CPU time.

Where M2/NVME shines is coping large data between discs. So for example you have 100GB movie and you copy it from m2 to m2 drive then you can expect something like 1,5GB/s compared to SSD 500MB/s

Is there any pc game build specifically for SSD, so we can have a real comparison?
I can see a 256gb nvme soldered directly to the board + a removable/upgradeable 7200rpm hdd. The nvme used as cache together with some decompression hardware and a few dev tricks can very easily make it seems like there are no loadings, and the Sdk can easily be built around this.

There is no such a thing as HDD/CD/DVD/BD/SSD build for games. Nor game can be build around them.
Only way to have such thing is to have specific hardware. Aka Arcade game machine or cart.
And even then you will still have loading screen because not everything is based around loading files as stated above.

 

[LuvOfThaGame]

He's the lead architect. If I was leading design/development on a next generation product and got the opportunity to speak about minor details of the system publicly I'd be excited to share my vision.

The only one exaggerating here is you, nitpicking and trying to tear apart something regarded by many as a positive proof of concept. What's your end goal here?

Why do you think he is exaggerating?
And which statement is obtuse?

I've stated your questions already.

 

[The_Mike]

Good thing people have always been able to use SSDs in their PS4s since launch, then.

Indeed, but still sucks it wasn't installed from. The beginning. I know it's more expensive, but it's just so much more convenient.

 

[lynux3]

I've stated your questions already.

No, you just nit picked based on absolutely nothing.

 

[Ar¢tos]

It doesn't really matter between very short loading times or no loading time, either way its MUCH better than this gen and its very welcome.
Just look at Destiny 1/2, it's half game, half loading screen. Even opening the menus on console is a pain.

 

[bitbydeath]

I've stated your questions already.

Your post was missing the detail as to the exact statements you were having issues with.

 

[Tripolygon]

Lots of back and forth over a statement that should be obvious yet of course people have to argue over it.

Current consoles use

1. SATA 2 and 3 interfaces which provide a theoretical 3Gb/s (375 MB/s) and 6Gb/s (750MB/s) of bandwidth.
2. 5400rpm hard drive with a maximum theoretical throughput of ~120MB/s but an average of ~50MB/s

Games, as well as other system services, rely on this small amount of bandwidth. Think about that for a second. Lots of clever software tricks go into making sure games run smoothly as they move files from HDD to RAM.

If next gen rumors are true which it is looking likely as Cerny has been talking about super fast storage and Phil Spencer talking about reducing load times, we are looking at possibly;

PCIe 4.0 or better interface that provides 64GB/s of maximum theoretical bandwidth. Currently, the fastest consumer storage solution which is the Samsung 970 Pro Nvme SSD provides a maximum theoretical speed of 3,200 MB/s.

This is how they are able to reduce spiderman load time from 15 seconds to an eye-popping 0.8 seconds. in the demo, the wired article was talking about.

 

[Leonidas]

Shaving 14.2 seconds off a 15 second load is far from anything we’ve seen before.

It's not unprecedented. Here is an example of a 10+ second load time cut down to ~.1 seconds on Xbox One.

 

[3March]

 

[GustavoLT]

Every time I enter the Krypt in MK11 on my Xone X the textures loads a second or two later... and its not that "oh my gosh, what a perfect texture" it's more of a development fix the a hardware gap, i think!

 

[mckmas8808]

Yeah ok Sony. But will this console have anime tiddies and games that aren't a cinematic experience third person shooter?

They already make those games too.

 

[waylo]

Did they really have to throw in "ultra high speed"? They gonna combine that with super ultra advanced high definition to make the most super duper aerodynamic deluxe hyper powered video game console of all time?

They're going to use a run of the mill cheapo SSD and they know it. Not that that's a bad thing, anything is better than a mechanical drive. It just bugs me they have to throw in a dozen useless adjectives, especially in this case. It's not like they're going to put a Samsung NVMe drive in there.