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[kraspkibble]

SSD prices aren't that bad these days.

they have improved yeah but i just paid £380 for a 2TB SSD. this is an NVME one...ykno the one that will be in next gen consoles. not a slow SATA3 drive which is cheaper. there is no way they are sticking in a 1TB or 2TB SSD. also these drives run hotter. a small low capacity drive with slow speeds will likely be in these consoles. consoles will need to target a certain price and not run too warm.

Been using SSD for years what's all the fuss about?

they are great but console owners are going to be severely disappointed. SSD will be a big step up (better late than never) but it's not going to provide amazing performance that Sony/Microsoft are making it out to be. Also, they are still too expensive for consoles I think. I reckon any SSD these consoles have will be low capacity drives at 128-500GB. that's enough for a few games. they will likely have a large capacity spinning drive to store the rest of your games on.

 

[Alexios]

So the thing both systems will have for sure and therefor have in common as any other modern platform does is the primary battleground? Wut?

 

[psorcerer]

WHAT'S THE BOTTLENECK WITH REGARDS TO LOAD TIMES?

One poster laid it out very nicely.

First three replies in this thread are total bullshit.
Decompression speed is almost free these days, you easily get 1gb/sec per cpu core.
And 2gb/sec is achievable.
The hdds have 40-50mb/sec on average.
Which means any game that was designed for hdd will use 5% of one cpu to decompress. I.e. nobody will write any code to optimize that. There's no point.
With the new consoles I hope there will be an effort in that direction on PCs.
Bottom line: loading speeds do not improve, because nobody ever invested any time in that.

 

[Ulysses 31]

So the thing both systems will have for sure and therefor have in common as any other modern platform does is the primary battleground? Wut?

Guess they're banking on that rather than that graphical leap won't be anywhere near as big as going from gen7 to gen8, the increased resolution will eat up most of the extra GPU power the newer consoles will provide.

 

[nkarafo]

Expect having at least a 4GB hard disk for storing your games you aren't playing as much or you are holding until you make a copy on the SSD. Games will be more than 100GB each next gen.

 

[Mr. PlayStation]

There's a reason why Sony's marketing strategy for PS5 would feature "Fastest console"

 

[CuteFaceJay]

they have improved yeah but i just paid £380 for a 2TB SSD. this is an NVME one...ykno the one that will be in next gen consoles. not a slow SATA3 drive which is cheaper. there is no way they are sticking in a 1TB or 2TB SSD. also these drives run hotter. a small low capacity drive with slow speeds will likely be in these consoles. consoles will need to target a certain price and not run too warm.


they are great but console owners are going to be severely disappointed. SSD will be a big step up (better late than never) but it's not going to provide amazing performance that Sony/Microsoft are making it out to be. Also, they are still too expensive for consoles I think. I reckon any SSD these consoles have will be low capacity drives at 128-500GB. that's enough for a few games. they will likely have a large capacity spinning drive to store the rest of your games on.

Heck RDR2 was about 110 GB on PC wasn't it. So unless their is some new technology that is really going to drop SSD prices I have no idea.

 

[Business]

They're less important than most of you guys think.

I barely notice any difference between my SDD and my HDD.

Oh wait, I actually notice two big difference: price and space.

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

The problem with them using SSDs is that games are huge and SSDs are small.

I bought a gaming PC with a 500 gig SSD a few months ago. It's fast as heck, but it's full, basically. I had to buy a 2 gig hard drive to put my lower priority games on.

I thought I saw 2TB 860 Evo SSDs on sale for around 200 bucks a week ago.

 

[Rayderism]

I still think a solution where games copy from a standard HDD to the SSD to play makes the most sense. So like, when it's showing you all the dev/pubisher screens at boot, it's actually copying the file to the SSD to play. Economically, it just makes the most sense, until SSD prices come down more. Especially if it's true that the internal SSD in the PS5 will be faster than anything on the market, even if you bought an external SSD, it wouldn't be faster than what's internal, so it almost HAS to work that way.

 

[MaKTaiL]

The problem with them using SSDs is that games are huge and SSDs are small.

I bought a gaming PC with a 500 gig SSD a few months ago. It's fast as heck, but it's full, basically. I had to buy a 2 gig hard drive to put my lower priority games on.

I'm pretty sure they will be using a similar technology of Store MI from AMD (heck, maybe it's the exactly same tech) where games you are using are quickly placed in the SSD while the rest remains inside a HD. If you change to another game it gets quickly swapped from HD to SSD and vice versa.

 

[cireza]

This generation is going to be a "please transfer your game from HD to SSD" management nightmare.

Pretty sure the SSD storage capacity is going to be fixed and somehow incorporated into the main board meaning that we will not be able to remove or upgrade it, and all games that don't fit into whatever size they decided (1 TB ?) will have to be transferred etc...

 

[jakinov]

I don't know how much an SSD actually cost to make in terms of labor and parts; and who owns what or even what company is making these SSDs for next-gen consoles but simply using the retail price of SSDs today to say that there's no way way anyone is going to put $XXX component in a console is not a great way of looking at. Firstly, the retail price you pay is going to be marked up price so that the store makes money. Secondly, so is the price that the stores pay the factory/manufacturer who likely inflates because of R&D costs. Thirdly, there's a lot of volume more volume at play so there's a lot of room for better pricing and reduced manufacturing costs. Lastly, these companies sound like they are going to do more than just sticking a commodity SSD in, if Sony and Microsoft are putting up a lot of cash up front to help do some R&D they are likely going to be able to get very good rates per console.

 

[EverydayBeast]

SSD next gen will be a pleasant incorporation into next generation.

 

[01011001]

Where are you getting this from? Games aren't designed for a specific HD, they're designed to run in specific operating systems and it's the OS that handles the I/O requests of the game, the game is agnostic of the storage type.

the new consoles will (according to leaks) use a reserved portion of the SDDs as virtual RAM

if you optimise your game to take full advantage of thebstorage system you can massively speed up loading times.

that's what you just can't do on a PC without having really strict hardware requirements.

so in this case the OS will take advantage of the closed system of these consoles and the developers will then be able to use this feature.

that's why you can't compare it to PC, that was my point.

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

they have improved yeah but i just paid £380 for a 2TB SSD. this is an NVME one...ykno the one that will be in next gen consoles. not a slow SATA3 drive which is cheaper. there is no way they are sticking in a 1TB or 2TB SSD. also these drives run hotter. a small low capacity drive with slow speeds will likely be in these consoles. consoles will need to target a certain price and not run too warm.


they are great but console owners are going to be severely disappointed. SSD will be a big step up (better late than never) but it's not going to provide amazing performance that Sony/Microsoft are making it out to be. Also, they are still too expensive for consoles I think. I reckon any SSD these consoles have will be low capacity drives at 128-500GB. that's enough for a few games. they will likely have a large capacity spinning drive to store the rest of your games on.

You think Sony is gonna use the best SSD available next gen? Do you know what the ps4/ps4 pro and ps3 HDD were?

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

I like this renewed focus on speed and quality-of-life. This better mean that we get improved performance for legacy/retro games. Gimme the AAA console version of retro emulation. It is overdue, Sony. Microsoft could even earn my $$ if they updated their shmup compatibility. My 360 blasting gorgeous VGA into a 480p monitor is serving me just fine in the meanwhile.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

The fastest of the fastest m.2 and NVME speeds is 32 GB/s, and even top-notch components typically go for 16GB/s. There's absolutely no way a console is hitting that rate, unless they're losing all sorts of money per console.

Um...where are you getting these numbers from? There's not a single m.2 NVMe-compatible SSD out there getting anywhere NEAR those speeds, and for the foreseeable future, as well. We are still talking NAND-based SSD's, correct? Even enterprise-level NAND-based SSDs don't hit those speeds.

Or do you mean Gb (Gigabit) when you say GB (Gigabyte)? That would be far more realistic and line up with what you're saying; there is a Gigabyte SSD on the market right now with read speeds of about 5 GB/s (40 Gbits/S).

........To answer the OP: the only option they have with a storage device achieving around 20 GB/s-25 GB/s is with 3D Xpoint PCM persistent RAM over a DRAM controller connection soldered to the board, or ReRAM spun off from 3D Xpoint with similar specs and functionality, also over a DRAM controller and soldered to the board. In both cases, you're only realistically looking at between 64GB-128GB, but this is persistent memory with speeds closer to (but not exactly; the latencies are notably much higher) DDR4 RAM, and long-term storage of NAND even when the power if off (plus having better P/E cycle performance).

So yes, that would be a big catch and it's possible Sony and even MS are doing something like this. But it's more realistically possible with 3D Xpoint at this stage; there have been no breakthroughs in ReRAM commercialization as a non-embedded part at capacities greater than a few megabytes. Hence why I said if Sony were to use ReRAM, it'd likely be an offshoot spun from 3D Xpoint as the technologies are very similar in most instances.

Even if they disappoint and don't go with persistent RAM, they could still use high-quality NAND (SLC or MLC) soldered to the motherboard as a fast cache connected to the APU on multiple PCIe 4.0 lanes, mimicking AMD's SSG GPU setup, but for even better performance (at least over the first-generation SSG GPU cards).

 

[Dory16]

Where are you getting this from? Games aren't designed for a specific HD, they're designed to run in specific operating systems and it's the OS that handles the I/O requests of the game, the game is agnostic of the storage type.

I guess in this case the SSD of the console could expose an api that

Been using SSD for years what's all the fuss about?

if SSD is the battleground than those consoles are much less advanced than what gamers are expecting. Personally I would accept the same loading times in exchange for the guarantee of native 4K/stable 60 FPS. Of course that and shorter loading times would be even better but the battleground is going to be which one fares better against the pc in the DF comparisons? The expectation is there should only be a small gap at least in the first year.

 

[Bolivar687]

This will be the single greatest placebo you hear about next gen.

 

[Dlacy13g]

Why? Because of 2013 Xbox One and Cerny we trust. Pack it up MS.

You realize MS had Kinect packed in that 2013 offering and thus driving up their costs. Without Kinect they could have easily been at price point parity. Thus why this launch will feel much closer at the checkout stand.

 

[Kdad]

They'll have the same fecking SSD

I thought someone said that one SSD with have a GPU in it.





/s

 

[Kdad]

My first non instant gaming experience was C64 1530 Datasette.....you can't really irritate me with loading times.

 

[CrisPy2019]

Honestly based on the rumors it seems to me Sony (not PS) wants to recreate the ps4 success again. Frankly it will be much harder this time but that PSN revenue makes it much easier than before (PSN revenue is higher than entire revenue of Xbox and Nintendo combined for 2018) .

I wouldn’t be shocked if ps5 is stronger and undercuts the xsx by 50$. For Sony PS division is extremely important . They won’t be like ps3 era and take 350$ loss per console but 100$ to 150 is kinda reasonable and unfortunately Xbox will not be able to match that as MS does not allow it.its not their philosophy. Look at price of xbx1x , surface line etc... all of those are in the higher end of price bracket in their segments. Big hardware loss is not their philosophy as a service provider company that they have transitioned into

That revenue part is pretty sad tho.
How people pay money for something that's actually free is still beyond me.
I don't need official servers to play with friends etc. I could host my own if they would allow me to... Or play on dedicated ones I could host on a separate machine.

Only ranked etc needs servers provided by Sony etc. Because of Cheaters etc. And even then Sony etc. Are doing a horrible job.

That this scam is working shows alot how smart most customers are. Or how they handle financials... and then whine about game prices or whatever...

The rented games you get are not a valid reason because they are just rented and not even choose what you want but "eat what we serve"
And the fact that you can't say"no thx I don't need crap games" shows that it's a scam.

Just imagine you would have to pay a monthly fee to play steam games online. How idiotic that would be...

Also whatever they say the servers cost is probably 5x lower then they try to make us believe.

 

[New Yorks Finest]

Imagine CyberPunk from the ground up for next gen only..oh the possibilities

 

[01011001]

Imagine CyberPunk from the ground up for next gen only..oh the possibilities

yeah but I think CRPR would be held back by the fact that they're simply not a giant team that could push out much more than what they already deliver with Cyberpunk

 

[LordOfChaos]

My bottom-line belief is that MS's SSD system is standards-based and will fall within the same performance characteristics of storage we can obtain pretty easily in the PC-world today. Something in the region of 3-7GB/s. If Sony has something that can do 20-25GB/s throughput, I think we may have a gamechanger.

Sometimes I think people forget large sequential transfers aren't all there are to SSD performance.

Some points that may be interesting:


Pappa Cerny: . “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. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster."

Again: "Rather than treating games like a big block of data [on PS5], we're allowing finer-grained access to the data"


Oftentimes it's not a big 20GB transfer that's going to be hitting an SSD, it's the unpredictable accesses to smaller files that really choke their performance, you're probably not hitting your drives max sequential rate most of the time.

What else gets rid of block level access and reaps big IOPS gains?

On Software Defined Storage:

"Our measurements show that SDF can deliver approximately 95% of the raw flash bandwidth and provide 99% of the flash capacity for user data. SDF increases I/O bandwidth by 300% and reduces per-GB hardware cost by 50% on average compared with the commodity SSD-based system used at Baidu," reads a 2014 study.

Thought for food

 

[Ryu Kaiba]

Average Joe doesn't give a hoot about SSDs, Teraflops, or RayTracing.

What do they care about? The price.

The average Joe isn't the one waiting in line all until midnight to buy one day one. Average Joe can wait.

 

[Birdo]

The average Joe isn't the one waiting in line all until midnight to buy one day one. Average Joe can wait.

Average Joe is the one who generates the most profit. They are far more important to these companies than the hardcore minority.

 

[Caffeine]

I think you guys are overthinking the custom nvme it will perform in the ballpark of the series x.
the primary battleground in gaming is gamepass/xcloud streaming vs psnow. but the real battle in tech will be streaming vs isp's

 

[Shmunter]

I think you guys are overthinking the custom nvme it will perform in the ballpark of the series x.
the primary battleground in gaming is gamepass/xcloud streaming vs psnow. but the real battle in tech will be streaming vs isp's

Maybe next gen. For now, the battle is for mindshare with physical hardware. Let’s face it, people like to get new gear too.

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

I think you guys are overthinking the custom nvme it will perform in the ballpark of the series x.
the primary battleground in gaming is gamepass/xcloud streaming vs psnow. but the real battle in tech will be streaming vs isp's

Streaming is not going to be the primary mode of consumption for gaming anytime soon.

Game Pass will be a factor though, for sure.

 

[EverydayBeast]

ssd vs hdd

 

[RaySoft]

I see MS going for a traditionally M.2 solution, but I think eveyone will be surprised at Sonys take on it. I have a feeling they'll have some proprietary tech that will deliver vastly more throughput than std. M.2

 

[Caffeine]

Maybe next gen. For now, the battle is for mindshare with physical hardware. Let’s face it, people like to get new gear too.

im expecting the gen to be the longest essentially lasting till 2030

 

[magnumpy]

no way this its some kind of exotic unheard of ssd. these consoles have to be mass produced at reasonable price points. you'll take lower than average ssd speeds and you'll be thankful for it. compared to a spinning platter based hard disk like in the ps4 it will be a big step up.

 

[quest]

im expecting the gen to be the longest essentially lasting till 2030

No matter how nice these consoles are they will start getting long in the tooth in 2025-2026. Technology advances to fast. People will want bigger worlds better physics better graphics ect. Things like RT in graphics cards are in their infancy ie first generation. They will get much better as nvidia and figure out new technique to make it run better and add more features. Like when shaders started. There was big break through like the unified shader array ect.

 

[LordOfChaos]

no way this its some kind of exotic unheard of ssd. these consoles have to be mass produced at reasonable price points. you'll take lower than average ssd speeds and you'll be thankful for it. compared to a spinning platter based hard disk like in the ps4 it will be a big step up.

The beauty of what I mentioned is no hardware change, a normal-ish PCI-e 4.0 drive plus software defined storage getting rid of block level accesses = massive IOPS.

Though I think the SSD will be more special than that with all their research and patents into controller SRAM caches and all that.

INFORMATION PROCESSING DEVICE, ACCESS CONTROLLER, INFORMATION PROCESSING METHOD, AND COMPUTER PROGRAM - Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.

<div p-id="p-0001">Disclosed herein is an information processing device including a host unit adapted to request data access by specifying a logical address of a secondary storage device, and a contro

www.freepatentsonline.com

- SRAM instead of DRAM inside the SSD for lower latency and higher throughput access between the flash memory controller and the address lookup data. The patent proposes using a coarser granularity of data access for data that is written once, and not re-written - e.g. game install data. This larger block size can allow for address lookup tables as small as 32KB, instead of 1GB. Data read by the memory controller can also be buffered in SRAM for ECC checks instead of DRAM (because of changes made further up the stack, described later). The patent also notes that by ditching DRAM, reduced complexity and cost may be possible, and cost will scale better with larger SSDs that would otherwise need e.g. 2GB of DRAM for 2TB of storage, and so on.

- The SSD's read unit is 'expanded and unified' for efficient read operations.

- A secondary CPU, a DMAC, and a hardware accelerator for decoding, tamper checking and decompression.

- The main CPU, the secondary CPU, the system memory controller and the IO bus are connected by a coherent bus. The patent notes that the secondary CPU can be different in instruction set etc. from the main CPU, as long as they use the same page size and are connected by a coherent bus.

- The hardware accelerator and the IO controller are connected to the IO bus.

If it ends up being all three parts of the triforce here...Holy hell.

 

[quest]

At this point I'm probably not the only one. I just want to be able to expand the storage using off the shelf parts to keep the price to a reasonable level. A plug in nvme won't cheap but a proprietary on ugh. I appreciate what Sony is doing but diminishing returns rather have expandable storage using off the shelf parts with a 3 second load time than no expansion or worse vita memory card situation and 0 load time.

 

[Lord Malachite]

I never understood the rush to get SSDs in consoles for this upcoming generation. Still don't. Sure, I get that SSDs are vastly superior in terms of load times. But to me, storage trumps loading speed any time. I find that most games have very little load time, and the ones that do might have one giant load up front but then no other discernible ones until I quit out of the game and have to reload. The whole "no more waiting 17 full seconds for your game to load" means less than nothing to me if they're going to pack in a 500GB SSD and call it revolutionary. If a console is going to last me for 5 to 7 years, it needs to have a bare minimum of 1.5TB, preferably 2TB of storage. I know the absolute max both Sony and MS will offer us out of the box is 1TB, and that means an additional cost of me having to buy a replacement internal drive for their inferior one, or at least a supplemental external drive. I'll happily accept longer load times in exchange for far better storage capacity out of the box.

 

[Shmunter]

I never understood the rush to get SSDs in consoles for this upcoming generation. Still don't. Sure, I get that SSDs are vastly superior in terms of load times. But to me, storage trumps loading speed any time. I find that most games have very little load time, and the ones that do might have one giant load up front but then no other discernible ones until I quit out of the game and have to reload. The whole "no more waiting 17 full seconds for your game to load" means less than nothing to me if they're going to pack in a 500GB SSD and call it revolutionary. If a console is going to last me for 5 to 7 years, it needs to have a bare minimum of 1.5TB, preferably 2TB of storage. I know the absolute max both Sony and MS will offer us out of the box is 1TB, and that means an additional cost of me having to buy a replacement internal drive for their inferior one, or at least a supplemental external drive. I'll happily accept longer load times in exchange for far better storage capacity out of the box.

I’m off the opinion the usage of ssd in the upcoming consoles is not just a storage solution. It will be an integral part of a 3rd layer of extended ram with software designed around it. Direct memory access and very different to current sata solutions etc.

Mass storage will be achieved via traditional storage. Games will be cached and copied onto the ssd on demand.

Not doing the above would be huge missed opportunity to take things in a bold new direction, hence my optimism.

 

[Rightisright]

I'm not so sure. I think both having an SSD in a closed architecture, where developers can use it to its full potential, is the game changer. If the PS5 takes 2 seconds quicker to load a game, no one will care. And in games, there's nothing a normal game will do which will show up the XBOXs SSD as inferior or less capable.
Sony showed as a demo Spiderman, where moving through the street on a SSD vs hard drive on the PS4, and it didnt have the stutter that the hard drive did. But the SSD in the Xbox wouldn't have had those stutters either,
So for me, great to see the innovation, but I cant see it doing anything against the SSD in the Xbox.

 

[Lord Malachite]

I’m off the opinion the usage of ssd in the upcoming consoles is not just a storage solution. It will be an integral part of a 3rd layer of extended ram with software designed around it. Direct memory access and very different to current sata solutions etc.

Mass storage will be achieved via traditional storage. Games will be cached and copied onto the ssd on demand.

Not doing the above would be huge missed opportunity to take things in a bold new direction, hence my optimism.

If this is something that comes to pass, it would be nice. But I don't have that kind of faith its what Sony or MS is cooking up at the moment. I'd love to be wrong about that. But if it's just going to be treated like a standard HDD but with way less loading, gimme a traditional HDD with 2 or 3TB of storage instead please.

That said, I'm a stickler for running my systems in spec. On both the PS3 and PS4, I always took great pains to have my upgraded HDD have the exact same specs as the one I was replacing outside of storage capacity. I will do the same for whatever SSD Sony launches the PS5 with.

 

[magnumpy]

The beauty of what I mentioned is no hardware change, a normal-ish PCI-e 4.0 drive plus software defined storage getting rid of block level accesses = massive IOPS.

Though I think the SSD will be more special than that with all their research and patents into controller SRAM caches and all that.

INFORMATION PROCESSING DEVICE, ACCESS CONTROLLER, INFORMATION PROCESSING METHOD, AND COMPUTER PROGRAM - Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.

<div p-id="p-0001">Disclosed herein is an information processing device including a host unit adapted to request data access by specifying a logical address of a secondary storage device, and a contro

www.freepatentsonline.com

- SRAM instead of DRAM inside the SSD for lower latency and higher throughput access between the flash memory controller and the address lookup data. The patent proposes using a coarser granularity of data access for data that is written once, and not re-written - e.g. game install data. This larger block size can allow for address lookup tables as small as 32KB, instead of 1GB. Data read by the memory controller can also be buffered in SRAM for ECC checks instead of DRAM (because of changes made further up the stack, described later). The patent also notes that by ditching DRAM, reduced complexity and cost may be possible, and cost will scale better with larger SSDs that would otherwise need e.g. 2GB of DRAM for 2TB of storage, and so on.

- The SSD's read unit is 'expanded and unified' for efficient read operations.

- A secondary CPU, a DMAC, and a hardware accelerator for decoding, tamper checking and decompression.

- The main CPU, the secondary CPU, the system memory controller and the IO bus are connected by a coherent bus. The patent notes that the secondary CPU can be different in instruction set etc. from the main CPU, as long as they use the same page size and are connected by a coherent bus.

- The hardware accelerator and the IO controller are connected to the IO bus.

If it ends up being all three parts of the triforce here...Holy hell.

of course, I didn't mean to be too dismissive and honestly I don't really know what sony has planned for ps5. I'm watching with interest

 

[CJY]

Good video on the topic...

 

[CJY]

Good video on the topic...

After watching that, I think I'm wrong in my belief that the Xbox SeX will just be a "normal" SSD. It makes no sense to use relatively slow PC SSDs over SATA or even M.2 NVMe when you're building a console. My initial thought was that MS will go in that direction, but based on this video, it seems MS are touting the use of the SSD as virtual RAM, so I guess the wait continues on what kind of tech and performance we'll be getting.

 

[JLB]

10% more powerful on the gpu side. we don't know about the other parts. i have a feeling both RAM and SSD will be faster.

“a feeling”?

 

[DarkestHour]

Been using SSD for years what's all the fuss about?

Nothing. Just a bunch of console users in this thread down-playing the significance of an SSD paired with a hopefully somewhat capable CPU this go around.

 

[EverydayBeast]

It's time for consoles to get their own SSD to stay strong in the war with PC's.

 

[Shmunter]

This may be a bit prickly for PC users, but logically this is a likely scenario...

https://www.pcgamesn.com/sony-ps5-ssd-console-pc-port-doom