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Xbox Velocity Architecture - 100 GB is instantly accessible by the developer through a custom hardware decompression block

Jon Neu

Banned
RAD is a 3rd party studio. You should read thread carefully. Bunch of 3rd party devs also. Really Xbone fans are trying to spin everything and they are wrong about basically everthing.

3rd party devs are far more believable than Cerny or any other dev that works for Sony/MS.

Seems Sony fans only want to hear the devs who work for Sony and disregard the ones who doesn't.
 
Those are very good points, not sure what Sony has on top of Kraken, but you start with an over 2x bandwidth advantage... People seem to hate asterisks over PS5’s variable frequency and performance, but the peak SSD’s figures for XSX based on best case texture compression only is fair only to a point.


Well, in the minute 17:30 of the unveil, if i understood correctly, when talking about kraken, Cerny referred to a custom decompression chip builti n the IO unit, the one that in a very specific case could allow to reach 22GB/s
 

Neofire

Member
What Sony expert? Sony just said that they see at the end of the year or early next to see mass produced SSD’s reaching over 7 GB/s. That drive costs $240 today, the console will be out for 6-7 years and has not launched yet.

Also, for all PS4 BC games a regular SSD (internal or external) or HDD (external) can be used. By the time this is a problem due to the number of titles released, the price of those drives will have already begun to fall considerably.
my thing is people are banging 9n Sony for having a SSD and being costly but are giving Microsoft a pass on having one and a proprietary one at that that they are paying a 3rd party to design and make.
 
This! Sony's solution is great, but people forget that Microsoft's solution is also absolutely fine and sufficient.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, right now it looks like storage bandwidth is the PS5’s main draw (and main advantage over XsX) so people hard one-sided are trying to build it into a monolith of console superiority when really it’s just a very solid perk to have. The XsX storage is still ultra fast. Everyone wins next gen
 
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3rd party devs are far more believable than Cerny or any other dev that works for Sony/MS.

Seems Sony fans only want to hear the devs who work for Sony and disregard the ones who doesn't.
You quoted me where i mentioned in that thread are tweets from 3rd party devs yet you said devs who work for Sony.
You should read that thread too instead of spewing nonsense.
 

darkinstinct

...lacks reading comprehension.
It may cost 300 now to consumer, but how much does it cost to Sony? much less.

Also gens last years so there is time for prices to drop.

It wont be any different than for xbox, just walk to the gaming area of the store and pick up certified SSD. And if you want to, you can hunt one from other places. For xbox it is just the gaming branded and thats it.

But yeah good if XBOX have fast enough system too, we will see in the end of next gen that did Sonys solution gain them what they wanted
OEM prices are roughly half of consumer prices. So it will still be a huge part of the BOM. I think XSX SSD will be around $70 and PS5 SSD around $120. MS saves double, by not using DRAM for the controller and by not having to source highest end NAND. With DRAM and NAND prices having risen over the last months, Sony is in a bad place.
 

SirTerry-T

Member
Open world is where I'd expect PS5 to have the most issues, they are the most demanding games and both the CPU and GPU won't be able to run at full speed. Faster asset streaming isn't going to save you when your CPU can't process it fast enough.
The thing is though, as a 40+ Dad, who works full time and has to fight the rest of the family for quality gaming time in front of the TV, the last thing I want is bigger bloody open world games!
 

Dural

Member
The thing is though, as a 40+ Dad, who works full time and has to fight the rest of the family for quality gaming time in front of the TV, the last thing I want is bigger bloody open world games!

Agreed, never been a fan of them. With the limited time I have (also 40yo dad of 3, soon to be 4), I prefer linear games I can jump in and out of quickly.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Which frankly is a disaster waiting to happen. You're pushing PC hardware complexity into the console space and 'normies' are going to fuck up and buy the wrong stuff or not know exactly what to buy, or jam something that doesn't fit right into the system.

Microsoft thought of this and simplified the whole process.

Wow... full circle now you are praising a company for using proprietary storage to help users... next if they were to lock Xbox LIVE and remove cross play multiplayer across consoles to protect LIVE players we should praise it too right :rolleyes:?!
 

psorcerer

Banned
Ready at Dawn is a Sony second party studio. A real dev also said this










I'm not sure I understand.
BCPack (from it's name) seems like a hw implementation of BC7 (1/6H) decompressor.
So will they use non-loseless compression and then unpack raw data to RAM which will be swizzled later in DirectX, or what?
Like DirectX12 doesn't support BC7 directly, it seems to me that there will be two copies of each texture: BC7->unpacked format->device format
Need more info.
 

Techies

Member
Do people realize that the new console has usb 3.2.

Due to crappy naming conventions I can't say if it's 20 or 40gbps, but in theory you could just buy a 3.2 external and throw in your own ssd and have it run just as good or better as the build in one.
 

T-Cake

Member
Do people realize that the new console has usb 3.2.

Due to crappy naming conventions I can't say if it's 20 or 40gbps, but in theory you could just buy a 3.2 external and throw in your own ssd and have it run just as good or better as the build in one.

20Gbps. So that equates to 2.5GB/sec. How are you going to make up the shortfall of 3.5GB/sec? Use all 3 USB ports in tandem?
 
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martino

Member
The thing is though, as a 40+ Dad, who works full time and has to fight the rest of the family for quality gaming time in front of the TV, the last thing I want is bigger bloody open world games!

then let's hope dev have more ambition than corridor narritive games for 40+ dads.
 

longdi

Banned
Wow... full circle now you are praising a company for using proprietary storage to help users... next if they were to lock Xbox LIVE and remove cross play multiplayer across consoles to protect LIVE players we should praise it too right :rolleyes:?!

We dont know how much MS will charge for their prop storage.
7gbs NVME standard drives wont be cheap...

In the long long run, PS5 solution may be cheaper without the license overhead.

The advantage of MS storage is you can plop one in and you get 2TB boom!
You can take your games every where!
Every prop storage you buy, works 100% plug and play.
 
100gb instantly avaiable... the pr does know no boundries. :D well hopefully ms has something somewhat equal to the ps5 Memory Controller and Chip.

You talk like ps5 hdd will make huge difference in 3rd party games. No 3rd party devs gonna utilize it as PC gamers won't have access to such hdd at reasonable price.


Also funny ponies changing narrative to ssd and ignoring gpu and cpu strength of xsx. Look at that memory bandwidth difference.
 
Ok I’ll bite. Every word in Cerny’s brief was carefully chosen as part of their PR management strategy. Watch it again and you’ll hear him say:
  1. Game players are here for the fantastic games
  2. The feature most requested by developers was SSD (And then it’s SSD bombardment)
  3. Important for us to find something other than CPU power, GPU power or amount of RAM
  4. Dangerous to rely on TFLOPS as an absolute indicator of performance.
  5. CU count should be avoided as well.
Now tell me who is downplaying what. And try to deny they’re not hanging everything on SSD, whilst also claiming a win with the perception amongst fanboys that Xbox has no games.


YOU are right lol. He basically downplayed every advantage XSX got lol
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
The second Cerny started his 25 minute speech on SSD, his first line was a laugher. It went like:

"All you guys asked for it. And you thought it could never be done...... SSD"

Well that's funny. PCs have had SSD for years, and SeX also has an SSD which both MS and Sony stated a year ago in their vague feature sets. And MS already stated it in their reveal two days earlier. LOL

Talk about a canned speech. Sounds like an opening line that should have been done at a gamin conference a year ago before either console maker said SSDs were coming to consoles.
 
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sendit

Member


Considering this was back in 2016. This is the same idea in practice that both XSX and PS5 will demonstrate. The GPU having direct access to the SSD will in theory revolutionize game design. Again, there is a reason why many developers are excited about this over pushing the Teraflop agenda.

(Normal PC setups) GPUs dedicated to gaming don't have direct access to a sata or m.2 connected SSD.
 

Bernkastel

Ask me about my fanboy energy!
Update : Since everyone his having doubts, I will quote the original Digital Foundry article
"Our second component is a high-speed hardware decompression block that can deliver over 6GB/s," reveals Andrew Goossen. "This is a dedicated silicon block that offloads decompression work from the CPU and is matched to the SSD so that decompression is never a bottleneck. The decompression hardware supports Zlib for general data and a new compression [system] called BCPack that is tailored to the GPU textures that typically comprise the vast majority of a game's package size."
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
We dont know how much MS will charge for their prop storage.
7gbs NVME standard drives wont be cheap...

In the long long run, PS5 solution may be cheaper without the license overhead.

The advantage of MS storage is you can plop one in and you get 2TB boom!
You can take your games every where!
Every prop storage you buy, works 100% plug and play.

You do not need 7 GB/s NVME drives for PS5, the overhead is not 1.5 GB/s out of 5.5 GB/s. That was just an example of the speed SSD’s are going to reach in the next 8-12 months.

It is useful to be able to bring your drive around in a plug and play manner, but you may be able to do with the internal drive (depend on the design) and backing the game up to a USB 3.2 drive.

I remember when the Sony patent about something that looked the SAME as the Xbox plug and play proprietary storage solution and they were assaulted and ridiculed PS Vita cards style, so I am a bit curious the about face... Normally the off the shelves / open market storage solution is THE pro consumer one.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius

We have seen and heard the PR, it no way closes the gap for general use. The difference for compressed data transfer is still enormous no matter the maximum theoretical data rate of that block.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
LOL star citizen ALPHA. It might be Bug. Also star citizens is a huge cluster fuck.

can you show me a released game where this applies also? Thanks

For obvious reasons, MS have you several when mentioning why they invented the Direct Storage API ;), on average PC games treat SSD as regular disk drives... yer another case where on PC you generally brute force your way up from what consoles target.
 

nowhat

Member
Can we travel back in time to the PSP days when people gave Sony shit for the Memory Stick cards ;)? Or the PS Vita memory ones?
This is barely on-topic, but meh, fuck it, so is most of the forum nowadays.

When Vita was released, was there a legit reason for having proprietary memory cards? Later on obviously not, which in part surely helped Vita's demise.
 
I remember with star citizen that the game stream it's asset's I can see that were the benefit of a fast SSD matter's because it's getting everything loaded quicker, but technically wouldn't PS5 advantage only be shown through exclusives? Because in theory XSX and PC would hold back the PS5 advantage in the SSD area. Plus there is no way to tell it couldn't be done on another platform because it's exclusive.
How would the XSX hold back PS5?
The XSX SSD can load an entire 60GB game into RAM in under 12 seconds, and you it will have issues streaming data into an open world game? For real?
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
This is barely on-topic, but meh, fuck it, so is most of the forum nowadays.

When Vita was released, was there a legit reason for having proprietary memory cards? Later on obviously not, which in part surely helped Vita's demise.
It is fully on topic as with both PSP and PS Vita, not to mention the time when a Sony parent suggested they may be doing for PS5 exactly the external expansion solution MS is doing, they got shat on because “proprietary storage is not pro consumer”.

I think Sony and/or their supporters “made the case” that they needed a simple for users fast solution that matched the game cards and required speed.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
By that logic, everything from Cerny's mouth is PR.

It is, he has just never resorted to cheap marketing stretch of the truth in any interview I have read and has worked directly as a software engineer and designer on a huge number of games. When he starts spouting off crap like “We invented DirectX, do you think we would give the. A 30-40% advantage?!” or something along the lines of “our system is perfectly balanced (and that is why it is better)”.

Take that at face value, not that you do not just transfer textures and they do not all compare at the same rate, or the very realistic 2-3x multipliers of every figure that article has... or take the uncompressed value... the result does not change. The assumption around Sony not being smart enough to design a good compressor and the thought this solution closes the gap is there.
 

Bernkastel

Ask me about my fanboy energy!
It is, he has just never resorted to cheap marketing stretch of the truth in any interview I have read and has worked directly as a software engineer and designer on a huge number of games. When he starts spouting off crap like “We invented DirectX, do you think we would give the. A 30-40% advantage?!” or something along the lines of “our system is perfectly balanced (and that is why it is better)”.

Take that at face value, not that you do not just transfer textures and they do not all compare at the same rate, or the very realistic 2-3x multipliers of every figure that article has... or take the uncompressed value... the result does not change. The assumption around Sony not being smart enough to design a good compressor and the thought this solution closes the gap is there.
This is the same guy who said PS4 Pro is 8.4 TeraFlops because of fp16 and half floats . Lets not forget that Sony marketed both the PS2 and PS3 as the second coming of Jesus. GAF threads before PS3 release were just like now with all the SSD talk.
Conversely Microsoft has always been on the point about their hardware.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
This is the same guy who said PS4 Pro is 8.4 TeraFlops because of fp16 and half floats . Lets not forget that Sony marketed both the PS2 and PS3 as the second coming of Jesus. GAF threads before PS3 release were just like now with all the SSD talk.

Oh beautiful, you must hate all the talk about FP16, 8 bits, and 4 bits MS made about rendering and AI.
What Cerny said about FP16 was factual: “if you are running FP16 code, the HW runs that code at double rate as if it it were a console with 2x the performance”. He made this statement to Gamasutra, a developers oriented publication, not The Verge or something...


Also, he was not the PS3 architect (but good gaslighting tactic now bringing even PS2 into the discussion 😂). So, not sure what to tell you here :).
Also, the CELL people hyped up back then, as hard as it was to code for, was what saved the console’s ass and helped it reach and overtake the Xbox 360 with its 1+ years head start...
 
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Jon Neu

Banned
You quoted me where i mentioned in that thread are tweets from 3rd party devs yet you said devs who work for Sony.
You should read that thread too instead of spewing nonsense.

You are the onetrying to disregard Ready At Dawn opinion claiming that is a 3rd party studio. You are the one trying to disregard 3rd party devs opinions when those opinions don't suit your narrative.
 
Wow... full circle now you are praising a company for using proprietary storage to help users... next if they were to lock Xbox LIVE and remove cross play multiplayer across consoles to protect LIVE players we should praise it too right :rolleyes:?!
Full circle? When did I ever say there was anything wrong with proprietary storage? What are you smoking?
 

Connxtion

Member
In my opinion this is just another “The Cloud” situation.

MS had inferior hardware and the cloud was there saviour. (Turned out it was a load of crud, took a good few years to get proof. Crackdown 3 anyone?)

PS5 is in the same boat and it’s now a super fast SSD that’s being touted as the best thing since sliced bread.

Now here is the thing, we don't know if this drive really is as fast as Sony states (yes big ass corps lie to consumers) we have no way of telling and we are taking what they say on face value. (Not doubt it’s fast, but how fast we won’t ever know.)

So what do we do as consumers? We take what both companies say with a grain of salt and wait for proof.
Proof = games or developers that aren’t tied to MS/Sony to benchmark both systems with the SDK, if the latter will ever happen.

Just remember Sony need to sell these consoles like hot cakes. They are the weaker hardware so people thinking they won’t skew figures to big them selves up ar mad, especially on stuff we will never be able to prove. Same can be said about MS.


This is my opinions on stuff, if yours differs then great.

So can the thread get back on point?
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
We don't need currently better textures or more space for them. They are as sharp now on PC as modern cameras can take reference pictures. Hope they will use more ram for better things than textures even sharper that I can see on my 4k monitor
 

Ar¢tos

Member
The second Cerny started his 25 minute speech on SSD, his first line was a laugher. It went like:

"All you guys asked for it. And you thought it could never be done...... SSD"

Well that's funny. PCs have had SSD for years, and SeX also has an SSD which both MS and Sony stated a year ago in their vague feature sets. And MS already stated it in their reveal two days earlier. LOL

Talk about a canned speech. Sounds like an opening line that should have been done at a gamin conference a year ago before either console maker said SSDs were coming to consoles.
THAT'S SO COOL!
...
.....
Has PC also had PCIE4 transfer speeds all those years?

Does PC even have any game designed around PCIE4 transfer speeds?

Last time I looked PC games had the same corridors, doors and obstacles hiding loading times, and they can also have pop-in.
 
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