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Xbox Series X SSD could be half the speed of the PS5
- Thread starter Captain Hero
- Start date
Swauny Jones
Member
If you can swap in a SSD drive of your own then this is of no concern to me. I'd install a 2tb SSD drive day 1 and just be flying high
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ethomaz
Banned
I guess SSD will continue being the slowest component of a gaming machine.
In reality the BD-drive is the slowest but with the move from PS3 to PS4 changed the read from the disc to the HDD (that is why all games are installed now) and with that they could increase the quality and quantity of the assets for the new generation of games.
Now they are doing the samebut the difference is way bigger than PS3 to PS4... SSD jump over HDD is bigger than HDD over BD-disc.
You will see a substantial jump in quality of the rendered graphics with SSD.
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JLB
Banned
Mechanical Disks are the BIGGEST bottleneck. Sure thing.
Please send me a doc that corroborates that.
My understanding is that "level"/map design is somewhat bottle-necked - and designers use corridors and doors to slow players down and give environments time to load. But I don't know what that means for like, Bioshock 5. Sounds like it'll mean all of the above - but whether it's revolutionary or just incremental and hyped, I don't know. I'd think there will still be limits with texture quality and variety because the size of a game file will be constrained by the size of the SSD.
Psykodad
Banned
vpance
Member
If PS4 and XB1 had a 3GB/s SSD as standard I've no doubt we would have see some games that look at least 2x better than the best of this gen.
Imagine like The Division gameplay reveal or W3 bullshot trailers.
CJY
Banned
Haven't you heard? The SSD is going to be bottlenecked by the Blu-Ray drive, so having an SSD is basically useless.
Refer to
MiyazakiHatesKojima
and
Freedom Gate Co.
for confirmation
JLB
Banned
Ridiculous. CPU and GPU are the biggest bottlenecks, and in that order.
Better ssd is good? Yeah, but lets not pretend it will enable 60fps or bigger draw distances all of the sudden.
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JLB
Banned
I have two computer science degrees. Thats why im calling you out that what you said is utterly idiotic.
ethomaz
Banned
After installed on SSD all the data is there already and you doesn’t need the BD-drive anymore.Haven't you heard? The SSD is going to be bottlenecked by the Blu-Ray drive, so having an SSD is basically useless.
Refer to
But with the increase of the games on the BD-disc (100GB?) you can expect bigger install times on PS5 than PS4.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
2x? The difference IS going to be noticeable. Third party devs wont bother but first party devs are known to extract every ounce of power from their consoles.
If MS is at 12 tflops and Sony is at 9 tflops, you ARE going to see that get reflected in games. Same goes for any SSD or Ray tracing performance advantages.
Now, i dont believe that is the case. How can Sony have a console thats 12 tflops with 2x better SSD and better ray tracing for the same price? However, if for some bizarre reason that is the case then we are going to start seeing differences pretty early on in first party games.
Of course, If Sony exclusives are held back by PC SSD speeds which current dont hit 5+ gbps then i dont see the point of this dick measuring contest. Both consoles will have their games on PC, they will look and play best on PC, and all this console warring wouldve been for naught.
EDIT: and sony is going to need some kind of ram buffer between the ssd and vram to move data in and out quickly. even at 5GBps, you need something extra to fill up the 576gbps VRAM in a realtime game world.
If MS is at 12 tflops and Sony is at 9 tflops, you ARE going to see that get reflected in games. Same goes for any SSD or Ray tracing performance advantages.
Now, i dont believe that is the case. How can Sony have a console thats 12 tflops with 2x better SSD and better ray tracing for the same price? However, if for some bizarre reason that is the case then we are going to start seeing differences pretty early on in first party games.
Of course, If Sony exclusives are held back by PC SSD speeds which current dont hit 5+ gbps then i dont see the point of this dick measuring contest. Both consoles will have their games on PC, they will look and play best on PC, and all this console warring wouldve been for naught.
EDIT: and sony is going to need some kind of ram buffer between the ssd and vram to move data in and out quickly. even at 5GBps, you need something extra to fill up the 576gbps VRAM in a realtime game world.
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ethomaz
Banned
So you should know that the biggest bootleneck in any compute hardware is the mechanical parts that didn’t envolve fast enough as the others components.... thr change from HDD to SSD was a movement that hardware companies where researching for decades because it was not possible to make substantial improvements in speeds with mecanical discs.
The same apply for games... the mecanical discas are the biggest (or better the slowest part) bootleneck of game development.
That is true, they teach in university and your comment fill the utterly idiotic seal.
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CJY
Banned
There is huge scope for Sony to have a more/equally powerful console at a cheaper/same price as the competition. It's called economies of sale. If you're a supplier, would you bet against Sony selling another 100M consoles? Would you bet on MS selling over 50M Xbox Series X consoles? I don't think you're giving Sony the credit they deserve when it comes to negotiating prices of their components.
CJY
Banned
The HD isn't the biggest bottleneck because games are designed around the fact that the consoles have them, but the same can be said about the GPU & CPU too. Games are designed around the target spec, so in effect nothing is actually a bottleneck in that context.
If you want to argue about something more specific, like why more games aren't 60FPS, then you can point fingers and say: yes, the CPU is the bottleneck there. Or why do we still have massive loading times: The slow disk speeds is the answer there and the limitations of the interface.
ethomaz
Banned
Not just this generation lol
It is a common bottleneck for decades already.
Mechanical drives speeds increased like 5x in the last 30 years.
CPUs and GPUs had it increased like 80x in the same same period.
I/O was always a serious issues for most company that had to rely in RAID mode and SCSI controllers to try to increase things a bit.
Mechanical drives technology are archaic yet because there is not so much you can do in terms of speed with a spinning disc.
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Gavin Stevens
Formerly 'o'dium'
Biggest bottle neck this generation was cpu. HDDs were not the bottle neck, and certainly not bluray, which was only used for authentication.
JLB
Banned
aha, so you say that hd is the bottleneck of a piece of software that is preemptively loaded in memory?
Clintizzle
Lord of Edge.
While welcome SSD's in both new consoles. I am going to miss booting up games like AssCreed, GTA or RDR and having enough time to watch a short film before I actually get into the game.
Nitty_Grimes
Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
Still gonna be better than what we have now so win win.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Gold Member
How is what they said a "crock of shit"? Calm down dude; they just said it won't be as game-changing as going from 2D to 3D, which is 100% true. At the end of the day these are still SSDs, they're still using NAND and NAND is still a limited technology in terms of how data can be accessed and altered compared to volatile memories.
And as with any system, this is just one factor of the equation that determines overall performance. CPU speed, CPU features, GPU compute power, custom GPU features, memory bandwidth, RAM amount, all of those will have a bigger impact on game design than SSD speed. SSD speed is literally at the bottom of that stack; not that it isn't important but it's not a literal game-changer the way going from 2D to 3D was, or even from non-unified shaders to unified shaders, or single-core processors to multi-core CPUs, etc.
Y'all gotta be a bit more chill with this.
makaveli60
Member
Damn. I've just realized that this will be the first time that there is a possibility that PCs hold back console games, meaning that you can't design a multiplatform game around an SSD, because then you would lose a lot of sales with PC gamers who don't have it. Sure we can even see the benefit in those cases too (no pop-in etc.) but that's not the same as designing a game around that. Strange timea ahead.
ethomaz
Banned
If the software have I/O ye. if not then no.
But any software need to be load to the memory the first time anyway.
BTW games uses a lot of asset streaming from HDD to memory all the time.... that causes a lot of tricks like reusing part of the asset across different levels (so you have more duplicated textures for example instead of unique), lower quality of the asset (lower file to move from HDD to memory faster), decrease in long distance asset, etc etc etc.
In today gaming development you work around with the HDD limitations.
Games using SSD and not having to work with HDD for compatibility opens a new worldto design games and the creativity can play a big hole here because it is a change in paradigm.
I’m really excited to what devs will do with next gen hardware.
Ohhhhhh I’m curious howthey will port that to PC with slower HDD... how devs will translate the next-gen innovations to PCs with HDD.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
So are SSDs basically the 2019 version of having a video cartridge from the 80s and 90s, but at 1 TB?
Cartridges back then had almost no loading times.
Cartridges back then had almost no loading times.
vpance
Member
The average PC gamer will have some upgrading to do post launch, but nothing out of the ordinary every generation.
If PS5 and XSX SSD are heavily customized and not able to be replicated on the PC side, PC always has the fall back of adding more system memory. More of the game will just have to be loaded in.
Woo-Fu
Banned
Probably need a synthetic benchmark to even measure it. This isn't going to be the bottleneck.
makaveli60
Member
Sounds fair.
Smaller than Atom
Member
Fight!
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
For the first time in gaming, SSDs are being discussed as standard.
Before that it's all about cpu gpu and ram.
Anyone know what the priority list for making a great system? Are SSDs that important to be put on a similar level as having a good cpu/gpu/ram?
Or are SSDs an afterthought? Gun for the usual specs and if there's room or budget, then tack on an SSD?
Before that it's all about cpu gpu and ram.
Anyone know what the priority list for making a great system? Are SSDs that important to be put on a similar level as having a good cpu/gpu/ram?
Or are SSDs an afterthought? Gun for the usual specs and if there's room or budget, then tack on an SSD?
JLB
Banned
See, let me give you a couple of examples.
Imagine that you have a highly concurrent SaaS platform. And that you use, let say, a postgre db. If your app is mostly, or relatively, high on writes, then ssd will make a huge difference. HD IO ops are the bottleneck there, and thats why platforms that leverage async, non blocking ops are more effective (blocking ops: db and hd calls, http requests, or even array iterators). Thats why you see Amazon offering ssd solutions that perfectly work for those scenarios.
But what if, on the other hand, your app is low on writes, but high on reads? What you will see is that the overall impact of a faster store diminishes . Most probably, on those cases, the key factor are the cache layer on top of it. Those caches wont be running on an hd, although they can make use of it on misses, invalidations or preemptive loads.
Another example: a java app thats fully loaded on memory, and has no blocking ops (ie: a calculator app). Effect of ssd? Only on startup time, and thats it.
Anather example: A site that crawls other sites and fetches data. Most relevant blocking ops? http reqs. Thats why browsers mitigate that making them async from an arch standpoint(single, non blocking thread).
What is more impactful on an online game? faster hd, or proximity to datacenter?
Now imagine games. Lets say a game luke Limbo, or Inside. They are probably mostly fully loaded on memory. Its the calculator app on steroids, if you want. what is the effect of a faster hd? mostly neglectible. Most games rely on reducing the amount of these expensive io, blocking ops to the disc.
The fact that eventually, in a short term future, some devices will have much faster, closer to ram memory speeds wont shift paradigm instantly. It will take years to see gigantic changes other than load speeds. Thats why Sony and MS are marketing that as the main advantage. You wont see “2x improvements”, whatever the hell that means, due to ssd speed now nor on the midterm.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Gold Member
Not quite; NAND still has to be addressed via pages, while old-school carts used ROM which are byte-addressable for reads and writes. And ROM is also more suitable for true random access than NAND.
Also a lot of older consoles used ROM as essentially an extension of their main memory like VRAM, only difference was that they couldn't write data to ROM since it's read-only.
Oh and to answer the other post...it really depends on how the SSDs are implemented. If these are just like off-the-shelf drives but they're pushing a fast controller for them to interface with, then at the end of the day they're just convenient small boosts but not in the same league as CPU, GPU, RAM, memory bandwidth or the such.
However, if they're going for a customized approach similar to AMD's SSG card line (signs seem to point to Sony and MS doing this), with the NAND soldered to the board (or a daughtercard connected through a card edge) directly and giving the OS means to memory-map the NAND so it can act as a cache, IF paired with sufficiently good bandwidth and speed through the controller and PCIe lane interfaces, then it becomes a lot more impressive and important.
Still not on the level of CPU, GPU, RAM or memory bandwidth but that kind of custom approach would make it more like CPU/GPU/RAM/Bandwidth >>> SSD versus CPU/GPU/RAM/Bandwidth >>>>>>>> SSD
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JLB
Banned
btw, now that we are talking about memory although a little bit offtopic, if you really want to know why Naughty Dog are damn wizards, please read this story https://bc-gb.com/blog/16716/how-naughty-dog-fit-crash-bandicoot-into-2mb-of-ram-on-the-ps1/
DunDunDunpachi
Patient MembeR
Is this the new 8GB of GDDR5 versus DDR3? I understand that power disparities at launch may very well be corrected or reversed in the subsequent revisions, but it seems odd that Microsoft would repeat the same mistake of the X1 vs PS4 at launch.
nikolino840
Member
Xbox Is doomed
Antwix
Member
Seriously. I mean, I COULD bang Phil Spencer's wife next week. Will it happen? Maybe, maybe not. This is the worst part of months before console releases/spec announcements. So much (clickbait) speculation.
JareBear: Remastered
Banned
Rightisright
Banned
So can someone link me to the Sony SSD speed sheet?
What speed has Sony said their SSD will be, I mean people wouldn't be saying that the Sony SSD is twice as fast as the Xbox one without knowing the speeds of both would they?
The only benchmarks for Sony is the Spiderman demo and what was said in the Wired interview which is this
"Sony won’t cop to exact details about the SSD—who makes it, whether it utilizes the new PCIe 4.0 standard—but Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. 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. 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.' As opposed to 19 times faster for the next-gen console, judging from the fast-travel demo."
So Sony real world demo only showed a 19 times improvement in loading times. Hey, MS said their SSD was 40 times faster than their current gen consoles.
So looks like Sony has slower SSD then.
What speed has Sony said their SSD will be, I mean people wouldn't be saying that the Sony SSD is twice as fast as the Xbox one without knowing the speeds of both would they?
The only benchmarks for Sony is the Spiderman demo and what was said in the Wired interview which is this
"Sony won’t cop to exact details about the SSD—who makes it, whether it utilizes the new PCIe 4.0 standard—but Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. 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. 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.' As opposed to 19 times faster for the next-gen console, judging from the fast-travel demo."
So Sony real world demo only showed a 19 times improvement in loading times. Hey, MS said their SSD was 40 times faster than their current gen consoles.
So looks like Sony has slower SSD then.
chemical boy
Member
If it is finally confirmed that PS5 also has an advantage in the GPU, the RT, 3D sound and a DS with interesting advances ... it does not leave the MS hardware team in good place, instead Cerny would be a genius.
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Speaking of NAND, Xbox One supposedly has 8gb of NAND ram on top of the 8gb of DDR3.
Anyone know why even with this big honking extra amount of ram (I think it was meant for OS), the OS still runs like shit half the time?
ethomaz
Banned
It is a eMMC SD.
If I have to guess it is probably where it have the OS firmware.
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Krappadizzle
Gold Member
From 4 seconds to 7 seconds. O the humanity! Whatever will Poppa Halo do?!?!
Gamer79
Predicts the worst decade for Sony starting 2022
I laughed
Kumomeme
Member
better world streaming,seamless transition, less popup, faster object loading, object can move faster on screen (etc. spiderman can swing faster, the flash game is possible etc) (todd howard blame hdd speed for slow horse riding in skyrim LOL), the devs no need to resort various trick to hide loading screen(hiding behind cutscene, tight area sequence etc) , first scene in spiderman take months to finished but with SSD it can be done much faster...basically game design changed with all these limitation lifted...less game file size as there no need to duplicate asset
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I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet, but considering that it's been strongly hinted at that next generation consoles will be setting aside a portion of their SSDs to use as Virtual RAM, the implications of having a vastly faster SSD could be much larger than you might think.
