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Xbox Series X SSD could be half the speed of the PS5

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?

Wait 8GB of NAND or 8Gb of NAND? I kinda got a pet peeve when people use gb or Gb for GB 'cuz the first two are for Gigabit while the latter's for Gigabyte :p

But I dunno what XBO's specs are RAM-wise outside of the DDR3 and ESRAM. But for why the UI can be kinda bad, well they've got a hypervisor (Hyper-V) with two separate partitions for games and apps.

So it's kinda like the OS has three layers :S

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.

Nah, nowhere on the same level. Some people don't seem to understand how NAND actually works, or the fact that even 8 GB/s of speed and bandwidth for a nonvolatile memory is nothing compared to even the memory bandwidth for main "L4/L5" DDR3/GDDR5 memories of XBO and PS4, let alone the memory bandwidths for the GDDR6 XSX and PS5 will be using.

No matter what, NAND still operates as NAND, so it is limited by the inherent limitations of the technology. One system having an SSD speed of 6 GB/s vs. the other's 3 GB/s doesn't suddenly make up for the system with 3 GB/s having higher GPU compute, more RAM and/or more main memory bandwidth (as a hypothetical example). The purposes of those things and the SSD, even as a memory-mapped virtual cache, are very different and not directly comparable.

So anyone trying to sell this to you as the new DDR3/GDDR5 situation is grossly exaggerating and/or don't know how this stuff actually works xD.

EDIT: I'm NOT saying you wouldn't notice the difference with games that optimized for the extra throughput on the faster solution. However, some are thinking it's analogous to CDs vs. cartridges or something like that, or mechanical HDDs vs. SSDs. The differences in practice would be nowhere in that same ballpark, and there are other factors in system design which can impact the effectiveness of the SSD cache feature.
 
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cozomel

Member
So what're the implications on game design here?

Not sarcasm, I genuinely don't know how one SSD being dramatically faster might play out.

So Rockstar said that when they made GTA5 that they wanted to put in jets but didnt because they couldnt make them go any faster than the helicopters because the HDD could not stream in the background fast enough. And if you notice Sony's Spiderman man demo, as they start to speed it up faster and faster that the background starts to buffer more and more. So one thing would be to make mush faster open world games where Spiderman could websling around the world faster or GTA could have fast moving jets. Also streaming textures would stream in much faster, so less texture pop in. And thats just two things i can think of, of the top of my head.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Wait 8GB of NAND or 8Gb of NAND? I kinda got a pet peeve when people use gb or Gb for GB 'cuz the first two are for Gigabit while the latter's for Gigabyte :p

But I dunno what XBO's specs are RAM-wise outside of the DDR3 and ESRAM. But for why the UI can be kinda bad, well they've got a hypervisor (Hyper-V) with two separate partitions for games and apps.

So it's kinda like the OS has three layers :S
Googling it, it's 8GB of Nand just like 8GB of DDR3.
 

Spukc

always chasing the next thrill
- No more pop in
- More objects in the screen
- Bigger and more detailed open world games
- Faster movement for character and camera
- More unique texture and assets (games reuse the same texture/asset in memory to not need to get a new one on disc)

It changes drastically what you can do in game development... be creative because you are not limited anymore by the texture/data streaming from the disc.

LIVING ON THE E D G E
 
Googling it, it's 8GB of Nand just like 8GB of DDR3.

Yeah seems you're right; I don't think that NAND is there for performance, just as a way to isolate critical OS files from off the main drive, for security purposes. Or as a way of allowing the OS to update critical files reliably without need of concern for the end-user's storage drive.

And probably also to allow the OS to write and read those critical files faster, since IIRC XBO only has a SATA II storage memory controller (and not even to the maximum spec of SATA II at that; granted it's sort of the same with PS4 but still :S).

It's not meant to act the same way as, say, the DDR3 RAM in PS4 Pro; that's actually meant for OS performance particularly with background tasks. XBO's 8GB NAND is just for storage of critical OS files in a secured, isolated NAND IC, updated sparingly.
 
Wasn't previous reports that it will uses PS5018-E18? But I don't know. I have to say, that I have fresh new PC with Ryzen 3900X and M. 2 PCIe 4 SSD and I find OS/Games to have really miniscule impact over the SATA 3 SSD (which is Samsung 850 Pro) even though in syntetic benchmarks it wipes the floor with that SATA 3 drive.
That's the problem right there, unless Sony really work their APIs to take full advantage of the benefits of a faster SSD... SATA III would mostly do the trick.

and this is what I suspect, I can't find it, but I saw a video that detailed what was possible with the Radeon SSG workstation cards - they have a dedicated NvME slot on them, and you can add a PCIe 3.0 of up to 1TB on them - it basically allowed you to load models and textures with amounts of data that is unthinkable with a traditional card (going over PCIE and back takes too long), it would potentially also allow games to have enemies and NPCs that are active from much further away.

Given how MS has spoken of their intentions to use their SSD as an extension of their main memory, I suspect they want to do something similar and if their machine's SSD is half the speed of what's in the PS5 that would mean that in some situations the games will either look worse (less data available), of run much slower, again waiting for information from the SSD to draw the frame.

But if we talk about traditional load times, they are often bottle-necked by the CPU or whatever is going on in the background, this is why I suspect some API level implementations to help developers take advantage of the feature.
 

Trimesh

Banned
Yeah, I don't like that. I hope they get rid of current-gen consoles faster than they imply. I want proper nextgen games on the nextgen consoles.

So what exactly is a "proper nextgen game"? Maybe I'm cynical, but I can still remember when we were being told that power of the PS2's Emotion Engine was going to change everything, and later how the "Power of Cell" was going to do the same thing. What we actually got were prettier versions of games that would have been entirely possibly before.

The fixation a lot of people seem to have on teraflops and technical specs seems bizarre to me - nobody seems to be asking the important question, which is what sort of gameplay experiences are going to be possible on these machines that previously weren't? Given the laser-like focus on technical ephemera, I'm starting to suspect this is a question that nobody has come up with a convincing answer to yet.
 

NOLA_Gaffer

Banned
Q3Uq8iO.jpg

System Warz still going strong in 2020 I see. What a shame.
 

base

Banned
Omg you people.

We will finally get a normal cpu instead of a tablet shit Jaguar like in ps4 and ssd drive but you still complain.

This gen will be a big improvement over last gen.
 
  • Praise the Sun
Reactions: GHG
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.
So if the reverse is true, that MS has an advantage in GPU, CPU, Bandwidth and the same speed SSD as the PS5, what would you call the MS hardware team? Would you say they are smarter than Cerny?
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
So if the reverse is true, that MS has an advantage in GPU, CPU, Bandwidth and the same speed SSD as the PS5, what would you call the MS hardware team? Would you say they are smarter than Cerny?

If Xbox came out on the same day/month as PS5, had the same R&D budget and number of similarly experienced engineers behind it, came out at the same price, and was faster in all metrics/scenarios... yes, the team would have done a better job.
 
Even if this were true I doubt it on every front, and the difference in read/write speed is not the only determinate. We don't know what the system RAM is, how fast it is, its capacity or how it will interact with the SSD. What if Microsoft has higher capacity and faster RAM and the SSD while important is not as much of a determinant as to what can be loaded in as it would be on the PlayStation 5?

You guys are chomping at the bit way too much and getting really fucking stupid in the process. Sony already showed their Spider-Man demonstration and it only shows a 9.75x increase in speed over the Pro, and the Pro loads in slower than the One X which has a 60 MB/s throughput.

That means this scene is basically loading in at 500-550 MB/s and you people are talking about 5,000 MB/s drives and shit... Come back down to reality...



You guys are getting really dumb with this shit.
 
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If Xbox came out on the same day/month as PS5, had the same R&D budget and number of similarly experienced engineers behind it, came out at the same price, and was faster in all metrics/scenarios... yes, the team would have done a better job.
Nah, both the PS and MS hardware teams are smart regardless. Reality is both teams have a budget. They get the same prices from AMD, and can pick from the same menu as each other. Where they will shine is in what secret sauce they bring, and what impact it has on games. Like Sony had their FP16 with the Pro, but it really didnt do much. MS baked DX 12 into the GPU reducing the amount of instructions that needed to be done by the CPU making that more efficient. But not every developer uses DX 12 to the max. Which ones secret sauce has the bigger impact is what I will look at.
 
Even if this were true I doubt it on every front, and the difference in read/write speed is not the only determinate. We don't know what the system RAM is, how fast it is, its capacity or how it will interact with the SSD. What if Microsoft has higher capacity and faster RAM and the SSD while important is not as much of a determinant as to what can be loaded in as it would be on the PlayStation 5?

You guys are chomping at the bit way too much and getting really fucking stupid in the process. Sony already showed their Spider-Man demonstration and it only shows a 9.75x increase in speed over the Pro, and the Pro loads in slower than the One X which has a 60 MB/s throughput.

That means this scene is basically loading in at 500-550 MB/s and you people are talking about 5,000 MB/s drives and shit... Come back down to reality...



You guys are getting really dumb with this shit.

Pretty much this.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Nah, both the PS and MS hardware teams are smart regardless. Reality is both teams have a budget. They get the same prices from AMD, and can pick from the same menu as each other. Where they will shine is in what secret sauce they bring, and what impact it has on games. Like Sony had their FP16 with the Pro, but it really didnt do much. MS baked DX 12 into the GPU reducing the amount of instructions that needed to be done by the CPU making that more efficient. But not every developer uses DX 12 to the max. Which ones secret sauce has the bigger impact is what I will look at.
Not sure how you disagree and then say the same thing I said (minus the FP16 and built in DX12 comments where we disagree) in different words 😂. Fair enough though.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Wasn't previous reports that it will uses PS5018-E18? But I don't know. I have to say, that I have fresh new PC with Ryzen 3900X and M. 2 PCIe 4 SSD and I find OS/Games to have really miniscule impact over the SATA 3 SSD (which is Samsung 850 Pro) even though in syntetic benchmarks it wipes the floor with that SATA 3 drive.

That is a PC software OS assumption/design issue (years of floating HW requirements and deep BC support forced Windows’s designers hands while consoles OS’s can optimise for the specific HW they have inside).

Panajev2001a said:
Can people help repost these once in a while so others could perhaps give them a look hehe... and see why SSD’s journey in computing is still very early and the big problems are really software and not HW related :)...
https://penberg.org/parakernel-hotos19.pdf

https://en.itu.dk/~/media/en/research/phd-programme/phd-defences/2015/mathas-pdf.pdf?la=en
 
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ZywyPL

Banned
Truth be told, even if both next-gen consoles used SATA SSDs as standard, they would already be waaay faster than what most folks have in their PCs, laptops, or current-gen consoles. Another fact is, all the customizations made by Sony and MS will (most likely) be utilized only in their 1st party titles, as they always do. because even if Sony's solution will really allow to cut loading times to zero, despite XBX there are still billions of PCs that don't have the tech, so even if XBX had the same capabilities all the 3rd party titles would still have to have some sort of loading screens implemented anyway.

From the current informations we got so far from developers themselves, it looks like Sony's solution will be all about cutting the loading times as uch as possible, or even completely removing them, whereas MS's solution is more about using the SSD as VRAM, so two different approaches, which one will turn out to be better, only time will tell.

So what exactly is a "proper nextgen game"? Maybe I'm cynical, but I can still remember when we were being told that power of the PS2's Emotion Engine was going to change everything, and later how the "Power of Cell" was going to do the same thing. What we actually got were prettier versions of games that would have been entirely possibly before.

The fixation a lot of people seem to have on teraflops and technical specs seems bizarre to me - nobody seems to be asking the important question, which is what sort of gameplay experiences are going to be possible on these machines that previously weren't? Given the laser-like focus on technical ephemera, I'm starting to suspect this is a question that nobody has come up with a convincing answer to yet.

Because nobody knows yet, no one can predict the future. only the devs who are currently working on games that will be released in 2021 and beyond know what next-gen games will be about, they define it, no one else. Until then you will be seeing kids trying to define their wet dreams as what next-gen games "should" be, but like I said, they are not the ones who make those games. The first wave of launch titles in late 2020/earlt 2021 will give us a glympse of what's what, the same way this gen was all about big open worlds from the get-go.
 

makaveli60

Member
So what exactly is a "proper nextgen game"? Maybe I'm cynical, but I can still remember when we were being told that power of the PS2's Emotion Engine was going to change everything, and later how the "Power of Cell" was going to do the same thing. What we actually got were prettier versions of games that would have been entirely possibly before.

The fixation a lot of people seem to have on teraflops and technical specs seems bizarre to me - nobody seems to be asking the important question, which is what sort of gameplay experiences are going to be possible on these machines that previously weren't? Given the laser-like focus on technical ephemera, I'm starting to suspect this is a question that nobody has come up with a convincing answer to yet.
Compare GTA physics on ps2 and ps3 for example. Or the entirely open world of AC Origins with its simulations with the lastgen Assassin's Creeds.
 
Not sure how you disagree and then say the same thing I said (minus the FP16 and built in DX12 comments where we disagree) in different words 😂. Fair enough though.
Not quite the same. I'm saying that there isn't too many ways they can be different that lets you say that one guy is a genius and the other not.
And the point I was making about the secret sauce is that I'm eger to see what they come up with, but up to this point it hasn't made much difference at all. FP16 and DX 12 baked in hasn't really set the world on fire. So that leaves you with how many compute units, how much ram and clock speed. It doesn't take a genius to say "hey, I want a 8 core Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.6ghz, I want a GPU with 60 Compute Units, and I want the GPU clocked at 1.8ghz. Also give me 16gb GDDR6 RAM etc etc."
We are all doing that here with our spec guesses.
If Cerny asks for 4 more compute units for the PS5 than MS ask AMD for, and they get 2 more gig of RAM and 10% faster clock speeds, I'm not sure that makes you a genius.
 

Shmunter

Member
So what exactly is a "proper nextgen game"? Maybe I'm cynical, but I can still remember when we were being told that power of the PS2's Emotion Engine was going to change everything, and later how the "Power of Cell" was going to do the same thing. What we actually got were prettier versions of games that would have been entirely possibly before.

The fixation a lot of people seem to have on teraflops and technical specs seems bizarre to me - nobody seems to be asking the important question, which is what sort of gameplay experiences are going to be possible on these machines that previously weren't? Given the laser-like focus on technical ephemera, I'm starting to suspect this is a question that nobody has come up with a convincing answer to yet.
I know, but it’s a million dollar idea. Not about to give that away for free.
 
Even if this were true I doubt it on every front, and the difference in read/write speed is not the only determinate. We don't know what the system RAM is, how fast it is, its capacity or how it will interact with the SSD. What if Microsoft has higher capacity and faster RAM and the SSD while important is not as much of a determinant as to what can be loaded in as it would be on the PlayStation 5?

You guys are chomping at the bit way too much and getting really fucking stupid in the process. Sony already showed their Spider-Man demonstration and it only shows a 9.75x increase in speed over the Pro, and the Pro loads in slower than the One X which has a 60 MB/s throughput.

That means this scene is basically loading in at 500-550 MB/s and you people are talking about 5,000 MB/s drives and shit... Come back down to reality...



You guys are getting really dumb with this shit.


Yikes. Btw. this section is just one part of the game and example shows just how pop-ins are eliminated while traveling much faster through level and with huge density., not the freaking loading time of the whole level.
 
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Nah, both the PS and MS hardware teams are smart regardless. Reality is both teams have a budget. They get the same prices from AMD, and can pick from the same menu as each other. Where they will shine is in what secret sauce they bring, and what impact it has on games. Like Sony had their FP16 with the Pro, but it really didnt do much. MS baked DX 12 into the GPU reducing the amount of instructions that needed to be done by the CPU making that more efficient. But not every developer uses DX 12 to the max. Which ones secret sauce has the bigger impact is what I will look at.

But not every developer uses FP16 to the max, right?

Btw. Matt said that FP16 helped.
 

The Alien

Banned
One would expect slower speeds when handling soooooo many tflops!!!

I kid....I kid 😘

Between this thread or last week's thread about the XBox SSD being insane.....I'm gonna wait it out until actual confirmation. I think both are gonna be game changing speed vs. Last year.
 

Blond

Banned
- No more pop in
- More objects in the screen
- Bigger and more detailed open world games
- Faster movement for character and camera
- More unique texture and assets (games reuse the same texture/asset in memory to not need to get a new one on disc)

It changes drastically what you can do in game development... be creative because you are not limited anymore by the texture/data streaming from the disc.

The idtech that ran the original RAGE could do this just fine without an SSD. I wonder what happened between then and now for us to go backwards and now need hardware to do what we could do back then with software.

That sounds pretty great but is there some kind of diminishing return, when it comes to read/write speeds? Is it possible that SSD speeds be bottlenecked by other components?

CPU most definitely, it's why even though I love the SSD in my PS4 it doesn't perform nearly as well as if would be in a PC.
 
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Verchod

Member
Jesus! Like it'll make any great difference between the two machines.

If both the new consoles can take full advantage of these M.2 Pcie drives, then that'll make far more of a difference compared to the current Gen than any performance gap between the two new consoles.
 

Amaranty

Member
Jesus! Like it'll make any great difference between the two machines.

If both the new consoles can take full advantage of these M.2 Pcie drives, then that'll make far more of a difference compared to the current Gen than any performance gap between the two new consoles.
That's what I'm thinking. If Sony will use a better SSD with little benefits compared to Microsoft, then is it actually worth it?

Surely a faster CPU or GPU yields better results than a faster SSD?
 

Gavin Stevens

Formerly 'o'dium'
That's what I'm thinking. If Sony will use a better SSD with little benefits compared to Microsoft, then is it actually worth it?

Surely a faster CPU or GPU yields better results than a faster SSD?

spoiler: no.

if the one console has a faster GPU AND CPU, then it will be a big difference. But if one has one and the other has the other, you won’t be looking at anything like current gen differences.

edit: one things for sure, with SSD in there as standard, you will see diminishing returns over a certain speed for the vast majority of titles, but, BUT... with both of them having it, it’s going to be shit loads better for ALL of us.
 
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Yes, like not every developer uses DX12 to the max. But if FP16 and DX12 were game changers, developers would jump on it.

LOL. Another Dx12 crap. After 4 years same crap again. Reminds me how DX12 will close the gap between Xbone and PS4. Looks like Xbox fans didn't learned anything. DX12 is a whole API, FP16 is just a small portio of PS4 API.

Why bother anyway.
 
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Ssd's don't impact performance all that much.
For quick loading any budget ssd id fine.
And I think there won't be any difference in performance if they stream textures from drive. It's just not that important part.
So all youse overreacting.
 
The idtech that ran the original RAGE could do this just fine without an SSD. I wonder what happened between then and now for us to go backwards and now need hardware to do what we could do back then.



CPU most definitely, it's why even though I love the SSD in my PS4 it doesn't perform nearly as well as if would be in a PC.
John Carmack is one hell of a genius. Wish he worked on bigger titles outside of his "comfort zone". He could really give Tim Sweeny and other tech gurus a run for their money.
 
So Rockstar said that when they made GTA5 that they wanted to put in jets but didnt because they couldnt make them go any faster than the helicopters because the HDD could not stream in the background fast enough. And if you notice Sony's Spiderman man demo, as they start to speed it up faster and faster that the background starts to buffer more and more. So one thing would be to make mush faster open world games where Spiderman could websling around the world faster or GTA could have fast moving jets. Also streaming textures would stream in much faster, so less texture pop in. And thats just two things i can think of, of the top of my head.

Appreciate the input, but that just sounds like the difference between HDD and SSD no? I was asking what the difference would be between one SSD and another SSD if this rumor about speed is true. Sorry if my post wasn't clear enough.
 
LOL. Another Dx12 crap. After 4 years same crap again. Reminds me how DX12 will close the gap between Xbone and PS4. Looks like Xbox fans didn't learned anything. DX12 is a whole API, FP16 is just a small portio of PS4 API.

Why bother anyway.
You missed the point. Best not to bother.
 
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Handy Fake

Member
Appreciate the input, but that just sounds like the difference between HDD and SSD no? I was asking what the difference would be between one SSD and another SSD if this rumor about speed is true. Sorry if my post wasn't clear enough.
Presumably the faster it is, the better quality and depth of textures that are able to be streamed. Draw distance too, possibly.
 

Blond

Banned
John Carmack is one hell of a genius. Wish he worked on bigger titles outside of his "comfort zone". He could really give Tim Sweeny and other tech gurus a run for their money.

True that. Did you watch the Joe Rogan podcast where he talked about flying across the country and locking himself in a motel for a week for the sole purpose of getting lost in his brain to try experimental code? That's nuts!
 
True that. Did you watch the Joe Rogan podcast where he talked about flying across the country and locking himself in a motel for a week for the sole purpose of getting lost in his brain to try experimental code? That's nuts!
No! But I'ma go check that out right now! Thanks for the heads up. Joe Rogan is awesome!
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Even if this were true I doubt it on every front, and the difference in read/write speed is not the only determinate. We don't know what the system RAM is, how fast it is, its capacity or how it will interact with the SSD. What if Microsoft has higher capacity and faster RAM and the SSD while important is not as much of a determinant as to what can be loaded in as it would be on the PlayStation 5?

You guys are chomping at the bit way too much and getting really fucking stupid in the process. Sony already showed their Spider-Man demonstration and it only shows a 9.75x increase in speed over the Pro, and the Pro loads in slower than the One X which has a 60 MB/s throughput.

That means this scene is basically loading in at 500-550 MB/s and you people are talking about 5,000 MB/s drives and shit... Come back down to reality...



You guys are getting really dumb with this shit.

9bX8.gif
 

onQ123

Member
2X faster SSD wouldn't really matter much by it's self if they was just being used in a PC but these SSDs are the standards for Xbox SX & PS5 & for the 1st time since the days of cartridges the storage will be part of the processing & creation of games so it might bring some noticeable differences.
 

JLB

Banned
Yeah, I think it was a huge bottleneck. Levels had to be designed with this in mind.

weird, i talked with a friend that works as a developer on ea for fifa, and he told me it was neglectible. maybe theres cases where isnt
 
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