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PS5's SSD is "far ahead" of those found in high-end PCs, according to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney

ethomaz

Banned
Just to followup with a quote from Tim Sweeney regarding this.

"Those PC numbers are theoretical, and are from drive into kernel memory. From there, it's a slow and circuitous journey through software decompression to GPU driver swizzling into video memory where you can eventually use it. The PS5 path for this is several times more efficient."

Do you have information about the PC architecture the manager of Epic Games does not have?
Yeap from the manager of Epic Games.
Tim added “PC will catch up with faster SSDs late this year” ;)

At launch of PS5 PC will already have hardware to delivery better performance then PS5.
 
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Shmunter

Member
Oh boy... This again... So... I'll repeat it yet again...

I don't see why people see his comments as some sort of novel thing. This has been the case for quite a while, where the consoles use a unified pool of RAM for both the CPU and the GPU. They can both read the same data from RAM and is therefore easily and quickly accessible, while the PC has a separate RAM pool for the CPU, and a RAM pool on the graphics card. The data from the RAM has to be transferred to VRAM before the GPU can do its thing. There's a reason GPUs are installed in PCIe x16 slots, where 3.0 gives you 32GB/s and 4.0 gives you 64GB/s. With the SSDs, it's the same thing, except drives are not that slow anymore.

Note that he's not saying it's impossible either. He's saying the road is a lot longer, which is not new. In practice this would mean keeping more data in RAM to compensate for the longer time that streaming from SSD would require to reach the graphics card.

I do love how everyone is pretending that RAM simply doesn't exist.
Yes RAM can help with the buffering, but how much RAM?

Putting aside all the inconvenience of the time it would take to preload mass ram, what if the UE5 demo chewed through 100gig of streamed assets during the last 20 second flyover?

Current pc architecture making that possible just becomes beyond the reach of too many PC consumers. It needs to evolve. It will be a good thing.
 
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Guilty_AI

Member
You people know Time Sweeny also said the PS3 was easy to develope for...
It's almost like this happens every time to sell people on consoles and feed them marketing so they think their plastic box has a bigger penis than their other plastic box.

Pretends to be shocked.

Why do you people fall for this so hard?
I still remember all the discussions back on 2008 or so, talking about how ultra powerful and revolutionary the cell processor of the ps3 was, how it was a game changer, how it would crush the x360, how it would make PCs obsolete, yada yada.

Worst part is that console makers are probably fully aware that people in these forums fight for their plastic boxes, and probably feed into it to groom that sweet brand loyalty.
 
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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
I don’t have time to bother.
But you can use this thread from,page 1 as a refresher if you’d like.

Im pretty sure 4K/60 comes up at least 20 times in the first 10 pages.

Ah yes. I see it from all sides in there. Hell, I am still seeing those saying the XSX would run the very same UE5 demo as the PS5 but in 4K/60 with the same fidelity. In this very thread. Hopes & Dreams are everywhere.

Nope in fact I was dealing with things that actually affect my life, I’m not here on a message board trying to prove something about my favorite piece of plastic.


Sorry I didn’t answer you as quickly as you would have liked.


In the end you still missed it, but I give you an E for effort.

You did better then DeepEnigma DeepEnigma who just bailed out Instead of either Admitting he was mistaken or totally wrong.

What was I wrong about?

I did not bail, I went to bed. My world does not revolve around circular arguments of lines in the sand console war dicking. Even if tech talk does keep me engaged and interested.
 
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Dodkrake

Banned
I can't get that that video out of my head of the foot landing @ 1 minute 32 seconds. Its going to be 13.2 TF and people going crazy, yes we're higher than 12 TF. Yeah more likw 13.2 TF GCN :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Considering RDNA2 is likely an almost 50% boost over GCN, your math seems off.

And I'll take double transfer speeds than a 17% increase in resolution.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Hmmmm....

“We’ve been working super-closely with Sony for quite a long time on the storage architecture and other elements. It’s been our primary focus. But Unreal Engine 5 will be on all next-generation platforms, and so will Fortnite,” Sweeney said.

He added, “Sony has done an awesome job of architecting a great system here. It’s not just a great GPU, and they didn’t just take the latest PC hardware and upgrade to it, following the path of least resistance. The storage architecture in PlayStation 5 is far ahead of anything that you can buy in any PC for any amount of money right now. It’s great to see that sort of innovation. It’s going to help drive future PCs. They’ll see this thing ship and realize, ‘Wow, with two SSDs, we’ll have to catch up.'”

I wonder just how close Epic has been working with Sony on making the PS5. I wonder if Mark Cerny and Tim Sweeney were having plenty of meetings on what exactly the SSD speed should be and what bottlenecks to get rid of.
 

Bogroll

Likes moldy games
Considering RDNA2 is likely an almost 50% boost over GCN, your math seems off.

And I'll take double transfer speeds than a 17% increase in resolution.
I wasn't saying it was 13.2Tf and i was taking the piss laughing about it. And I'll take both as i'm buying both so don't get your knickers in a twist you sad person. Your obviously hurt by the 9.2TF-10.28TF lol.
 
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Shmunter

Member
Hmmmm....



I wonder just how close Epic has been working with Sony on making the PS5. I wonder if Mark Cerny and Tim Sweeney were having plenty of meetings on what exactly the SSD speed should be and what bottlenecks to get rid of.
Sweeney and Cerney in a jacuzzi
 

Kenpachii

Member
When it takes 30 seconds to load a game even on fast SDD it's clearly a sign of bottleneck, because with lets say 3.5 GB/s SDD you should be able to fill system ram in just a few seconds.

Tim Sweeney from Epic has more knowledge than everyone here, and even he wrote the reason why PC SDDs are slower is because of bottlenecks. They only reason why you think PC SDDs have no bottlenecks is because you dont want to accept the truth and you are willing willing to lie to yourelf, just to not admit PC technology can be sometimes worse compared to cheap consoles. Other PC "fans" are doing the same thing, so you can hear them saying the dumbest things possible like there's no 16x MSAA on consoles (the problem is MSAA is no longer supported in the majority of games even on PC).

Read what is say dude, i aint repeating myself. If you can't be bothered to read your problem.

Nobody is arguing that the i/o of the PS5 is far superior then PC has. However its not a bottleneck for PC even remotely and it won't be a bottleneck for other xbox either. Want to know how that works? start scrolling through my posts. hint EU5 is not builded for the PS5 only.

Your whole lie rambling is kinda offensive bro. Look if you don't agree u can quote me and discuss stuff, but if you come in with shit like "u lie because u can't seem to keep information straight on what i said and not" then u can fuck off straight away mate.

What your MSAA rambling has to do with anything nobody will ever know.

Anyway stop quoting me i have zero interesting fanboy wars.

PS

I don't see how anybody on the pc platform can not be hyped about EU5 demo, finally SSD's get used and details go up.
 
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ethomaz

Banned
Another Tim quote about the demo.

“[The PS5] puts a vast amount of flash memory very, very close to the processor,” says Sweeney. “So much that it really fundamentally changes the trade-offs that games can make and stream in. And that’s absolutely critical to this kind of demo”.

Nanite and that demo was build to take advantage of these custom PS5 I/O tricks.
 
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pawel86ck

Banned
Read what is say dude, i aint repeating myself. If you can't be bothered to read your problem.

Nobody is arguing that the i/o of the PS5 is far superior then PC has. However its not a bottleneck for PC even remotely and it won't be a bottleneck for other xbox either. Want to know how that works? start scrolling through my posts. hint EU5 is not builded for the PS5 only.

Your whole lie rambling is kinda offensive bro. Look if you don't agree u can quote me and discuss stuff, but if you come in with shit like "u lie because u can't seem to keep information straight on what i said and not" then u can fuck off straight away mate.

What your MSAA rambling has to do with anything nobody will ever know.

Anyway stop quoting me, rather have intelligent discussions with people that actually read my reactions and not start making shit up and insult me straight after it with there fairy tale garbage.

PS

I don't see how anybody on the pc platform can not be hyped about EU5 demo, finally SSD's get used and details go up.
UE5 is build to scale on every modern platform, but according to Tim Sweeney the level of detail is directly related to SDD speed. With current bottlenecks on PC SDD in PS5 has no match, therefore it's safe to assume the same demo would have to run with lower level of detail on PC.
 
The tech shows by Epic added triangles/details to the screen without the need of GPU rasterization.
It direct stream the data from the storage and though software rasterization (CPU?) added them to the render output.


So the demo was not about resolution but level of detail in the screen.

Being 1080p, 1440p, or 4k won’t change direct the level of detail being added by that tech... actually the tech is not related with the resolution or the render.

Due the speed of the streaming from storage you could end having less detail even at higher resolution or in the case of PS5 the max level of detail actually allowed by the storage tech with average resolution of 1440p.

Xbox and PC can render a higher resolution but with less details due the limitation of SSD actual speeds.

This was a great tech demo emphasizing 2 things:

-level of detail
-pumping out triangles
-Vast open world (flying sequence even though it was a cut scene)

Focusing only on PS5, the game could have ran on 4K @30fps (there were dips lower than 30fps in the demo) and PS5 is totally capable of that If the following were done:
-Using finished Unreal Engine 5.0
-Giving them more time
-You can have the same level of detail with adaptive tessellation, variable rate shading because its mostly due to texture work. The statues in my opinion dont need that many polygons to have the same shape, size and appearance.

RDKqDkJ.jpg


The limited tech demo was mostly about exploration and scenic environments, but you are not going to be doing that all the time in most games. You will have to fight/dodge enemies, online play with other players, local multiplayer etc. and that is taxing on the CPU and GPU and on top of that trying to maintain a resolution of 4k and framerate of constant 30fps. Then on top of that there was no Raytracing implementation which is further taxing on the CPU/GPU. How PS5 will achieve and balance all these factors has yet to be seen because this was 1440p/30fps (with dips) with barely anything going on and a cut scene at the end.


Saying that PC and Xbox Series X cannot have the same level of detail, due to the limitations of the SSD is just not true, and please dont quote Tim Sweeney and tell me to re-read it because I have already read it. To say such a thing you will need to run the same exact demo on PC and XsX to demonstrate that is actually true. That is a great projection and assumption based only on quotes and embracing them as gospel. Every developer third party or first puts their own 2 cents into hardware components to achieve their vision of a game:

-"The SSD is fast, but what really matters is the CPU"
-"The CPU is fast, but what really matters is the GPU"
-"The GPU is great, but what really matters is the SSD"

and repeat to your hearts content.
 

ethomaz

Banned
This was a great tech demo emphasizing 2 things:

-level of detail
-pumping out triangles
-Vast open world (flying sequence even though it was a cut scene)

Focusing only on PS5, the game could have ran on 4K @30fps (there were dips lower than 30fps in the demo) and PS5 is totally capable of that If the following were done:
-Using finished Unreal Engine 5.0
-Giving them more time
-You can have the same level of detail with adaptive tessellation, variable rate shading because its mostly due to texture work. The statues in my opinion dont need that many polygons to have the same shape, size and appearance.

RDKqDkJ.jpg


The limited tech demo was mostly about exploration and scenic environments, but you are not going to be doing that all the time in most games. You will have to fight/dodge enemies, online play with other players, local multiplayer etc. and that is taxing on the CPU and GPU and on top of that trying to maintain a resolution of 4k and framerate of constant 30fps. Then on top of that there was no Raytracing implementation which is further taxing on the CPU/GPU. How PS5 will achieve and balance all these factors has yet to be seen because this was 1440p/30fps (with dips) with barely anything going on and a cut scene at the end.


Saying that PC and Xbox Series X cannot have the same level of detail, due to the limitations of the SSD is just not true, and please dont quote Tim Sweeney and tell me to re-read it because I have already read it. To say such a thing you will need to run the same exact demo on PC and XsX to demonstrate that is actually true. That is a great projection and assumption based only on quotes and embracing them as gospel. Every developer third party or first puts their own 2 cents into hardware components to achieve their vision of a game:

-"The SSD is fast, but what really matters is the CPU"
-"The CPU is fast, but what really matters is the GPU"
-"The GPU is great, but what really matters is the SSD"

and repeat to your hearts content.
Well or do you believe in what Tim said or not.
You have no proof that Tim/Epic said is not true... so I will stay with what they said the level of detail scale with the storage bandwidth available.
And that is highlighted with the demo running on PS5.

“[The PS5] puts a vast amount of flash memory very, very close to the processor,” says Sweeney. “So much that it really fundamentally changes the trade-offs that games can make and stream in. And that’s absolutely critical to this kind of demo”.

It is weird to dismiss something that Epic keep saying is critical for that demo... needs a lot of mental gymnastics for that.
 
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pawel86ck

Banned
This was a great tech demo emphasizing 2 things:

-level of detail
-pumping out triangles
-Vast open world (flying sequence even though it was a cut scene)

Focusing only on PS5, the game could have ran on 4K @30fps (there were dips lower than 30fps in the demo) and PS5 is totally capable of that If the following were done:
-Using finished Unreal Engine 5.0
-Giving them more time
-You can have the same level of detail with adaptive tessellation, variable rate shading because its mostly due to texture work. The statues in my opinion dont need that many polygons to have the same shape, size and appearance.

RDKqDkJ.jpg


The limited tech demo was mostly about exploration and scenic environments, but you are not going to be doing that all the time in most games. You will have to fight/dodge enemies, online play with other players, local multiplayer etc. and that is taxing on the CPU and GPU and on top of that trying to maintain a resolution of 4k and framerate of constant 30fps. Then on top of that there was no Raytracing implementation which is further taxing on the CPU/GPU. How PS5 will achieve and balance all these factors has yet to be seen because this was 1440p/30fps (with dips) with barely anything going on and a cut scene at the end.


Saying that PC and Xbox Series X cannot have the same level of detail, due to the limitations of the SSD is just not true, and please dont quote Tim Sweeney and tell me to re-read it because I have already read it. To say such a thing you will need to run the same exact demo on PC and XsX to demonstrate that is actually true. That is a great projection and assumption based only on quotes and embracing them as gospel. Every developer third party or first puts their own 2 cents into hardware components to achieve their vision of a game:

-"The SSD is fast, but what really matters is the CPU"
-"The CPU is fast, but what really matters is the GPU"
-"The GPU is great, but what really matters is the SSD"

and repeat to your hearts content.
You dont like what Tim Sweeney has said, so you assume he must be wrong. That's the most convincing argument I have read today 😂😂👍.
 

vpance

Member
UE5 is build to scale on every modern platform, but according to Tim Sweeney the level of detail is directly related to SDD speed. With current bottlenecks on PC SDD in PS5 has no match, therefore it's safe to assume the same demo would have to run with lower level of detail on PC.

Yep

"You could render a version of this [demo on a system with an HDD], it would just be a lot lower detail," said Sweeney.

If that demo was heavily optimized to run on PS5 in the 9-22GB/s range you could assume it would look noticeably cut down on a regular SSD. Would it make sense for Epic to do that on their first showing? Probably.
 
Yes RAM can help with the buffering, but how much RAM?

Putting aside all the inconvenience of the time it would take to preload mass ram, what if the UE5 demo chewed through 100gig of streamed assets during the last 20 second flyover?

Current pc architecture making that possible just becomes beyond the reach of too many PC consumers.
You actually believe this crap don't you? Just so that you know I'm going to thoroughly enjoy your disappointment when it turns out this demo can run just fine at the same detail level or greater streaming assets off a SATA3 SSD, let alone an NVMe. I do wonder how much Tim Sweeney was paid to lie though, like all the other times he lied about upcoming consoles.
 
You dont like what Tim Sweeney has said, so you assume he must be wrong. That's the most convincing argument I have read today 😂😂👍.

In order to prove that Tim Sweeney himself is right, he or his development team has to demonstrate that is visually so. For example, if they make a Unreal 5.0 demo of XsX flexing its extra TFLOPS, Extra RAM Bandwidth, and Raytracing implementation, 4k 60fps and saying that is not achievable on any other console because they were working closely with MSFT, I would call it bullocks. You would have to demonstrate that is actually true with the same exact demo on the other console.

I know in reality we will NEVER get that. The only way we will see strengths and weaknesses in both consoles is through third party cross gen games, and this is what Unreal 5.0 will expose.
 
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VFXVeteran

Banned
Every single thing you were spouting on these forums for the past three months have been thrashed by that UE5 demo. Do you seriously expect us to believe your BS at this point? Just try saying SSDs won't affect fidelity once more here. I don't care that you can play games at 4k 60 fps on PC. Trash graphics at 4k 60 is still trash.

It's the engine that affects fidelity. I don't care what you think about me. But I'll be waiting to analyze every single PS5 game from here on out. We'll see how much of this SSD gets you better fidelity and faster rendering times.
 

MHubert

Member
You actually believe this crap don't you? Just so that you know I'm going to thoroughly enjoy your disappointment when it turns out this demo can run just fine at the same detail level or greater streaming assets off a SATA3 SSD, let alone an NVMe. I do wonder how much Tim Sweeney was paid to lie though, like all the other times he lied about upcoming consoles.
Cerny emphazised the capablilites of the ssd in the deep dive, and here you have Sweeney doubling down on those capabilities by demonstrating how it can be used with their Nanite tech. Both Series X and PS5 have to make compromises. Sony compromised the GPU so they could have a faster SSD, and MS compromised the SSD so they could have a bigger GPU and thus push out more pixels. If it's not hard to grasp that Series X can push out more pixels, then why is it somehow an unfathomable concept that PS5 can stream more data from the ssd, faster?
Can you at least admit, that the only reason you have to doubt this is by accusing them of lying?
 
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Three

Gold Member
It's the engine that affects fidelity. I don't care what you think about me. But I'll be waiting to analyze every single PS5 game from here on out. We'll see how much of this SSD gets you better fidelity and faster rendering times.
I know you're Alex and you would love to analyse these and go on and on about PC but you won't see it in third party games especially crossgen ones. Now can you at least admit that a faster drive does affect texture quality in games when traversing and asset variation?
 

Dodkrake

Banned
I wasn't saying it was 13.2Tf and i was taking the piss laughing about it. And I'll take both as i'm buying both so don't get your knickers in a twist you sad person. Your obviously hurt by the 9.2TF-10.28TF lol.

I'm not. Why would I be hurt? I play regularly on a 1.8TF console and my PC, which plays Xbox games better than the One X. 9 or 10tf is minimal. What bothered me was more stuff that can be perceived as fud.
 

pawel86ck

Banned
In order to prove that Tim Sweeney himself is right, he or his development team has to demonstrate that is visually so. For example, if they make a Unreal 5.0 demo of XsX flexing its extra TFLOPS, Extra RAM Bandwidth, and Raytracing implementation, 4k 60fps and saying that is not achievable on any other console because they were working closely with MSFT, I would call it bullocks. You would have to demonstrate that is actually true with the same exact demo on the other console.

I know in reality we will NEVER get that. The only way we will see strengths and weaknesses in both consoles is through third party cross gen games, and this is what Unreal 5.0 will expose.
Every scenario is possible, but given Tim Sweeney reputation and knowledge people can believe him for now.

It's the engine that affects fidelity. I don't care what you think about me. But I'll be waiting to analyze every single PS5 game from here on out. We'll see how much of this SSD gets you better fidelity and faster rendering times.
Where's PS5Pro? According to your sources PS5P was equally fast as XSX, however we know now it's not gonna happen, because there would be no point launchig PS5P with just 2-3 TF more.
 

Journey

Banned
Sony's strong relationship with Epic.

Riiiiiight. Cos it was Sony that gave you the opportunity to build your engine and launch Unreal Tournament in the first place and Sony that gives you the Operating system to run your programmes and tools in the first place.

All I'm really hearing is $$$$$ kerching kerching gobble gobble gobble swallow love ya Sony.


Was this your attempt at sarcasm? Tim Sweeney said so himself

From the horse's mouth:

Sweeney says the two companies have been working closely together during the development of UE5 and the PS5, ensuring that Epic’s game development tool sets for developers creating next-gen titles is optimized for the hardware that software will ultimately run on.


As for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, Sweeney isn’t saying the new Xbox won’t be able to achieve something similar; both are using custom SSDs that promise blazing speeds. But he says Epic’s strong relationship with Sony means the company is working more closely with the PlayStation creator than it does with Microsoft on this specific area.


So there you have it. I'm taking the "wait and see" approach. If everyone remembers back in 2005 when PS3 and Xbox 360 were revealed, it was Epic showing off Unreal Tournament on PS3 that was showcased at E3, if MS hadn't risked investing on a new franchise (Gears of War) we would assume that only PS3 could run Unreal Engine 3.

I want to make perfectly clear that I'm not trying to minimize the benefit of the PS5 SSD speed, I love this innovation being made to take advantage of it, especially Sony with their first party games, but lets be serious here, UE5 will run and will use the benefit of XSX SSD as well and we don't know if the SSD speed difference will make up the TF difference in XSX, they're not 2 GPUs with the same amount of horsepower with the only differentiator being the SSD speed, there are bandwidth differences, TF differences and for all we know, UE5 will do just fine with the SSD speed in XSX.

It's like having a network with 24Mpbs and another with 55Mbps, clearly the 55Mbps is ideal for streaming 4K, but the 24Mbps will stream 4K just fine as well, meanwhile you have other differentiating factors like the quality of your TV, the person using the 24Mbps has a 120cm OLED vs the person with the 55Mbps connection having a 102cm LCD, which one will have the best picture quality in the end? 🤷‍♂️ If I were a betting man, I would choose the one with the base advantage (Better TV) than rely on the streaming factor alone since there will be other content that rely on other advantages.
 

sinnergy

Member
You guys are hilarious, ninja Theory showed 2 demos, Hell Blade 2 and Project Mara, which look in the same league .
Also this is a Multi Platform engine , running on multiple platforms. It will look the same on both.

I thought only 1st party mattered?
 

Shmunter

Member
You actually believe this crap don't you? Just so that you know I'm going to thoroughly enjoy your disappointment when it turns out this demo can run just fine at the same detail level or greater streaming assets off a SATA3 SSD, let alone an NVMe. I do wonder how much Tim Sweeney was paid to lie though, like all the other times he lied about upcoming consoles.
What have you got to backup your case up except for accusing industry leaders, devs and tech analysts of being paid puppets in some grand conspiracy? Serious, they’re all in on it and you see through it because you’re gifted. Put up or shut up bro.

You know what the difference between people enthusiastic for new gen ssd and those that crap on it? The enthusiastic people actually read tech, the others look at porn instead
 
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scydrex

Member
You guys are hilarious, ninja Theory showed 2 demos, Hell Blade 2 and Project Mara, which look in the same league .
Also this is a Multi Platform engine , running on multiple platforms. It will look the same on both.

I thought only 1st party mattered?

Can you play those 2 demos?
 

sinnergy

Member
Can you play those 2 demos?
Can you ? play those and the ue5 demo ? It’s a MP engine ... what do you think ? Demonstrated by the developer, It will all be the same.
It’s all about 1st and second party.

this all looks stunning , but I look forward to Naughty Dog , 343 etc ..
 
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VFXVeteran

Banned
I know you're Alex and you would love to analyze these and go on and on about PC but you won't see it in third party games especially crossgen ones. Now can you at least admit that a faster drive does affect texture quality in games when traversing and asset variation?

You guys are completely generalistic in your claims and that's 99% because you don't know how the 3D graphics pipeline works.

I'll say it again one last time.

The SSD is a storage medium. If you have a gazillion bytes of data on it, that doesn't mean it makes the computer process more data or it's fidelity. If you have 8k, 12k, etc.. of texture data on the SSD/HDD, it just holds it. Let's first get that out of the way. The SSD, in and of itself, is NOT a integral piece of hardware like the CPU/GPU/RAM.

Now, let's look at what it does. It can be used for streaming of assets from an arbitrary graphics engine.

In order for the GPU to render each pixel on the screen at a certain resolution and at a certain framerate, it MUST be able to read from it's own internal framebuffer memory. This is an orders of magnitude higher in speed than reading directly from the SSD. In other words, I'm not going to have this kind of algorithm in my shader:

void getTexture (FilePointer aSSD, 2DCoord aUV)
{

for each pixel in a triangle
{
Color myTextureColor = aSSD.read( aUV );
}

}

That function will never be a reality. This is what you guys are trying to imply. That is unequivocally FALSE! The textures have to be read from GPU memory. In that case, the SSD is acting as a cache for the VRAM.

Can you stream high res texture sizes/several polygons into VRAM? Sure. Does the speed of the transfer allow for FAST 'asset' transfers vs. transferring from an HDD. Absolutely!

But there is way more to this than just the speed of the SSD transferring data into VRAM. The algorithm by which you measure HOW much data, HOW fast you want your target render frame to be, WHAT resolution you want to render at, etc.. ALL depends on the limitation of GPU/CPU/RAM,

In short, can an SSD play a role in the overall fidelity of a 3D image? Absolutely! Is it the main component that allows this fidelity? Absolutely NOT! It certainly helps, but it's not more important than all of the main systems that drive it (i.e. CPU/GPU).
 
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sinnergy

Member
The UE5 demo was playable.

The other two were non-playable in-engine demos... it was like the U4 in-engine demo at some previous E3.
Can you play it ? UE5 demo was played in perfect condition at the developer... just saying . I’ll wait for all the delayed E3 stuff.

it’s all the same inengine , played under perfect conditions.

we like real captured gameplay .
 

FireFly

Member
In short, can an SSD play a role in the overall fidelity of a 3D image? Absolutely! Is it the main link that allows this fidelity? Absolutely NOT! It certainly helps, but it's not more important than all of the main systems that drive it (i.e. CPU/GPU).
What does it mean for something to be the "main link"?
 

ethomaz

Banned
You guys are completely generalistic in your claims and that's 99% because you don't know how the 3D graphics pipeline works.

I'll say it again one last time.

The SSD is a storage medium. If you have a gazillion bytes of data on it, that doesn't mean it makes the computer process more data or it's fidelity. If you have 8k, 12k, etc.. of texture data on the SSD/HDD, it just holds it. Let's first get that out of the way. The SSD, in and of itself, is NOT a integral piece of hardware like the CPU/GPU/RAM.

Now, let's look at what it does. It can be used for streaming of assets from an arbitrary graphics engine.

In order for the GPU to render each pixel on the screen at a certain resolution and at a certain framerate, it MUST be able to read from it's own internal framebuffer memory. This is an orders of magnitude higher in speed than reading directly from the SSD. In other words, I'm not going to have this kind of algorithm in my shader:

void getTexture (FilePointer aSSD, 2DCoord aUV)
{

for each pixel in a triangle
{
Color myTextureColor = aSSD.read( aUV );
}

}

That function will never be a reality. This is what you guys are trying to imply. That is unequivocally FALSE! The textures have to be read from GPU memory. In that case, the SSD is acting as a cache for the VRAM.

Can you stream high res texture sizes/several polygons into VRAM? Sure. Does the speed of the transfer allow for FAST 'asset' transfers vs. transferring from an HDD. Absolutely!

But there is way more to this than just the speed of the SSD transferring data into VRAM. The algorithm by which you measure HOW much data, HOW fast you want your target render frame to be, WHAT resolution you want to render at, etc.. ALL depends on the limitation of GPU/CPU/RAM,

In short, can an SSD play a role in the overall fidelity of a 3D image? Absolutely! Is it the main component that allows this fidelity? Absolutely NOT! It certainly helps, but it's not more important than all of the main systems that drive it (i.e. CPU/GPU).
I think you missed Nanite is not using the GPU rasterizer to render the triangles coming from the storage to screen.

It uses software rasterization some (guess) probably on CPU or Async Compute.

The critical path in how many data you can send from storage.

"The vast majority of triangles are software rasterised using hyper-optimised compute shaders specifically designed for the advantages we can exploit," explains Brian Karis. "As a result, we've been able to leave hardware rasterisers in the dust at this specific task. Software rasterisation is a core component of Nanite that allows it to achieve what it does. We can't beat hardware rasterisers in all cases though so we'll use hardware when we've determined it's the faster path. On PlayStation 5 we use primitive shaders for that path which is considerably faster than using the old pipeline we had before with vertex shaders."
 
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MHubert

Member
You guys are completely generalistic in your claims and that's 99% because you don't know how the 3D graphics pipeline works.

I'll say it again one last time.

The SSD is a storage medium. If you have a gazillion bytes of data on it, that doesn't mean it makes the computer process more data or it's fidelity. If you have 8k, 12k, etc.. of texture data on the SSD/HDD, it just holds it. Let's first get that out of the way. The SSD, in and of itself, is NOT a integral piece of hardware like the CPU/GPU/RAM.

Now, let's look at what it does. It can be used for streaming of assets from an arbitrary graphics engine.

In order for the GPU to render each pixel on the screen at a certain resolution and at a certain framerate, it MUST be able to read from it's own internal framebuffer memory. This is an orders of magnitude higher in speed than reading directly from the SSD. In other words, I'm not going to have this kind of algorithm in my shader:

void getTexture (FilePointer aSSD, 2DCoord aUV)
{

for each pixel in a triangle
{
Color myTextureColor = aSSD.read( aUV );
}

}

That function will never be a reality. This is what you guys are trying to imply. That is unequivocally FALSE! The textures have to be read from GPU memory. In that case, the SSD is acting as a cache for the VRAM.

Can you stream high res texture sizes/several polygons into VRAM? Sure. Does the speed of the transfer allow for FAST 'asset' transfers vs. transferring from an HDD. Absolutely!

But there is way more to this than just the speed of the SSD transferring data into VRAM. The algorithm by which you measure HOW much data, HOW fast you want your target render frame to be, WHAT resolution you want to render at, etc.. ALL depends on the limitation of GPU/CPU/RAM,

In short, can an SSD play a role in the overall fidelity of a 3D image? Absolutely! Is it the main component that allows this fidelity? Absolutely NOT! It certainly helps, but it's not more important than all of the main systems that drive it (i.e. CPU/GPU).
I don't think anyone disagrees with you. People are talking about how fast you can transfer assets from ssd to vram, which seems to be the underlying concept behind the Nanite tech. No one is saying that GPU power won't matter.
 
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ethomaz

Banned
Can you play it ? UE5 demo was played in perfect condition at the developer... just saying . I’ll wait for all the delayed E3 stuff.

it’s all the same inengine , played under perfect conditions.

we like real captured gameplay .
Yes it is playable lol
It was a demo for GDC... to people try it.
 

ethomaz

Banned
Nanite has to get the triangles to the GPU. Only the GPU evaluates the triangle and renders pixels within it.
That is not what Epic is saying...
Maybe you should ask or talk with them because they even said it won’t affect GPU performance.
The GPU only add them to the render... the processing of these triangles are done by software running on CPU or Async Compute.
 
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VFXVeteran

Banned
I don't think anyone disagrees with you. People are talking about how fast you can transfer assets from ssd to vram, which seems to be the underlying concept behind the Nanite tech.

I don't think it's as critical as people think it is. We have no real data to determine that. I have no idea how much data is being transferred to VRAM from the SSD. I have no idea how little VRAM (or how much) VRAM is needed for the detail levels seen in that demo. For all we know, it could easily NOT be streamed and stored in VRAM mostly with only a few fetches here and there for change of scenary. For example, the SSD might have loaded all of those statues into VRAM taking up a mere 4G of VRAM for that entire level and you just see the character moving around in that room and the workload is from VRAM to GPU while the SSD just sits there waiting for the next scene to load in.
 

BadBurger

Is 'That Pure Potato'
There more info comes out, the more I am thinking about preordering a console (PS5) to get at midnight release for the first time ever.

That is if Gamestop or Bestbuy even still exists after the worst of this pandemic passes.
 
Can you at least admit, that the only reason you have to doubt this is by accusing them of lying?
...because nobody marketing a product has ever lied about it...never happened...ever...
The fact that many of you cannot see this for the bought and paid for marketing spin it is tells me that it was genius. I doubt their claims because unlike many in the console space I have actual hands on experience with SSDs. I know what their strengths are, and what their weaknesses are. I can point to scenarios where they can outpace a HDD by 50x...for a short while anyway...and ones where the margins are more like 2x...regardless of theoretical bandwidth limits.

SSDs are not magic bullets. They have their limits. No amount of Sony secret sauce is going to change the fact that unless you're doing continuous sequential reads and writes of large, singular, files, the controller is going to bog down, the DRAM cache is going to fill, and the drive is going to get hot...and when any one of those things happen...POOF...your theoretical limits don't mean jack shit.
 

FireFly

Member
I worded that wrong. It means the main component in the subsystem that drives the performance and overall fidelity of a rendered image.
Ok, so I think this is compatable with the claim, that within a certain performance context, faster data transfer speeds will allow for higher image fidelity. As I understand it, the whole philosophy behind UE5 is that GPUs are already capabable of rendering much greater geometric density than we have been able to feed them. So as long as this continues to be the case, increasing the transfer speed will allow us to increase the fidelity of the image.
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
That is not what Epic is saying...
Maybe you should ask or talk with them because they even said it won’t affect GPU performance.
The GPU only add them to the render... the processing of these triangles are done by software running on CPU or Async Compute.

Everything affects GPU performance. If that was the case, this demo should have run at 8k/60FPS. Point me to where they talk about the GPU being a non-factor.
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
Ok, so I think this is compatable with the claim, that within a certain performance context, faster data transfer speeds will allow for higher image fidelity. As I understand it, the whole philosophy behind UE5 is that GPUs are already capabable of rendering much greater geometric density than we have been able to feed them. So as long as this continues to be the case, increasing the transfer speed will allow us to increase the fidelity of the image.

I don't think so. If that were the case, we'd have seen that demo run much much faster at a higher resolution. I do know that the resolution determines that nanite tech as it's trying to render a 1 pixel to 1 triangle target. Simply adding more pixels would have made the PS5 choke in framerate.
 
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pyrocro

Member
You had this quoted....

Anyway, wouldn't expect him back anytime soon! Ha
Im saying what you said has nothing todo with my post or his quote in my post.
The tech shows by Epic added triangles/details to the screen without the need of GPU rasterization.
It direct stream the data from the storage and though software rasterization (CPU?) added them to the render output.

So the demo was not about resolution but level of detail in the screen.

Being 1080p, 1440p, or 4k won’t change direct the level of detail being added by that tech... actually the tech is not related with the resolution or the render.

Due the speed of the streaming from storage you could end having less detail even at higher resolution or in the case of PS5 the max level of detail actually allowed by the storage tech with average resolution of 1440p.

Xbox and PC can render a higher resolution but with less details due the limitation of SSD actual speeds.
Source for the no need for GPU rasterization, please.
 

MHubert

Member
I don't think it's as critical as people think it is. We have no real data to determine that. I have no idea how much data is being transferred to VRAM from the SSD. I have no idea how little VRAM (or how much) VRAM is needed for the detail levels seen in that demo. For all we know, it could easily NOT be streamed and stored in VRAM mostly with only a few fetches here and there for change of scenary. For example, the SSD might have loaded all of those statues into VRAM taking up a mere 4G of VRAM for that entire level and you just see the character moving around in that room and the workload is from VRAM to GPU while the SSD just sits there waiting for the next scene to load in.
It could, but everything we know about Nanite so far seems to imply that fast data streaming is essential, be it from a large pool of ram (obviously preferable) or an optimised ssd solution.
 

Thirty7ven

Banned
I don't think so. If that were the case, we'd have seen that demo run much much faster at a higher resolution. I do know that the resolution determines that nanite tech as it's trying to render a 1 pixel to 1 triangle target. Simply adding more pixels would have made the PS5 choke in framerate.

Yup, makes sense that 1440p is a target the hardware was comfortable with.

Do you think that Pixel rate and Texel rate in GPUs in tech like nanite will be a big factor in performance? It would gel with the idea that AMD will be pushing clocks in their next cards, as I think PS5 high clock is really just the beginning and we will see PC GPUs, at least from AMD, hitting higher frequencies than that.
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
It could, but everything we know about Nanite so far seems to imply that fast data streaming is essential, be it from a large pool of ram (obviously preferable) or an optimised ssd solution.

I don't disagree with that. But the way the PS guys are reacting is completely overblown. I'm sure this UE5 demo will be able to run equal or even better fidelity on a high-end PC. I also think the Xbox guys have nothing to worry about.
 
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