• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

How long will mechanical disks on PC be a bottleneck now consoles have SSD as standard?

Self

Member
At this point I belive that people deliberately cling to debunked rumors to justify their claims :messenger_grinning_sweat:

k1t4KR1.gif
 
Last edited:
SSD has a LONG ways to go in terms of price per GB/TV and to replace HDs as primary storage. But as access drives I guess this is a legit Q... 🤔
 

killatopak

Gold Member
Enthusiast people in an enthusiast forum claiming they have enthusiast spec PC.

Screen_Shot_2018-10-25_at_11.02.15_AM.png


Here I am playing Valorant with a min spec of a Core 2 Duo, Intel HD 4000 and most likely an HDD.

There is no bottleneck in terms of hardware for PC. It has always been the games that define the requirements.

The problem with this thought process is thinking that every PC user will somehow upgrade to SSD instantly when required too. Things are always gradual in the PC landscape. There’s no hivemind that forces everyone to upgrade.

The difference with console and PC has always been consoles are fixed hardware where everyone gets the same thing while PC is fragmented.

 

cormack12

Gold Member
Can't they just make SSDs a recommended spec and any without it are subject to longer loads, downgraded visuals etc

They can - but then the question persists, why haven't they already done so with games that are PC only? Games like Total War Troy wouldn't benefit from design to production targeting an SSD given the amount of complexity in there? Of course it would. You get loading benefits if you play Total War on a PC with an SSD over a 7200rpm HDD but you don't get the under the hood benefits that could have been realised if they abandoned the HDD as the base component. They still target standard HDD because it's the market.


What a nothingburger. Any PC worth its salt in 2020 has an SSD. Hell, I was a HDD holdout for a long time (and I still put most of my games on a 4TB HDD...it's just more economical), but even I bit the bullet and got an SSD a while ago.

You're missing the point. PC Gamers are not the same as people who play games on their PC. There are a number of people who play with these components (and backed up by steam survey). Most of you of this in this thread with this mindset have two clairvoyant arguments (with no data), which amount to:

  • Pffft, any PC Gamer has an SSD anyway
  • Well, even I upgraded and everyone I know has an SSD

You'e not even taking into account player demographics. For example, Konami stalled PES next gen engines for a few years because their largest target is Latin America. Places like Brazil would take significantly more time to get PS4 saturation due to economic/pricing reasons. So they targeted the PS3 as their base hardware without moving on (edit: added source)

This is according to PES Europe’s community manager Adam Bhatti, speaking on Twitter.

“Not in the business for high-res next-gen ports,” he wrote. “We can’t and shouldn’t do that. Bad habit etc. The fact we’re not on PS4 or Xbox One with PES 2014 is simple: we can’t and shouldn’t be just using higher quality textures etc should be new.

“In the past people accused us of being lazy. We’re adamant of not making the same mistakes, and making sure we create amazing football games. It’s hardly amazing making the next-gen version prettier. We shouldn’t have that mentality, and you shouldn’t expect that. Aim higher.

“I think it’s important to remember our biggest markets, where we are number one [Latin America and Asia] won’t shift to next-gen as quick as Europe. We can’t just leave our most passion fans behind. Besides, the quality of the current version is high enough.”

“I’m a gamer like you, [and] can’t wait for next-gen, so I feel your pain. But once u see PES 2014 in action, that pain will disappear. It’s stunning.”



You're free to point out the problems with the steam survey (i.e. opt in only, no referential integrity etc) but it still a conclusion reached on the back of available data. Which is more compelling than 'thoughts in my head/anecdotal evidence'. The question still perists for all of you - if SSD is a standard right now and such a non-issue why aren't PC only games designed with that as the min req?

I don't know why this is so hard to understand for people who are technical enough to build PC's but can't understand plain English. Mechnical HDD will be the weakest I/O component next gen.

  • Cross-gen games will be held back by jaguar CPU and 5400rpm console drives first.
  • When games are no longer console cross-gen, the weakest I/O component will be standard HDD on PC.
  • Developers can choose to abandon this, if they wish (but PC developers haven't so far).
Having said that UE5/Nanite is scalable, it will work with spinning disks, but they will have to use less detailed assets. So PC with SSD will still 'look' better, but they are the reason we will still have Cal Kestis crawling through narrow passages every 10 minutes in game. It's not hard to understand or grasp. PC base component will hold back the design of games, not the visuals.
 
Last edited:

cormack12

Gold Member
Biggest problem of it is fact, that it always happen on my laptop where I have steam used only as communicator, because it can't run any games.

And that's fine - it's a limitation of the dataset, it's still going to be difficult to extrapolate an exact modifier for outliers but as long as it's acknowledged to contextualise the data there's not an issue. As we also have to acknowledge those who don't opt-in with big rigs. But conclusion based on data will always be more compelling than anecdotal and assumptions.
 

killatopak

Gold Member
And you're assuming (incorrectly) that people who play games on their PC are playing the latest AAA titles. They're not. Modern AAA titles are the domain of PC Gamers not people who play games on their PC.
That’s exactly why consoles remains the priority in any AAA game. They are a known quantity.
 

cormack12

Gold Member
And you're assuming (incorrectly) that people who play games on their PC are playing the latest AAA titles. They're not. Modern AAA titles are the domain of PC Gamers not people who play games on their PC.

I don't know what point you're trying to make, sorry?

That PC gamers playing older games are happy with PC effects/BC? I'd still contest that - is there a PC gamer who wouldnt want a GTA IV remake for example? Despite the benefits they get with mods, upscaling and post processing?

Alternatively, if you're saying that most of those playing new AAA titles are the ones who will be upgrading their machines and so they are 'ready', then yeah I'd agree. But not all of them. Because we go back to 'If they were, why aren't those developers - in fact, with PC it's even worse - why didn't they bleed the support for HDD a few years ago?'

Why still target HDD with games like TW:Troy or Flight Sim? Why is TW:Troy still targeting a 5/6 year old video card? Val0rant is brand new and targets a 5 year old graphics card. Bleeding edge on PC is the biggest waste of money - however, if you have that money it's yours do what you want with it. It's your hobby etc. I'm not judging - just saying you make up such a tiny minority of the PC market that you're hardware is never going to be 'taxed'. You're trying to brute force the mainstream game design to make it look prettier. No matter how good your PC is, it can't overcome the max number of NPC's that were put it into a game, it can't discard crawlspaces, it can't generate more models on the fly.

Publishers and developers wouldn't waste time on it, if it wasn't worth the investment.

You need to distance yourself away from the platform - no one is pointing the finger saying you specifically are a bottleneck, but the I/O subsystem will be a baseline for development and that will reside in the PC space. Unless devs abandon it. On the other hand, devs can guarantee every console has an SSD.
 
Last edited:

Self

Member
Hilarious!
Most of you of this in this thread with this mindset have two clairvoyant arguments (with no data), which amount to:

  • Pffft, any PC Gamer has an SSD anyway
  • Well, even I upgraded and everyone I know has an SSD

Yes, I seriously doubt this claims.
As long as there is no actual data to back them up I remain confident that the bottleneck issues is not addressed.

Can someone comment on the RAM-fix solution?
Is it legit?
RAM is cheap, right?

I mean, just stack 128 GB RAM under the hood and things will be fine, right? Initially I thought it would be straight forward approach, but something seems fishy about that approach too.
 
Last edited:

cormack12

Gold Member
Yes, I seriously doubt this claims.
As long as there is no actual data to back them up I remain confident that the bottleneck issues is not addressed.

Can someone comment on the RAM-fix solution?
Is it legit?
RAM is cheap, right?

I mean, just stack 128 GB RAM under the hood and things will be fine, right? Initially I thought it would be straight forward approach, but something seems fishy about that approach too.


It's still brute forcing but that's meant to address the issue of PC's being able to move the same amount of data as the PS5, as quickly. This is more of a side issue as generic SSD will be fast enough in the vast majority of cases, and will be the target, I think. If Cerny is accurate then the PS5 can move the most data (i.e. the highest amount of high detail assets) the quickest. So you might see something like PS5 using some 4k textures and lots of 8k textures and some movie assets, whereas standard PC might be some 2K textures and lots of 4k textures and no movie assets. At this point, yeah PC players can stick a load of RAM in and use that in the same way the SSD is being leveraged (provided it's supported - I've no idea if this would be a native benefit or whether the game needs to know it can use it as extra cache etc. this is just the broad theory. I'm sure there will be driver support for this, if not already)

But, adding RAM doesn't change the fact that when making Jedi: Fallen Order 2 compatibility and design will be built around that 7200rpm disk. So they still have to cater for that in the game. Dumping assets, winding corridors etc. are all required because of slow mechnical disks. Until devs abandon it, they are here to stay.

Having said that, we're talking about probably two years away before this becomes an issue.
 
Last edited:
why didn't they bleed the support for HDD a few years ago?'
That's like saying why don't they add support for SSDs. They don't need to add or remove support for anything. A HDD is just a storage format. Games will continue to "support" HDDs for as long as HDDs continue to exist as a current storage format (and whether you like it or not HDDs are still very current, what they lack in speed they make up for in sheer capacity).

Why still target HDD with games like TW:Troy or Flight Sim?
Because neither would benefit all that much from requiring an SSD.

Why is TW:Troy still targeting a 5/6 year old video card?
Because it belongs to a genre of games that is infamously CPU bottlenecked and therefore cannot properly utilize a modern GPU to its fullest potential.

Val0rant...
Val0rant is free to play tripe.
 
Last edited:

killatopak

Gold Member
The point being...that free to play stuff nearly always targets low-end hardware...like really low-end.
I mean that’s exactly the reason why I think PC is holding back not only the consoles but even PC users themselves.

Shit the first two years I was playing League of Legends, a game with a very low min spec, I still can’t run it past 30fps on the lowest settings. I was on sub 20fps. It was a garbage PC. What do you think I’ll improve first, CPU, GPU, RAM, Motherboard, or Storage? Storage was the very last thing on my mind and even now that is still the case.

For enthusiast and even just mid spec users, it’ll be pretty easy to transition to SSD. That’s not the case for everyone else.
 
I mean that’s exactly the reason why I think PC is holding back not only the consoles but even PC users themselves.

Shit the first two years I was playing League of Legends, a game with a very low min spec, I still can’t run it past 30fps on the lowest settings. I was on sub 20fps. It was a garbage PC. What do you think I’ll improve first, CPU, GPU, RAM, Motherboard, or Storage? Storage was the very last thing on my mind and even now that is still the case.

For enthusiast and even just mid spec users, it’ll be pretty easy to transition to SSD. That’s not the case for everyone else.
But again...if you don't even reach the bar for "mid-spec" (by which you actually probably mean entry level...hardly mid-spec) you aren't playing modern AAA titles. If you can't even get 20FPS in LoL then you DEFINITELY aren't playing modern AAA titles...and developers aren't targeting users with such shitty machines. Your example is disingenuous as all hell.
 

cormack12

Gold Member
That's like saying why don't they add support for SSDs. They don't need to add or remove support for anything. A HDD is just a storage format. Games will continue to "support" HDDs for as long as HDDs continue to exist as a current storage format (and whether you like it or not HDDs are still very current, what they lack in speed they make up for in sheer capacity).

Why still target HDD with games like TW:Troy or Flight Sim?


Because it belongs to a genre of games that is

I think you're conflating compatibility with design. An SSD has clear benefits if you design your game from the ground up for it. You're still looking at an SSD that you bung in and gives you a performance boost. Let's take an example of how it could work in Fallen Order 2 (which fits your example of AAA)

So the developers decide to develop solely for SSD. Cal gets to the top of Tattoine and then opens a shortcut to the base. Hey, we don't need to care about ditching assets any more, we're not bothered about HDD so just turn around and climb down the side of the cliff instead of having a windy tunnel to squeeze through. Cool. Let's release. I'll pop that in my PC with 7200rpm drive. Oh shit, it's not instant, I don't have an instruction to ditch all that shit and reload. It's not going to just magically generate a loading screen because it's on a slower disk. So, you tell me - what happens here?

Devs go back to the drawing board and decide actually we'll just stick the winding corridor in anyway because then those with HDD can play as well. And it works on SSD as well. Upshot, you get home, stick the game in and you have to go through that winding corridor even though you wouldn't need to. If your SSD is so quick why does it take Cal the same ten seconds to traverse that corridor on all platforms? Because it's designed with the time of the slowest component in mind.


I mean, I can't explain it any simpler than that. Even my cats understand it. You're going to have to explain specifically what you don't understand about it.

You are in the same boat as us despite being on a different platform. It's just the slowest component will belong in your platform space in the near future. Same as all of us who stuck SSD in our consoles but played games designed around the 5400rpm notebook drive.



The point being...that free to play stuff nearly always targets low-end hardware...like really low-end.

So you're proving your own point. Developers/Publishers have targeted the largest install base. This isn't rocket science. Until you can give us an example of a top tier mainstream game (i.e. not even Star Citizen mandates an SSD) that has cut support for HDD then you're just going to have to accept it, even if it makes you sad. We can debate specific games all day - Serious Sam 4: 6 year old gfx card, 10 year old CPU?, HDD.



But again...if you don't even reach the bar for "mid-spec" (by which you actually probably mean entry level...hardly mid-spec) you aren't playing modern AAA titles. If you can't even get 20FPS in LoL then you DEFINITELY aren't playing modern AAA titles...and developers aren't targeting users with such shitty machines. Your example is disingenuous as all hell.

You are the one being disingenuous, you've fallen back to a point that cannot be proven and has no data and are hiding behind it. You are basically saying that any AAA cross platform developer, should appeal to this unevidenced demograph in your head. That all PC gamers playing the latest titles have SSD - so the onus on you is to evidence that now. Otherwise your point/stance has no merit being debated.

To put it simply for you:

Your argument: The HDD component in PC's won't hold back game design because everyone who plays AAA titles has an SSD
Counter argument: Plenty of developers with PC only titles still support HDD (even star citizen), so the game design is tied to that component. There is no data to support the bolded claim. If developers are still designing their games with a mechanical disk as the base I/O and don't advocate for SSD after Gen 8 is no longer supports, that component will be in the PC platform space and be the lowest I/O baseline.
 
Last edited:

Armorian

Banned
SSD will become a requirement in 2021.

Or a lot of RAM so after long loading everything will be in memory (32GB). PC games ditched 32 bit OSs very quickly this gen so same will happen with HDDs. SATA SSDs will be in minimum specs.
 
Last edited:

kuncol02

Banned
In very same moment crossgen games ends all new AAA games will require SSD same way Star Citizen require it to be playable. In theory it works, but with heavy stuttering.
 

Thirty7ven

Banned
Or a lot of RAM so after long loading everything will be in memory (32GB). PC games ditched 32 bit OSs very quickly this gen so same will happen with HDDs. SATA SSD's will be in minimum specs.

Anybody with 32 GB of ram in their PC has a SSD.
 

killatopak

Gold Member
But again...if you don't even reach the bar for "mid-spec" (by which you actually probably mean entry level...hardly mid-spec) you aren't playing modern AAA titles. If you can't even get 20FPS in LoL then you DEFINITELY aren't playing modern AAA titles...and developers aren't targeting users with such shitty machines. Your example is disingenuous as all hell.
The point is they aren’t excluded from PC because they bring in money. Just like how the first few years of next gen will still have cross gen games.

They are shackles to advancing game design. By definition they are a bottleneck.

Where are multitude of PC only games that advance game design significantly? Why are they stuck still supporting less than ideal PCs? An example earlier was Total War. Why are they still supporting HDD?
 
Last edited:

Self

Member
You are in the same boat as us despite being on a different platform. It's just the slowest component will belong in your platform space in the near future.

Very good point. Thank you.

I guess many PC gamers feel buthurt because the HDD issue is happening in there 'space'. And yeah, I admit I also thought along these lines.

Console gamer als well as PC enthusiasts will suffer from these bottlenecks.
 
Last edited:
Oh shit, it's not instant, I don't have an instruction to ditch all that shit and reload. It's not going to just magically generate a loading screen because it's on a slower disk. So, you tell me - what happens here?
What happens is that you decide to stop relying on naively pulling your assets off the SSD in a manner that makes the game break instantly if it fails for *any* reason (which could well just as well be a random I/O error...you know, the kind of thing that happens all the time without you noticing because people don't develop their software naively like you're suggesting) and start streaming in assets into RAM just before you need them...as we have been doing for a long time. It has worked fine and will continue to do so.

Developers/Publishers have targeted the largest install base.
Yes. Free to play developers do that. You'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't. Last I checked though Val0rant isn't something like Red Dead Redemption 2 though, which can make full use of a 2080Ti.

Until you can give us an example of a top tier mainstream game (i.e. not even Star Citizen mandates an SSD) that has cut support for HDD
Again...you can't cut support. The OS handles that. The game cannot decide what it will or will not run on. The user does that when they decide what to install it on.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
blah blah
TL;DR > You decided to cut off stuff with slightly worse performance than the consoles that haven't even launched yet, is completely ignoring the obvious fact that very few people will buy the absolutely most powerful hardware when that really isn't used yet for the any of the games we have today, is ignoring the alternatives that exist to compensate for slower SSDs and is still considering the survey unreliable because you decided you knew better than the tech people at valve on how statistics work. And lets not forget we're still basing ourselves on imaginary requirements for imaginary games that we still have no clue about.

But hey, if you need to write an entire essay to justify getting a PS5 for yourself go ahead, whatever makes you feel more confortable. Personally, i'm more than happy with my modest non-master, non-RTX ready PC since most AAA games are a borefest to me anyway.
 
Last edited:

Jayjayhd34

Member
I guess it falls on to me to do it – some people just can’t be honest with themselves. We’ll be using the Xbox Series X as baseline hardware (aka minimum reqs) because it’s the easiest to emulate with off-the-shelf PC parts. Here’s what that limited, opt-in only survey as of May 2020 tells us.

Steam Survey - click here.

And before you ask why not use Sony’s PS5 as baseline? Because Sony’s nontraditional use of clocks, + the custom hardware and super charged I/O and SSD make sustained performance as a whole unpredictable and unknown. Now you can strongly believe and think adding a component here or there could make a significant statistical difference but as you’ll eventually conclude after reading the walls of text below, it does not in the slightest.

Anyway, minimum reqs are a package of components that must all be present in a configuration so that we can properly match performance to fixed console hardware. Example: You can’t have an equivalent performing CPU, GPU, and RAM but be missing an NVMe Drive yet claim an old Sata SSD is equivalent as a data streamer. It doesn’t work that way. Only components that provide equal or higher performance can only be taken taking into account. Components that are close to equivalent but provide lesser performance are in effect underperforming and thus defacto holding back the baseline hardware (The Xbox Series X).

Lets start:

GPU:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER – 1.34%(gift)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 – 1.72% (gift)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 – 0.95% - baseline (MSRP: $800)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 ti – 0.79%
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER – 0.55%

Total: 5.35% of PC Gaming users surveyed are comfortably ready for next gen GPU Wise.

Thus we can conclude that 94% of PC gaming users surveyed do NOT have a capable and equivalent GPU to match the next-gen baseline. In other words, 94% of those surveyed will have to upgrade by November 2020, in 2021 or in 2022 or be left in the dust, and it won’t be cheap, not even with “discounts”.

Now don’t be surprised at these numbers and the numbers that will follow for other components because the price for those cards tell you everything and ALL you need to know about why adoption is so low. Feel free to google.

CPU (gift) :

As for CPU’s; we don’t have individual data for specific components but instead generalized data on cores and frequencies used which gives us literally nothing to work with. Even using blindly the flawed metric (as presented) tells us that the majority are woefully not ready. There is too much variation in performance within that data that makes it impossible for us to speculate the potential amount of AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (baseline - around $270) and Intel Core i5-9600k users within that survey.

Thus the only thing I can do to help the argument of the opposing view is to equate the same percentage of GPU equivalent adoption with CPU equivalent adoption.

In short: 6% are ready. I’m doing this as a helpful gift and not giving any thought to conventional wisdom which tell us that PC gamers cycle and upgrade GPU’s at a faster rate than CPU’s (because it’s less costly – and doesn’t require a motherboard upgrade). In other words, in all likelihood, if we had the numbers, next-gen ready, baseline matching CPU percentages would be lower than GPU percentages. Considering the mainstay of all old graphic card like GTX 1060 (and lower), most PC gamers are probably running on a CPU released around the same time (2016-2017-2018).

Thus we come to the conclusion that out of that survey, 94% of PC gaming users DO NOT have a capable and equivalent CPU.

Storage/ I/O:

Ohh boy….

Now the big question: How many PC gamers today own an NVMe 4.0 SSD? The answer to that is obvious: extremely, extremely few. Of those, how many own one that can push an I/O throughput of 2.4GB Raw/4.8 GBs compressed?

The closest on the market is a Sabrent 1TB NVMe 4.0 at $200.

How many PC gamers, even if they wanted and had the money to acquire said NVMe SSD would not only have to contend with the upgrade of a new SSD but also a new motherboard because it’s not ready to support it (due to slot space or bottlenecked architecture etc)? Thus the problem here is an avalanche of compounding costs (not cheap at all).

Now you ask, how in hell did you come up with the idea that few PC gamers have an NVMe 4.0 capable set up? Same rationale as with the lack of concise data for a CPU. By looking at the GPU usage data, we can extrapolate the date and motherboards in use for the overwhelming majority of users (90-94% or so). We just then use the date of the new NVMe 4.0 SSDs released in the market and it all falls into place.

So we’re in the same position as with the CPU here. Just that in this case, the adoption rate to an equivalent SSD can be safely speculated to be even lower.

There is no velocity architecture at work here either. As for the PS5, well let just say it’s better not to dwell on that beast as initially prefaced.

In short: PC gamers are ABSOLUTELY not ready on the SSD front given this survey. Any SSD won't do for the sake of the argument.

RAM:

RAM paints a better picture for the opposing view.

16 GBs of RAM or better can be found in 48% of user rigs surveyed (with 7.7% of that 48% being above). However we all know the devil is always in the details and not all RAM is equal. We do not get data on clock frequency unfortunately. It’s safe to say however, that out of that 48%, a number of the users surveyed are running with lower frequency RAM compared to the baseline (XSX).

This is the least costly area of an upgrade process, ranging from $50-100 to get equivalence.

Thus, between 52 -60% of those users surveyed have, in some way or another, a need to upgrade their RAM to get up to par.

MOTHERBOARD:

This is where it all falls apart for that survey. There is no data here.

What we know for sure is that given the need for 90-94% or so of the users surveyed to at least have a need for an upgrade; more than likely it will require a new motherboard (especially if the CPU is your problem or if it’s a combination of components).

To get to an equivalent for the Series X, using AMD Ryzen 7 boards as the baseline this can range between $120 (good luck) - $450 and above for enthusiast models.

-------------------------------------------

There are obviously other costs like a PC case, fans etc that bump the price up. In short, if you want to be next gen ready, you should probably have saved that stimulus check, and beg the turtle Mitch McConnell to approve another one. Frankly, just buy a god damn console.

Conclusions:

Based on this limited data, as of May of 2020, of a limited - opt in survey (of which we have no idea how many participants took part) tells us that PC Gamers are woefully unprepared to sit on November 2020 at the same table with future next-gen console owners. Using the slow variation in upgrade % for components in this data tells us that PC gamers upgrade at a constant but extremely snail-like pace (0.3%-2%) - progressively, and not drastically in jumps. PC users do not behave like console users on the cusp of a new generation who buy-in and rush en masse to adopt hardware.

Even if we were to be generous by doubling, or tripling the rate of percentage change (upgrades) on PC (due to incentive of new minimum reqs by devs); it still would be too low a number, too slow to outpace, match, or keep within striking distance next-gen console adoption. Not mention, it’s consoles who are dragging PC gaming forward, and not the other way around. Why the snail pace? PC gaming is becoming prohibitively expensive.

Making the educated guess that by the end of 2021 there will be roughly at least 10 million next-gen consoles (in user hands) tells us that PC users for at least the very the first year of this next gen cycle will be, without a doubt, holding back console hardware and its advances – and are defacto, the lowest common denominator. This is all the result of the quality of hardware that’s shipping with next gen consoles, the custom chips that help achieve optimal performance by removing bottlenecks and the consumer friendly pricing to be expected (or in other words, the high cost PC users will face when upgrading to an equivalent set-up).

Now of course I wasn't a proponent of using this data, as I think it's devoid of details, and too limited in sample size. For us to have truly representative data, Steam would have to profile every concurrent PC gamer in the span of 1 fiscal year, release yearly data, be detailed components wise, and must do this through data mining not as an opt-in survey but as part of Steams TOS (to include as much data as possible).

Now of course there will be those who will still be myopic about reality and come in and claim that they spent 3k on their rig, have a ferrari parked outside their homes and that they’ll smoke consoles, barbeque them etc…. that’s a cool story and all but you know there’s the door out…

4bUV7Ls.gif


Your whole augments destroyed by one simple fact. Majority of pc gamers are not aiming for 4k...
 

Helios

Member
There's too much concern over hardware that some, quite frankly, don't have any interest for.
It's just more fuel to the console warring machine. Except now they've moved over to PC. It happens at the beginning of every consoles cycle but this might be the most unbearable one I've seen yet. I genuinely feel like these people don't play games, they play shilling their consoles. They than play console exclusives, not because they enjoy them, but because now they have something to justify their purchase on mongolian basket weaving forums.
I'll give OP the benefit of the doubt that while the title was clickbaity he seemed to be asking in good faith.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
Your whole augments destroyed by one simple fact. Majority of pc gamers are not aiming for 4k...
Yeah, i feel like some of the people in console circles think PC gamers are all involved with master race stuff. I'm more than happy to run games at 1080p 30fps, although 60 fps can be nice. Most games i enjoy don't even need powerful hardware in the first place.
 
For the handful of people spreading FUD about SSD's and how PC is doomed... Do any of you guys have a ps5 or XSX, currently in your living room? Serious question. If not, do you at least have evidence to back up your nefarious claims? If not, what is the point of talking out the ass with literally nothing to prove?
 

Jayjayhd34

Member
Yeah, i feel like some of the people in console circles think PC gamers are all involved with master race stuff. I'm more than happy to run games at 1080p 30fps, although 60 fps can be nice. Most games i enjoy don't even need powerful hardware in the first place.

Me personally I'm gaming 4K 30fps-60fps, however that's the beauty of PC gaming CHOICE. We are not dictated by what resolution a developer chooses.
 
Last edited:

Guilty_AI

Member
Me personally I'm gaming 4K 30fps-60fps, however that's the beauty of PC gaming CHOICE. We are not dictated by what resolution a developer chooses.
And you can fuck the game up to run it on a potatoe if an old PC is all you can afford to have. I have good memories of forcing GTA SA to run on an PC made up of used old parts at my grandmother's house.
EDIT: aaand i just rememberd how she admonished me for playing an "evil game" when she found out about it. Perhaps not that good of a memory
 
Last edited:

cormack12

Gold Member
What happens is that you decide to stop relying on naively pulling your assets off the SSD in a manner that makes the game break instantly if it fails for *any* reason (which could well just as well be a random I/O error...you know, the kind of thing that happens all the time without you noticing because people don't develop their software naively like you're suggesting) and start streaming in assets into RAM just before you need them...as we have been doing for a long time. It has worked fine and will continue to do so.

Right ok, I see now. We're coming at this from different perspectives which is where the fundamental disagreement lies.

So, in your response you're talking about precaching assets which is done now. Where the assets are loaded from the HDD into RAM for everything that can be encountered in the next 30 seconds for example? If games were being rendered like that, then yes stuffing an arseload of RAM will allow you to hold more assets. Quickly accessible etc. But then you're just shifting the requirement from SSD to xxx amount of RAM.


I'm talking about why the need for SSD has arisen from both console makers. So, what you're saying in response to my example is:

Cal gets to the top of the cliff. It doesn't matter how he gets down because all the assets that are needed have been preloaded into RAM and are ready to go (from HDD or SSD). The only bottleneck here is how much RAM developers decide is the mininum threshold as their window to dump and refresh. It doesn't matter if he jumps off the edge because if he turns round quickly or the camera rotates mid fall, the rest of that asset only needs to be fetched from RAM where it already is.


But that's where the change for next gen comes in with Nanite and UE5. It will be going open source next year and other developers will adopt their own versions of it into their engines when that happens. It's too efficient and impressive not to. So, why will developers be keen to adopt this into their own engines - workflow/time benefits are huge, and it allows you to make better use of the RAM for what's immediately in view. An 80,000 Lara Croft polygon model, now becomes a 33 million polygon model - that detail improvement is insane.


So for next gen, this is how I'm looking at the example:

Cal gets to the top of the cliff. Everything in view is very high fidelity. Nothing off screen is rendered, it's been dropped/culled which is why so much extra detail is able to be packed into the camera view. Only partial assets are in memory. So Cal jumps off the cliff, none of those assets are in memory so they need to be fetched. The detail level of those assets is determined by the throughput. There is not enough time to go back to a mechical HDD and load them onto the SSD or RAM unless you use low quality/lesser size asssets.

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


So, you can stick a load of RAM in the machine to brute force the traditional workflow but you'll still be stuck with the limitations of polycounts and a min spec of RAM - you won't be able to benefit from those high(er) quality assets streaming in. That might be a decent enough level of fidelity for some people though, and some developers may still support the traditional methods. We just don't know. If developers choose to support this model then yes, the mechanical disk will hold back the asset fidelity across the entire game because you will still be using LOD models etc.


Mechanical disks in next gen rendering won't hold console games back as the engine will scale, but you will have lower quality assets - this will affect the people on PC who use mechanical HDDs still of which we don't and probably won't have exact numbers. So it's an unknown, but it doesn't really matter except to say the consoles will be able to pull in assets as quickly as PCs with SSD and Sony are saying their specific implementation will eclipse what PC can do in the immediate/short term which remains to be proven.
 

skneogaf

Member
Surely not every game benefits in a game play changing way when using an ssd in a way that streams assets in a way that removes loading.
 

cormack12

Gold Member
I'm guessing eventually SSDs will be listed in the "minimum system requirements".

Yeah, exactly and I think the ultimate part of the debate without the tangents is what will happen first?

Will SSD be listed as a minimum requirement on all games (or)
Will support for console cross gen die out first?
 

ZywyPL

Banned
PC related. Is anyone still using mechanical HDD in your comp?

I have them in all but one, they are just used for backing stuff up though and keeping a healthy windows recovery partition.

I have regular SSD in all laptops and then NVMe in two desktops.

I just cant go back to HDD.

Tons of people. Like, the vast majority of PC users. And this won't change until the SSD price closes the gap to HDD, people have hundreds, thousands of GB of pictures, movies, all their memories stored that are worth infinitely more than fast loadings. MP3 songs, FHD movies, that's another bunch of hundreds GB many people don't want to lose. So why would an average Joe want a 1TB SSD when he can have 4TB, for half the cost?
 

Boss Mog

Member
Yeah, exactly and I think the ultimate part of the debate without the tangents is what will happen first?

Will SSD be listed as a minimum requirement on all games (or)
Will support for console cross gen die out first?
or worse, multiplatform devs won't take advantage of SSD tech on consoles to accomodate PCs.
 

GreenAlien

Member
Isn't Switch the bigger "issue"..? It's probably around for another 3 years at least, worse than even legacy PCs and multiplat devs like to support it as well..


Tons of people. Like, the vast majority of PC users.
This "vast majority" are not gamers and if they play occasionally, they are probably not playing current gen AAA titles. -> They are not the market for NextGen AAA anyway.
 
Last edited:
So guys, I'm genuinely interested to find out if and how the PC market will slow down radical technical advancements in the upcoming console gereration.

We heard several comments from insiders, programmers and technical experts that all point to the same conclusion: The PC market has become the lowest common denominator.

- How will this influence technical progression?
- Is it even true or merely a hypothesis?
- Are PC gamers now considering to move over to the console market?

Personally I'm looking forward to the next generation and I'm eager to see new technical stuff which was not possible before. But if this shit is true, then my hopes have come to a halt. It would mean that only exclusive titles would profit from this upcoming technology.
It would mean that we could only profit from this technology in small and homeopathic dosages.
A real bummer.

So guys, proof my fears wrong, give me some hope.

So, what do you think?
I have been gaming long enough on PC to know that there is nothing weird about having to upgrade your computer to run a game.

When Doom came out, most computers couldn't do multiplayer and you had to buy a "sound card" for best experience.
When Half Life 1 came out, most computers can't run it properly.
And for future-proofing, many PC games used to have advanced graphics settings that were unusable at the time of launch, that could only be used once future hardware was released.

But after Console gaming became a thing, PC hardware requirements was anchored to the ground. Ten year old PCs, computers that are not suppose to run any game at all, suddenly stayed usable because all the latest games were Console ports. it's kind of nice if you think about it, but from another perspective this is an abnormal situation.

Now that Console finally have an SSD, gaming can finally move forward and PC gaming can really start to upgrade again. The whole point of PCs is that upgrads are possible; we just haven't had a reason to do it for a decade because of consoles.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
This "vast majority" are not gamers and if they play occasionally, they are probably not playing current gen AAA titles. -> They are not the market for NextGen AAA anyway.

I don't have the statistics obviously, but I firmly believe those people are actually responsible for the most revenues on the PC marked, exactly because of their potato PCs - Sims, LoL, WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc. those are the people who play those games, while AA/AAA market on PC is a fucking Joke, 10-15 years ago the publishers were lucky if their game sold 1M copies, now they are lucky if it's 100k, so I don't know, on one hand forcing people to switch to SSDs will cut you from already tiny audience, but on the other those few people actually might be willing to do the change. Time will tell as always.
 
while AA/AAA market on PC is a fucking Joke, 10-15 years ago the publishers were lucky if their game sold 1M copies, now they are lucky if it's 100k
Tell that to CDPR, The Witcher 3 has sold 12M copies on PC alone...and that's actually the leading platform, with PS4 trailing behind by 1.2M copies. Not all titles do quite so well but the idea that PC is dead is demonstrably false.
 
Last edited:

Jayjayhd34

Member
I don't have the statistics obviously, but I firmly believe those people are actually responsible for the most revenues on the PC marked, exactly because of their potato PCs - Sims, LoL, WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc. those are the people who play those games, while AA/AAA market on PC is a fucking Joke, 10-15 years ago the publishers were lucky if their game sold 1M copies, now they are lucky if it's 100k, so I don't know, on one hand forcing people to switch to SSDs will cut you from already tiny audience, but on the other those few people actually might be willing to do the change. Time will tell as always.

Yes the 12 million people who bought witcher 3 on PC don't buy any other games total fluke....
 
Going through this thread's definitely been an experience.

Genuine question: why does it seem so very sacrilegious to a lot of folks to own both a PC and a console?

 
Top Bottom