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THQ Nordic Exec is “Not Sure if the Market Will Adopt” the Xbox Series X / S Dual-Console Model | PS5’s SSD is “the true advancement”

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

Someone else who’s skeptical of its viability is Reinhard Pollice of THQ Nordic, who’s the executive producer on Gunfire Games’ upcoming RPG, Chronos: Before the Ashes. We recently had the chance to send across some questions about the game and the industry as a whole to its developer, and when asked about his thoughts on the Xbox Series S, Pollice said that though he understands Microsoft’s reasoning for the console’s design, he’s not sure if the industry will adopt the model of having two different consoles of different specs.

“I understand the reasoning behind it,” he said. “From a development perspective it’s always better to just focus on one spec. I am not sure if the market will adopt this model of having two next gen consoles.”

Something else that Pollice is far more impressed with is the PS5’s solid state drive, which currently is faster than anything else in the market. According to Pollice, the PS5’s SSD is “the true advancement” of the new console generation.

“This is the true advancement of this generation,” he said. “Loading times can take so long and be troublesome to optimize for better loading times. I am convinced this is a great push.”
 

mcjmetroid

Member
1: Loading times really are not going to be the game changer people think it will be.

2: what do these developers think is going to happen with the Xbox one X/S. They're going to ignore the Xbox entirely and put their games on playstation alone?
It's possible but highly unlikely.
 

killatopak

Gold Member
The idea that loading screens were this huge bane that Sony thankfully slayed is laughable.

If the only advantage of the SSD is faster loading, than fuck it.
Loading isn’t limited to the traditional static loading screen though. It could mean many things including on the fly loading of assets.

I wouldn‘t count what we see right now as the standard of next gen. Too many cross gen games.
 

Lukin1978

Member
j9sGjZ6.gif
 
people downplaying PS5 SSD
You have no idea of how speed can change everything related to technology, do you?
The speed can be applied to many, many, many other things not related to the load screen.


Anywho, I will go back to watch Netflix using my 56kps internet while I wait for my pc to move 1 terabyte to my external HDD at 1 Mb/s
 

ZehDon

Member
The idea that loading screens were this huge bane that Sony thankfully slayed is laughable.

If the only advantage of the SSD is faster loading, than fuck it.
I agree with your first sentence, but the reason that the next-gen consoles didn't ship with a similar RAM increase compared to previous generations is actually due to the SSDs these machines have. The longer it takes to load assets, the more RAM you need to act as a buffer to ensure smooth gameplay. The faster your storage, the less RAM you need to use as that buffer. The major benefit of the SSDs as standard won't be loading screens; it'll be the amount of parallelism possible now that they don't need to use 75% of the RAM to act as an asset buffer because of how slow the damn storage is.
 

JonkyDonk

Member
What people don't understand is that when the ssd gets praised by game company ppl it's not because it's so great for players but rather because it helps development tremendously.
This is what people still don't understand. The main reason that Sony invested so much in their I/O architecture is to make things easier for developers. It makes memory management a lot better and compensates for the fact that 16GB is not much to start with. Sony wanted their first party to make games much faster this gen and not have to waste a lot of time optimising and they built a system to be efficient and easy to develop for above anything else.
 

kuncol02

Banned
I agree with your first sentence, but the reason that the next-gen consoles didn't ship with a similar RAM increase compared to previous generations is actually due to the SSDs these machines have.
Main reason is fact that 128GB of RAM (16 times more ram than previous generation) is prohibitively costly. Even 32GB of ram is too expensive for 500$ box (especially when you need to squeze SSD into your budget).
 

Arkam

Member
The idea that loading screens were this huge bane that Sony thankfully slayed is laughable.

If the only advantage of the SSD is faster loading, than fuck it.
To each their own. But that was the only thing I wanted out of this gen. Visuals have been fine for a while. But since the death of the GC it’s been a painful time being a console gamer with Load times. Without rest mode and quick resume I doubt I would have played many games on PS4.
 
I'd have to imagine that these dev's can't explain it to us what a difference these new systems SSDs/i/O are... so they just bring up load times. I don't think they can articulate it in a way that the average person who's never created a game before would understand. Cerney tried, dude had a whole PowerPoint and everything and he was mostly met with skepticism and ridicule.

Also, why is everyone so sensitive these days? Yea, no shit the Series X has a very good SSD and very good i/O. Have confidence in that, don't cry foul whenever it's not mentioned by someone. I'm sorry, but not everyone in an interview is there to make you feel better about your purchase. It's a really well designed system, it's going to be right there with the PS5. Relax, it's going to be a good generation.
 
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Almost as if this is running off of BC mode that the 1X already loaded faster than the PS4. BC doesn’t take advantage of the I/O in the PS5, nor do third parties deep dive... yet, if ever.

Open world 1st party games loading larger assets, load night and day difference in that regards.

THQ Nordic is a third party publisher.
 
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JonkyDonk

Member
Next gen version of NBA 2K21:

i8PxZqk.png
Again what is your point?
Firstly: All of these comparisons have been contradicted by different sources, I've seen different times in different comparison videos. But hey, claim your victory with that less than 1 second win.
Secondly: Did you read the rest of the thread before you started posting these pointless comparisons? Improving loading times is not the sole purpose of adding SSDs and improved I/Os to next-gen consoles. Load times will be very short on both consoles with minor differences. Miles Morales loads in 2 seconds on PS5 and that's as fast as it gets, loading times are an irrelevant thing to talk about this gen. The point of all this is to make things easier for developers and allow them to do things they couldn't do before. People who keep posting these loading screen comparisons have never understood why people are talking about SSD and I/O or why the PS5 I/O in particular gets praised a lot. Loading is just a simple side-effect.
 
Again what is your point?
Firstly: All of these comparisons have been contradicted by different sources, I've seen different times in different comparison videos. But hey, claim your victory with that less than 1 second win.
Secondly: Did you read the rest of the thread before you started posting these pointless comparisons? Improving loading times is not the sole purpose of adding SSDs and improved I/Os to next-gen consoles. Load times will be very short on both consoles with minor differences. Miles Morales loads in 2 seconds on PS5 and that's as fast as it gets, loading times are an irrelevant thing to talk about this gen. The point of all this is to make things easier for developers and allow them to do things they couldn't do before. People who keep posting these loading screen comparisons have never understood why people are talking about SSD and I/O or why the PS5 I/O in particular gets praised a lot. Loading is just a simple side-effect.

Cool, but all of those points are also valid for the XSX and XSS. Aside from first party games, there is seemingly no real world advantage to PS5s SSD and I/O speeds, so uniquely praising the PS5, especially from a third party publisher point of view, looks a bit weird.
 

JonkyDonk

Member
Cool, but all of those points are also valid for the XSX and XSS. Aside from first party games, there is seemingly no real world advantage to PS5s SSD and I/O speeds, so uniquely praising the PS5, especially from a third party publisher point of view, looks a bit weird.
That's not entirely true. Yes, first party will do much more with PS5's I/O than anyone else. But it will still be a boon for anyone who develops for PS5, because certain things will just be easier in the development process. And as we've seen in the early multiplats' performance, the platform that is easier to develop for can have an advantage in optimization. It might not be a huge difference, but developers love anything that makes their already difficult work a bit easier.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Cool, but all of those points are also valid for the XSX and XSS. Aside from first party games, there is seemingly no real world advantage to PS5s SSD and I/O speeds, so uniquely praising the PS5, especially from a third party publisher point of view, looks a bit weird.

Weird to you, not the actual people developing the games, with hands on experience and much more technically adept with the tools and capabilities, clearly. Considering these aren’t isolated sentiments, at all.
 
Weird to you, not the actual people developing the games, with hands on experience and much more technically adept with the tools and capabilities, clearly. Considering these aren’t isolated sentiments, at all.

I'm a consumer, I don't care about the dev experience. The consumer experience seems to be extremely similar between the two platforms.
 
Cool, but all of those points are also valid for the XSX and XSS. Aside from first party games, there is seemingly no real world advantage to PS5s SSD and I/O speeds, so uniquely praising the PS5, especially from a third party publisher point of view, looks a bit weird.
I guess we don't know that until developers drop cross-gen support. Horse before cart. Wait for those games and we may be surprised.
 

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
Next gen version of NBA 2K21:

i8PxZqk.png

You're posting things in this thread it's obvious you don't know what you're even talking about.


Simple just loading games is only part what the SSD is going to do next gen, and we saw a glimpse of that in the Unreal Engine 5 presentation.

Third Party devs will improve loading over time, and their engines will be design to stream data instead of trying to load an entire scene at once.
 
You're posting things in this thread it's obvious you don't know what you're even talking about.


Simple just loading games is only part what the SSD is going to do next gen, and we saw a glimpse of that in the Unreal Engine 5 presentation.

Third Party devs will improve loading over time, and their engines will be design to stream data instead of trying to load an entire scene at once.

The dev in the OT is specifically praising loading times.
 

Keihart

Member
More than loading it's about streaming but i guess both words can be used interchangeably, but yeah, speeds in the SSD are not similar at all but to which degree this is going to show we still don't know.
 

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
The dev in the OT is specifically praising loading times.

“This is the true advancement of this generation,” he said. “Loading times can take so long and be troublesome to optimize for better loading times. I am convinced this is a great push.”

Previous gen, they had to optimize what to load because they were under a strict budget. This includes things that are not shown on screen. On next consoles, they can load when things are needed at that time. This will make development easier.
 
Previous gen, they had to optimize what to load because they were under a strict budget. This includes things that are not shown on screen. On next consoles, they can load when things are needed at that time. This will make development easier.

I get that, I just don't see how the PS5 is unique in this case, especially if you're a third party dev and have to develop a game for the lowest common denominator anyway.
 

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
I get that, I just don't see how the PS5 is unique in this case, especially if you're a third party dev and have to develop a game for the lowest common denominator anyway.

It's simple.

If devs can leverage XsX speeds to improve their games and stream in large amount of assets (especially textures), the PS5 can do it better and faster. As shown in the Unreal Engine 5 demo, they were able to stream 8K textures in an instant.
 

JonkyDonk

Member
Some people need to understand that games are 'loading' things all the time, not just during the traditional loading screens we know. And it's that constant loading that is a real bottleneck for developers. Having a very fast SSD and very efficient I/O means they don't have to worry about that limitation anywhere near as much. We have not seen this in effect in any of these early games. All of these games are still designed for last gen speeds.

And like I already said, the reason they praise the PS5 in particular is because it is like twice as fast in this area compared to the other platforms and it will just make things that much easier for developers. They don't have to optimize memory as tightly because they can lean more on doing things straight from the SSD.
 
It's simple.

If devs can leverage XsX speeds to improve their games and stream in large amount of assets (especially textures), the PS5 can do it better and faster. As shown in the Unreal Engine 5 demo, they were able to stream 8K textures in an instant.

The demo also ran well on a laptop with a standard NVMe SSD, apparently. And even if we assume that the PS5 can stream 2x the assets, what are the odds that a third party dev will invest vast ressources into building exclusive assets for the PS5 (and optimizing for them) which one would not be able to use on the XSX or your average PC?
 
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