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How Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture supercharge the IO system of the Sony PS5

truth411

Member
I cant remember where it was but it was RAD dev that discussed the throughput for PS5 with oodle kracken, Basically it was:

5.5GB raw
10.85GB compress
21.99GB. For textures. (PS5 22GB limit)

If I remember correctly.

Edit.
 
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bitbydeath

Member
I cant remember where it was but it was RAD dev that discussed the throughput for PS5 with oodle kracken, Basically it was:

5.5GB raw
10.85GB compress
21.99GB. For textures. (PS5 22GB limit)

If I remember correctly.

Edit.

It was but then Sony purchased oodle texture a few months ago.

Not all games at launch of PS5 will be using Oodle Texture as it's a very new technology, but we expect it to be in the majority of PS5 games in the future. Because of this we expect the average compression ratio and therefore the effective IO speed to be even better than previously estimated.
 

Tripolygon

Banned
Credit to @Dan_of_Rivia

Charles Bloom of RAD Games Tools has posted a blog to talk about PS5 Kraken decompression hardware and why it is more powerful than people realize.

The Sony PS5 will have the fastest data loading ever available in a mass market consumer device, and we think it may be even better than you have previously heard. What makes that possible is a fast SSD, an excellent IO stack that is fully independent of the CPU, and the Kraken hardware decoder. Kraken compression acts as a multiplier for the IO speed and disk capacity, storing more games and loading faster in proportion to the compression ratio.
Sony has previously published that the SSD is capable of 5.5 GB/s and expected decompressed bandwidth around 8-9 GB/s, based on measurements of average compression ratios of games around 1.5 to 1. While Kraken is an excellent generic compressor, it struggled to find usable patterns on a crucial type of content : GPU textures, which make up a large fraction of game content. Since then we've made huge progress on improving the compression ratio of GPU textures, with Oodle Texture which encodes them such that subsequent Kraken compression can find patterns it can exploit. The result is that we expect the average compression ratio of games to be much better in the future, closer to 2 to 1.

kraken-3-mod800-oodle.png


The Kraken decoder acts as an effective speed multiplier for data loading. Data is stored compressed on the SSD and decoded transparently at load time on PS5. What the game sees is the rate that it receives decompressed data, which is equal to the SSD speed multiplied by the compression ratio.

Good data compression also improves game download times, and lets you store more games on disk. Again the compression ratio acts as an effective multiplier for download speed and disk capacity. A game might use 80 GB uncompressed, but with 2 to 1 compression it only take 40 GB on disk, letting you store twice as many games. A smaller disk with better compression can hold more games than a larger disk with worse compression.

When a game needs data on PS5, it makes a request to the IO system, which loads compressed data from the SSD; that is then handed to the hardware Kraken decoder, which outputs the decompressed data the game wanted to the RAM. As far the game is concerned, they just get their decompressed data, but with higher throughput. On other platforms, Kraken can be run in software, getting the same compression gains but using CPU time to decode. When using software Kraken, you would first load the compressed data, then when that IO completes perform decompression on the CPU.

If the compression ratio was exactly 1.5 to 1, the 5.5 GB/s peak bandwidth of the SSD would decompress to 8.25 GB/s uncompressed bytes output from the Kraken decoder. Sony has estimated an average compression ratio of between 1.45 to 1 and 1.64 to 1 for games without Oodle Texture, resulting in expected decompressed bandwidth of 8-9 GB/s.

Since then, Sony has licensed our new technology Oodle Texture for all games on the PS4 and PS5. Oodle Texture lets games encode their textures so that they are drastically more compressible by Kraken, but with high visual quality . Textures often make up the majority of content of large games and prior to Oodle Texture were difficult to compress for general purpose compressors like Kraken.

The combination of Oodle Texture and Kraken can give very large gains in compression ratio. For example on a texture set from a recent game :

Zip 1.64 to 1
Kraken 1.82 to 1
Zip + Oodle Texture 2.69 to 1
Kraken + Oodle Texture 3.16 to 1

More at the link below

 

Pimpbaa

Member
I seen the Oodle logo in current gen games, I just didn't know they handled data decompression. I was in a debate in another thread about how decompression is done by the game engine/middleware or an API in current gen consoles, guess I was right or partially right.
 

BeardGawd

Banned
Doesn't this require GPU cycles to use? Anything beyond the builtin compression will consume additional resources. Technically XSX can use this too.
 
Doesn't matter, none of that is sustained speed and they're advertising peak speeds just like snake oil vendors of SSD's do.

You know the Firecuda 520? Arguably one of the best drives on the market at $250. Well its advertised speeds are up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s.

Guess what its sustained speeds are? PCI-E gen 3 @ 1.7 GB/s, PCI-E gen 4 @ 2.1 GB/s. Sony is bullshitting everyone with peaks and not mentioning a word of their sustained speeds.
 
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Entroyp

Member
Doesn't matter, none of that is sustained speed and they're advertising peak speeds just like snake oil vendors of SSD's do.

You know the Firecuda 520? Arguably one of the best drives on the market at $250. Well its advertised speeds are up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s.

Guess what its sustained speeds are? PCI-E gen 3 @ 1.7 GB/s, PCI-E gen 4 @ 2.1 GB/s. Sony is bullshitting everyone with peaks and not mentioning a word of their sustained speeds.

Are you sure of this or are you taking out of your ass?
 

mckmas8808

Banned
Doesn't matter, none of that is sustained speed and they're advertising peak speeds just like snake oil vendors of SSD's do.

You know the Firecuda 520? Arguably one of the best drives on the market at $250. Well its advertised speeds are up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s.

Guess what its sustained speeds are? PCI-E gen 3 @ 1.7 GB/s, PCI-E gen 4 @ 2.1 GB/s. Sony is bullshitting everyone with peaks and not mentioning a word of their sustained speeds.

Why do you sound so upset?
 


17:40 onwards.

8-9gb/s typical speeds. 22gb/s max

If they were just trying to impress then they’ll just say 22gb/s and be done with it. That’s the peak thoroughput.

There’s nothing you can do for both MS and Sony SSD speeds but just take their word for it until the product is released.
Typical =/= sustained
 
I mean, if you don’t want to see it then it’s on you. The info is out there I ain’t fetching it for you. Do your own homework.

I guess it’s just easier to spew bullshit than reading the article.
I've already done the homework, I know you can't because the industry standard metric they refuse to state doesn't exist in their language.

They're bullshitting.
 
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T

Three Jackdaws

Unconfirmed Member
 

Entroyp

Member
I cant remember where it was but it was RAD dev that discussed the throughput for PS5 with oodle kracken, Basically it was:

5.5GB raw
10.85GB compress
21.99GB. For textures. (PS5 22GB limit)

If I remember correctly.

Edit.

I remember this discussion but I can’t to find it anymore. I’ll keep looking, but from what I remember the info on this article correlates almost 100% to the old article.

We’ve seen games with 2 second load times or less, which kind of fall in line with Sony’s numbers. Why would they lie about those lol.
 

Tajaz2426

Psychology PhD from Wikipedia University
This seems quite interesting. Don’t understand hardly any of it, but can’t wait to see how it turns out.
 

truth411

Member
I remember this discussion but I can’t to find it anymore. I’ll keep looking, but from what I remember the info on this article correlates almost 100% to the old article.

We’ve seen games with 2 second load times or less, which kind of fall in line with Sony’s numbers. Why would they lie about those lol.
They didn't lie, it was:
5.5GB raw
9GB kracken.

oodle texture kraken is brand new, Launch titles and probably Launch window titles aren't using it. But going forward its:

5.5GB raw
10-11GB oodle kracken
17-22GB oodle texture kracken.

This is my understanding.
 

Vroadstar

Member
Doesn't matter, none of that is sustained speed and they're advertising peak speeds just like snake oil vendors of SSD's do.

You know the Firecuda 520? Arguably one of the best drives on the market at $250. Well its advertised speeds are up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s.

Guess what its sustained speeds are? PCI-E gen 3 @ 1.7 GB/s, PCI-E gen 4 @ 2.1 GB/s. Sony is bullshitting everyone with peaks and not mentioning a word of their sustained speeds.

Says the guy who created a thread about his bullshit belief despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
It doesn’t. They have built in hardware decompressors.

If they are using RDO to optimise the texture layout + Oodle Texture standard optimisation + Kraken then yeah they get great compression without any CPU or GPU runtime hit.

If they enable an even higher compression rate using the BC7Prep compression step Oodle also offers then you have one extra layer of compression you need to undo at runtime and Oodle provides very efficient code to do so on either CPU or GPU as compute shaders.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Confirmation that the 8-9 GB/s was under representing/a conservative estimate without using Oodle Texture :):
Sony has estimated an average compression ratio of between 1.45 to 1 and 1.64 to 1 for games without Oodle Texture, resulting in expected decompressed bandwidth of 8-9 GB/s.

Since then, Sony has licensed our new technology Oodle Texture for all games on the PS4 and PS5.

More about what Oodle Texture let’s them achieve (using an unspecified recent game as practical example... and make equivalent compressed bandwidth 17+ GB/s):
Sony has previously published that the SSD is capable of 5.5 GB/s and expected decompressed bandwidth around 8-9 GB/s, based on measurements of average compression ratios of games around 1.5 to 1. While Kraken is an excellent generic compressor, it struggled to find usable patterns on a crucial type of content : GPU textures, which make up a large fraction of game content. Since then we've made huge progress on improving the compression ratio of GPU textures, withOodle Texture which encodes them such that subsequent Kraken compression can find patterns it can exploit. The result is that we expect the average compression ratio of games to be much better in the future, closer to 2 to 1.

[...]

The combination of Oodle Texture and Kraken can give very large gains in compression ratio. For example on a texture set from a recent game :
Zip1.64 to 1
Kraken1.82 to 1
Zip + Oodle Texture2.69 to 1
Kraken + Oodle Texture3.16 to 1
Kraken plus Oodle Texture gets nearly double the compression of Zip alone on this texture set.

Oodle Texture is a software library that game developers use at content creation time to compile their source art into GPU-ready BC1-7 formats. All games use GPU texture encoders, but previous encoders did not optimize the compiled textures for compression like Oodle Texture does. Not all games at launch of PS5 will be using Oodle Texture as it's a very new technology, but we expect it to be in the majority of PS5 games in the future. Because of this we expect the average compression ratio and therefore the effective IO speed to be even better than previously estimated.

BC7Prep can go on top of that to further increase compression ratios, but this additional step needs to be undone at runtime (CPU or optimised compute shaders on the GPU, code provided by RAD Game Tools in the Oodle Texture package).
 
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Darius87

Member
Doesn't matter, none of that is sustained speed and they're advertising peak speeds just like snake oil vendors of SSD's do.

You know the Firecuda 520? Arguably one of the best drives on the market at $250. Well its advertised speeds are up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s.

Guess what its sustained speeds are? PCI-E gen 3 @ 1.7 GB/s, PCI-E gen 4 @ 2.1 GB/s. Sony is bullshitting everyone with peaks and not mentioning a word of their sustained speeds.
here you go:


he says PS5 SSD speed isn't theoretical like PC SSD's.
 

geordiemp

Member
Doesn't matter, none of that is sustained speed and they're advertising peak speeds just like snake oil vendors of SSD's do.

You know the Firecuda 520? Arguably one of the best drives on the market at $250. Well its advertised speeds are up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s.

Guess what its sustained speeds are? PCI-E gen 3 @ 1.7 GB/s, PCI-E gen 4 @ 2.1 GB/s. Sony is bullshitting everyone with peaks and not mentioning a word of their sustained speeds.

People that use the word sustained have not a clue what they are talking about of I find. Well done.

Did you even read or understand any of the information.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
Well, we already know how much space some of the PS5 games will take, between 50-70GB, so that's easily more than 10 stored AAA games, let alone smaller indie/AA titles, so way more than enough for most people.
 

notseqi

Member
Doesn't matter, none of that is sustained speed and they're advertising peak speeds just like snake oil vendors of SSD's do.

You know the Firecuda 520? Arguably one of the best drives on the market at $250. Well its advertised speeds are up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s.

Guess what its sustained speeds are? PCI-E gen 3 @ 1.7 GB/s, PCI-E gen 4 @ 2.1 GB/s. Sony is bullshitting everyone with peaks and not mentioning a word of their sustained speeds.
A higher theoretical than another theoretical should net higher practical values if the system isn't too complex. Doesn't mean it can't crap out with high I/O and a multitude of small files but with well understood console specs you can mitigate that.
Nice member tag doe.
 
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