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I'm a bit disappointed at the loading times to switch between games (XB so far, but likely PS5 too)

FritzJ92

Member
I shuffle a story-based game a sports game and a multiplayer game at almost all times, I don't see how this is useless.. especially since my friends interrupt my single-player games to play a couple of apex matches with them...
 

Amey

Member
It's the result of both consoles cheaping out on memory. 32GB should have been the minimum. Something like 16GB GDDR6 + 16GB DDR4.

But instead they want us to ride the SSD hype train, so this is what we have.
 
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mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
There's so many variables in restoring a game though, from reconnecting to servers for licenses, reconnecting to play servers etc.

Suspend/Resume isn't meant to be alt/tab. It's the equiavlent of quicksave, restart game, load quicksave.

THIS!
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
It's the result of both consoles cheaping out on memory. 32GB should have been the minimum. Something like 16GB GDDR6 + 16GB DDR4.

But instead they want us to ride the SSD hype train, so this is what we have.
Well that way it would be even slower.
 

cireza

Member
I don't understand these discussions. I turn off my Xbox every time (complete shutdown) and turn it on when I want to play. I wait a minute for it to boot, then select a game and play it. When I am done, I shut down my console again. I never switch between 10 games in a row. Do you people even know what you want to play to begin with ? I know this before I even start the console.
 
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RoadHazard

Gold Member
It's the result of both consoles cheaping out on memory. 32GB should have been the minimum. Something like 16GB GDDR6 + 16GB DDR4.

But instead they want us to ride the SSD hype train, so this is what we have.

Are you saying the consoles should have 16GB extra RAM just for game suspension, so each game would still only use half of it? Yeah, that's a terrible idea.

I mean, I wouldn't have said no to 32GB, but then I'd want that available to games.
 
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Calverz

Member
XSX SSD 2.4GB/s | 100%
PS5 SSD 5.5GB/s | 229% +129% "more than double"

Also we have not seen any quick resume on PS5 as of yet, we don't know it even comes with that useless feature. Why would i be running 14 different games at once? This feature is so pointless, i don't get the appeal of it.

How many times are you all alt+tabbing on the PC between 10 different games? I have never done that in the past 20+ years. Why would i?
Congrats on probably the most ignorant comment iv seen today. “This feature is so pointless”.
Have u ever considered that u know, other people might find that useful? You know, that people dont think like you do??
 

soulbait

Member
ALT-Tab to another application that is already opened and running is totally different than loading a game from a memory saved state.

I am really curious how much RAM you have and what kind of performance hits you are taking in your games by keeping more than one open at a time. I have 32GB of RAM on my PC and I will not keep more than one game opened at a time.
 

n0razi

Member
When I'm playing a game with lots of down time on PC (matchmaking, grinding) I often have a second game loaded....which I can swap to in literally less than a second by Alt+Tabbing.

I didnt know people even did this....

I just browse the internet or grab my smartphone during down time.
 

Lethal01

Member
What irritates me though is people in this thread calling it a useless feature, but will be sure to jump all over it if MS / Sony does reduce the swap time down to a few seconds

Reducing the time it take for it to load will not make me care about it anymore than I do, I'd sacrifice the whole feature for and extra 2 or 3 gigs
 

RaySoft

Member
You're talking about an "OG Xbox game" which does not benefit from the Velocity architecture, hence your disappointment. Wait until the next-gen only games to arrive, then swamp between them in order to get the real and full benefits.
Quick resume has nothing to do with the game supporting velocity arc. or not. Quick resume is a OS feature and it has to write the current games RAM contents into the SSD before it can start dumping the next game from the SSD into RAM again. I guess they use compression when writing as well (missed opportunity if they don't since h/w accel.)
Task switching on PC is not the same, since you then already have both tasks (games) already in memory and are simply switching between them.
 
That's not relevant to this discussion. This is about quick resume, which means writing the RAM content to disk. That's 100% an OS thing, has nothing to do with new or old games. New games are gonna take even longer most likely, because they will use more RAM.

I expect it to be faster on PS5. Still not instant, that's not possible, but maybe 5 seconds.

You mean the OS that is still being tweaked? That's still getting updates? And we're in here judging current-build progress like it's final? OK then.

For one there's not even any indication PS5 has Quick Resume. If it does that will be nice but there's no evidence proving it's there at this point in time. Secondly, any parts of QR leveraging XvA in a way a game needs to be programmed against it, means that for older games they still can't leverage those parts unless they are touched up to do so.

Also I think some folks are misunderstanding what QR has to do. I'm guessing they aren't simply dumping the game's state in RAM to storage; they're also likely compressing that state at least somewhat. It would make the most sense given they'd want to save as much space on the drive as possible. AFAIK the systems have decompression hardware, but not dedicated compression hardware. So compression might still have to be done on the CPU (again I'm just speculating here).

That eats into the time it'd take. So theoretically, if PS5 has a Quick Resume-like feature, some aspects of it would be faster for sure, but any aspects relying on compressing the data state to storage would be slower. You likely wouldn't be looking at a 2:1 ratio in time between them for such a feature as a result.

All in all though, people just aught to be thankful we're getting these kind of QoL features for next-gen at all. This stuff can (and will) be tuned over time to operate even more efficiently. Seeming "vehemently disappointed" in it or whatever at this early a time, just comes off as being ungrateful imo. And I know that probably sounds ironic seeing that these companies should be grateful people are willing to spend money on these consoles and the games in the first place (at a scale of millions, no less)...but I do think sometimes gamers can be a bit unappreciative of good things (games, system features, etc.) or unrealistic in their expectations, and they don't come to realize it until those good things have passed them by.

Quick resume has nothing to do with the game supporting velocity arc. or not. Quick resume is a OS feature and it has to write the current games RAM contents into the SSD before it can start dumping the next game from the SSD into RAM again. I guess they use compression when writing as well (missed opportunity if they don't since h/w accel.)
Task switching on PC is not the same, since you then already have both tasks (games) already in memory and are simply switching between them.

IIRC these systems have hardware-dedicated decompression. I've not heard anything about hardware-dedicated compression, though.

I could be wrong on that, but to my knowledge these systems have hardware for doing decompression only.
 
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RaySoft

Member
IIRC these systems have hardware-dedicated decompression. I've not heard anything about hardware-dedicated compression, though.

I could be wrong on that, but to my knowledge these systems have hardware for doing decompression only.
Good point. They may not have compression in hardware actually. Would be sweet if they did since the resume states would take less precious space from your SSD.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
Alt+Tab times on my PC basically.

That's why RAM is RAM and storage is storage.

For multiple games to be residing in RAM, we'd already be halving, thirding, what have you, our already meager RAM gains this generation.

2.4GB/s best case filling 16GB of RAM through the 100GB it reserves for quick resume, doesn't take much figuring to see why it takes some time to swap games.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
It's the result of both consoles cheaping out on memory. 32GB should have been the minimum. Something like 16GB GDDR6 + 16GB DDR4.

But instead they want us to ride the SSD hype train, so this is what we have.

You wanted to have a split pool of GDDR6 and DDR4?

Good thing you arent in charge of hardware engineering.
 
Good point. They may not have compression in hardware actually. Would be sweet if they did since the resume states would take less precious space from your SSD.

Haven't done a lot of research into the area, but from the little I've read, compression is a somewhat more difficult thing to dedicate to fixed-function hardware. It might have to do with the fact the range of data can have so many minute differences that even if you have two files that appear strikingly similar on the outset, an compression range on one could be completely ineligible on the other without causing issues.

That's my ignorant idea on it, anyway. Did a quick search and came across this on StackOverflow; hobbyist stuff but might be relevant to show what type of cost is associated with compression vs. decompression?

plain="2016-11-09 20:56:02,469 ERROR [main] c.s.HelloExample - Something wrong with customer 'CUS-123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-42665544'"

echo "Log message which we are using for this test is:"
echo $plain

echo "Time taken to echo this string 10,000 times:"

time for a in $(seq 1 10000);
do
echo $plain > /dev/null
done

echo "Time taken to echo and compress this string 10,000 times:"

time for a in $(seq 1 10000);
do
echo $plain | gzip -cf > /dev/null
done

echo "Time taken to echo, compress and decompress this string 10,000 times:"

time for a in $(seq 1 10000);
do
echo $plain | gzip -cf | gzip -cfd > /dev/null
done

Here's how the measurements came out:

Log message which we are using for this test is:
2016-11-09 20:56:02,469 ERROR [main] c.s.HelloExample - Something wrong with customer 'CUS-123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-42665544'
Time taken to echo this string 10,000 times:

real 0m1.940s
user 0m0.591s
sys 0m1.333s
user+sys 0m1.924s
Time taken to echo and compress this string 10,000 times:

real 0m22.028s
user 0m11.309s
sys 0m17.325s
user+sys 0m28.634s
Time taken to echo, compress and decompress this string 10,000 times:

real 0m22.983s
user 0m18.761s
sys 0m27.322s
user+sys 0m46.083s
[Finished in 47.0s real time]

And their conclusions from that test:

User+sys shows how much CPU time was used; that's the bit that is important for working out how computationally intensive this is.

So, compression takes about 14.9x more computation than just echoing the string raw.

Compression + decompression takes 24.0x more computation than just echoing the string raw. This is only 1.6x more computation than compressing.


Conclusions:

  • It's not cheap to compress even a tiny file in GZIP.
  • GZIP decompression is cheap!
Caution: this test may have, in reality, been measuring startup and cleanup costs of the gzip executable. I am not sure if those are significant, but certainly we can see that it is a threaded application (user + sys < real). So I could imagine setup overhead such as starting pthreads.

Again it's just a hobbyist example but I guess it does a good point showing the cost of compression vs. decompression on the CPU. If the next-gen systems had dedicated compression hardware, they'd probably need about 3x the amount of capability on their I/O stack than they currently already have!

It's the result of both consoles cheaping out on memory. 32GB should have been the minimum. Something like 16GB GDDR6 + 16GB DDR4.

But instead they want us to ride the SSD hype train, so this is what we have.

Nah, they made the right call as-is. Assuming they were able to get GDDR6 at like $5 per GB, that alone is $80. DDR4 would not have been that much cheaper per GB, maybe $3.50. That's an extra $56. $136 for volatile memory alone. And if that came at the expense of cutting down on the SSD I/O investments?

Might not've been a good trade-off in the long run. Plus split GDDR6/DDR4 pools would mean shadow-copying data assets between the two pools, unless you'd leave the DDR4 for the CPU and audio. But you'd still need a means to copy assets to the GPU's pool of memory. On PC that's usually done by the CPU transferring the data to the GPU's pool over the PCIe 3.0/4.0 bus.

It probably would've complicated the designs too much, and for not much of a performance benefit.
 
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Danny 117

Member
XSX SSD 2.4GB/s | 100%
PS5 SSD 5.5GB/s | 229% +129% "more than double"

Also we have not seen any quick resume on PS5 as of yet, we don't know it even comes with that useless feature. Why would i be running 14 different games at once? This feature is so pointless, i don't get the appeal of it.

How many times are you all alt+tabbing on the PC between 10 different games? I have never done that in the past 20+ years. Why would i?

It’s not useless.

My friend group played Halo TMCC, Destiny 2, Dead by Daylight and Golf with Friends last Saturday evening and being able to quickly switch between games will save us a lot of time. It’s a game changer for groups like us.
 

BigLee74

Member
It's like the idiots complaining/laughing that it takes 15 seconds to load a dirt 5 track on the XSX.

Who cares? Plenty fast enough. I'll hardly have time to scratch my balls before I have to stop and pick up the controller!
 
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