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[kraspkibble]

no loading times was never gonna happen. it's just part of the marketing bullshit by Sony.

they won't be as long, that's all.

 

[Tulipanzo]

I’m going to bookmark this thread to revisit it in 2 years and see how some comments aged. Now it’s just no fun

Hope you google what's a transition by then. Or buy a proper pocketwatch

 

[psorcerer]

After watching Geoffs reveal of the controller today and seeing the demo of Astrobots Playground, is the dream of no load screens dead before it happened?

Its obvious and takes 6-8 seconds before the game launches (in the best case scenario.)

If they can’t get it right on prerecorded and scripted demos, what chance does real world games have?

Do you actually believe loading screens will be gone, or are they always going to be a problem we have to deal with?

Which "loading screen" are you talking about?
It's obvious that first game/demo load will take time. It's physics.
Anything else?

 

[Hunnybun]

Just an assumption, but isn’t loading a whole game a bit different than transition between levels (as in ratchet)? Point is that these two things shouldnt be compared 1:1.

Not really. "Loading a whole game" never actually happens. It's always loading a level, it's just when you start a game you go from no level to some level, and when it's a new level it's level x to level y.

The principle is exactly the same. You need to get sufficient data into RAM to be able to display all those beautiful textures etc on screen at one time. Then once you're loaded games will prevent you from moving through the game world too quickly, so they can gradually swap data in and out without you noticing (So walking around an open world for example). That's why flying a jet in GTA V feels about as dynamic as riding a milk float.

 

[nkarafo]

Everything that was said like the "60fps/4K" or this no loading thing were over-hyped bullshit.

Frame rate will be the same, loading times will be a bit better (maybe). It's just that they needed the SSDs because mechanical drives would not be able to load the new assets in a sensible time.

 

[Tschumi]

Too soon i don't think they would put so much emphasis on it to drop it quietly like you suggest. I think it's either wishful, or overly pessimistic, thinking on your part~

Just an assumption, but isn’t loading a whole game a bit different than transition between levels (as in ratchet)? Point is that these two things shouldnt be compared 1:1.

I think in the deep dive he said that the whole game would instantly fade in.

 

[Knitted Knight]

If loading times measured in seconds in something that fanboys will fight over this is a fight Sony will gladly engage in. No way it's spun, they'll win that fight. Likewise for all the new parameters to judge third party multiplats, like pop-in, draw distance and texture quality/streaming.

OP already falling into that trap, despite thinking he's achieving the opposite, which is to trash on the SSD narrative.

 

[Hunnybun]

Everything that was said like the "60fps/4K" or this no loading thing were over-hyped bullshit.

Frame rate will be the same, loading times will be a bit better (maybe). It's just that they needed the SSDs because mechanical drives would not be able to load the new assets in a sensible time.

You don't know what you're talking about. A, say, 30 second loading time at 5.5 gbps would imply RAM of 165 GB!!

The time it takes to fill RAM has take a quantum leap, whereas the size of RAM has not. Therefore loading times will also take a quantum leap.

It IS that simple. It's a formula.

 

[PresetError]

Are we going to consider loading screens the loading time before launching a game?

 

[cerealbuster]

1) We literally had a game where hopping between dimensions took 1.5s
2) As people already pointed out, a dev may want transitions to take longer (Cerny already mentioned this).
For this demo, devs would want to communicate the idea of travelling through your PS5, and an excessively short transition wouldn't give that feeling. Considering the "loading" is still ~6s, i.e. long enough for your brain to acknowledge a transition but short enough to not get boring, this seems plausible
3) Even if it's a full 7s loading, it's enough to load the entire level, which is a radical improvement
4) Taking one example from one game to try and invalidate SSD speeds seems rather futile

Is this the new 23fps is an artistic choice?

 

[Tulipanzo]

Is this the new 23fps is an artistic choice?

I'm also a big fan of Hellblade 2, yes /s

But seriously, transitions need to be there.
What you are assuming is the whole transition is needed to hide loading, while in reality it also serves the purpose of giving the sense of "travelling through a PS5". Were the transition just a couple seconds long, it'd look like you never traveled at all, and this is something Cerny directly referenced in its og talk.

We've seen other transitions lasting 1,5s anyway, so this is a rather silly concern.
Edit: In R&C, transition length again reflects function, as portals need to give the player time to expect the unexpected, while being quick enough to not affect the action-game pacing.

 

[Vasto]

Good call out OP.

 

[RoboFu]

Loading is like frame rate. It’s all a compromise of assets to load time.

As games get bigger. More and larger files mean longer load times.

Basically Faster loading either means loading more files in a similar time than before or loading the same number of files faster.

 

[Guilty_AI]

I think having fast load times should be good enough of a thing. Of course its a different story if sony blows it out of proportion in their marketing campaign, which lets be honest wouldn't be a first for them.

Even so, we wouldn't actually be able to tell how much of bull there were in those talks until real costumers get their hands on the console. Regardless, remember its important to keep a healthy amount of skeptcism since, as i said, sony does have history with exagerating their console capabilities and even some deceitful marketing. No matter how much of a fan you are from their brand, learn to not just gobble up everything they tell you.

 

[Rikkori]

Meanwhile on the other forums:

“Artistic choice” I can’t even

Fanboy cope is hilarious!

Whenever their hardware gets exposed for being overhyped it's always "artistic decision".

When raytracing gets gimped into oblivion that's gonna be called an artistic decision too.

 

[Tulipanzo]

Fanboy cope is hilarious!

Whenever their hardware gets exposed for being overhyped it's always "artistic decision".

When raytracing gets gimped into oblivion that's gonna be called an artistic decision too.

This is something Mark Cerny literally said in the Road to PS5.

Screen transitions, as loading becomes much faster, don't only serve to hide loading and are a poor point of comparison.
The function of the transition here is to give the idea of "travelling through your PS5", which would be poorly served by a 1.5s transition, as in R&C (it'd look like the level was just behind a door).

You'd have a point if the transition were long enough to be undesirable, or if it were a "cut-to-black" load screen.

 

[Naked Lunch]

Unless we're talking Commodore 64 here, I can honestly say load times have never bothered me.
Hell, loading in maps in multiplayer games allows for piss breaks.

This "no loading times" selling point of the upcoming gen does absolutely nothing for me.

 

[nkarafo]

You don't know what you're talking about. A, say, 30 second loading time at 5.5 gbps would imply RAM of 165 GB!!

The time it takes to fill RAM has take a quantum leap, whereas the size of RAM has not. Therefore loading times will also take a quantum leap.

It IS that simple. It's a formula.

Assuming the speed is indeed 5.5 gbps, which soundstoo good to be true.

 

[Optimistic Gamer]

Never.

I knew the SSD “magic” was FUD. I’m just surprised they exposed It so quickly.

Pretty sure you misunderstand the meaning of FUD?

 

[Vawn]

no loading times was never gonna happen. it's just part of the marketing bullshit by Sony.

they won't be as long, that's all.

When did Sony say there would be NO loads? Since they first talked about their next console, they mentioned "super-fast loading". They demonstrated Spider-Man fast traveling across the map takes 15 seconds on PS4 and 0.8 seconds on PS5. They didn't say 0 loading times, they demonstrated that it was super fast - which it is.

And how is it marketing BS? We've seen it in action with Ratchet and Clank. Unless, you believe that entire gameplay demo was faked?

 

[Hawks Eclipse]

Something like DMC when you had to spam a button to slash the loading ?

It was only ever in the PS2 versions of DMC3 from what I know. The HD editions removed that little button warm up.

 

[Tesseract]

nope

 

[BadBurger]

Looking at what Sony is doing with their hardware on paper, it's entirely possible games on the PS5 will have very little load times, sure.

 

[Hunnybun]

Assuming the speed is indeed 5.5 gbps, which soundstoo good to be true.

Wait, you're genuinely suggesting that Sony were lying about their officially stated specs?

Can I assume your think that Microsoft were lying about their 2.4 gbps SSD, too?

Because that allows for MUCH faster loading than you argued we were going to see (a 'bit' faster than current gen) as well, just not quite as fast as the PS5.

 

[EverydayBeast]

No but it shows they respect your time, everyone is buying into not having loading screens even if it's only 8 seconds.

 

[mortal]

It's only 6 seconds. It's so minuscule it might as well be considered no loading time.

What else are you going to do in just 6 seconds besides breath a couple times?

 

[Holammer]

Yes, it is exaggerated, but it's going to get faster, much faster.
Welcome to PC hell where loading screens just flash on screen for a second and you don't have time to read any of the fluff text.

 

[nani17]

Maybe it's the developers creative decision or does that not fit here because it's PS5

 

[nkarafo]

Wait, you're genuinely suggesting that Sony were lying about their officially stated specs?

Can I assume your think that Microsoft were lying about their 2.4 gbps SSD, too?

Maybe not lying, more like not telling the whole truth?

That number could be reading/writing a big file sequentially, which is the best case scenario. But even SSDs can slow down considerably (up to 10 times or more) if they are reading/writing small chunks randomly. Streaming assets in an open world game (for instance) sounds closer to the second scenario.

 

[TLZ]

Can't blame you for missing it, I did too.
It's here, when Geoff goes into Cooling Springs

I still can't see it :/

 

[cireza]

It died when discs became the new medium for games.

 

[GaviotaGrande]

Fast traveling from Lake Knot City to Capital Knot City in Death Stranding displays a loading progress bar for around 7 seconds (at least on PC).

For those who haven't played Death Stranding: it's going from one open-world map to another open-world map.

6 seconds in a small silly game suddenly seems like a lot.

 

[Andodalf]

Loading is more than just your storage filling up ram, a ton needs to happen. Think about stuff like procedural generation, randomization in a scene. That isn’t stored on a drive, it has to be done at runtime every time.

 

[diffusionx]

I think it is possible, but As we push the possibility to make it happen, we are at the same time pushing it further away.

I believe if we were loading a game with PS2/3 assets and worlds, then load screens would be 100% non existent and would be closer to cartridge days. At the same time, because the assets are getting larger and larger, even the bigger bandwidth get's eventually filled; but there are other limitations now. We have GPU and CPU Rendering.

TLDR No, I dont think the idea is dead, but I feel as we continue to push higher fidelity, we will find other bottlenecks that prevent that instant loading we want.

I’m playing C&C Remastered, as one of the rare PC gamers who is using a SSD before the next gen consoles come out, and that game has N64-type loading. It’s honestly great. That said I think we will for the most part not see an elimination of load times, but a vast reduction, similar to, yes, a modern PC game running off a SSD.

 

[DeepEnigma]

It’s dead Jim, right up there with that 60fps “next gen feel.”

 

[GaviotaGrande]

I was curious about The Witcher 3 because I heard Digital Foundry bitching about loading times in this game in their few latest videos.

So I did a test. Fast traveling from Novigrad to Crookback Bog takes 5 seconds.

To those who haven't played The Witcher 3: what the fuck are you waiting for?

 

[diffusionx]

You don't know what you're talking about. A, say, 30 second loading time at 5.5 gbps would imply RAM of 165 GB!!

The time it takes to fill RAM has take a quantum leap, whereas the size of RAM has not. Therefore loading times will also take a quantum leap.

It IS that simple. It's a formula.

These numbers are theoretical and peak, and anyone who has ever used or benchmarked a PC, or wrote a program, knows that the real world doesn’t play out in this way and it is not this straightforward.

 

[namekuseijin]

I noticed it too. And that's a small game and not graphically demanding.

Sony of late has been ticking all the wrong boxes to me and not giving me any reasons to stay in the platform I've been into for the past 25 years.

 

[magnumpy]

my little boy dreams of fast game loading are ruined

time to grow up and become a man

 

[dorkimoe]

Loading screens are replaced by always on reconnecting screens, its seriously ruined the "suspend/resume" feature that i love so much

 

[01011001]

lot of people will also be very sad to find that in online games, the actual limiting factor is often the time it takes for people to connect to servers.

so in games like Fortnite the difference will be that you're faster in the pre game lobby, but you'll still need to wait for everyone to connect and sync.

 

[GlassAwful]

The loading transition started at the 5.18-5.19 mark and ended just after 5.27. That's about 8 to 9 seconds.

This was an in game level transition and it lasted longer than many of the game switching demos on Series X...

What happened? This is a showcase game for the PS5, it's basically a tech demo that comes with the PS5 to show off its features.

Cerny said the I/O hardware was designed to be automatic and invisible to developers so there's no 'lazy devs' or early demo bs to hide behind here.

This shouldn't be possible unless the advertised 5.5 GB/s ssd speeds aren't being reliably reached. A new game load is one thing but a level transition would only need to replace portions of the ram pool, so that's even more disturbing....

SSD speeds getting throttled by heat?

 

[Flintty]

It always boggled my mind how you could travel north of the map to south in WoW with no load screen, and they were doing that 15 years ago. I don’t know how this shit works but I find that quite impressive and I’m surprised it’s not very common.

 

[CuNi]

I still can't see it :/

The Animation where the bot gets digitized is technically a loading screen masked as a animation and then when he flies through those sci-fi gates, it's just a loading screen that presents itself as gameplay.
Obviously, the days of 2D Images and a progressbar as loading screens are mostly behind us. "Ingame Loading" will be the new thing. While still a loading screen, it's not having a that big negative impact since you don't feel like it takes you out of the game but feels like actually a part of that game that makes it more realistic. Like having a elevator ride is obviously a masked loading screen, but it doesn't feel that way since we all expect elevator to take some time to reach the selected floor.

 

[Tomeru]

Did the phrase "Jumping the Gun" disappear from existance sometime this year?

 

[Vyse1800]

It's the SimCity rule. Build an eight lane highway to alleviate traffic, have eight lanes of congested traffic in short course.

 

[Holammer]

I still can't see it :/

Did you notice this one? It even sign posts the fact that it's loading with a CD icon.
Games mask data streaming by having long corridors, elevators and doors that require effort to open.

 

[Ten_Fold]

AAA games might get a lot faster to load, but possibly not enough to get rid of loading screens. I can see smaller AA games no having no loading screens. Still it’s too early.

 

[BootsLoader]

One console.
Nintendo 64

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Come on kagey, you're better than this.

The load time of 8 seconds for a full next gen game, that isn't launched yet, that might not be running on a Ps5... There's too many variables to make a decision on.

Either way, if loading between a shop, a town and the open world in Skyrim and Fallout becomes next to nothing, I'll be well happy.