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Kraken Vs ZLIB: 29% Smaller Game Sizes Losslessly, 297% Faster Decompression on PS5

Bo_Hazem

Banned
Kraken VS ZLIB:

According to the official graph by RAD Game Tools, Kraken has 29% higher compression ratio over ZLIB (used in PS4 and other platforms), and does it 3-5x faster (doesn't really concern us as gamers, only good for devs). Both Kraken and ZLIB are lossless compressions, meaning data is kept as it is, like textures, audio, game files, etc. Also another advantage is being 297% (~4x times) faster in decompression, which is very critical for data streaming at least.

oodle-typical-vbar.png


Oodle Texture:

Textures in games take a big chunk of the total size. To amplify compression even further, Oodle Texture go 5-15% "near" lossless compression:

Lossless Transform for BC7: Oodle Texture also includes a lossless transform for BC7 blocks called "BC7Prep" that makes them more compressible. BC7Prep takes BC7 blocks that are often very difficult to compress and rearranges their bits, yielding 5-15% smaller files after subsequent compression. BC7Prep does require runtime reversal of the transform, which can be done on the GPU. BC7Prep can be used on existing BC7 encoded blocks, or for additional savings can be used with Oodle Texture RDO in near lossless mode. This allows significant size reduction on textures where maximum quality is necessary.

oodle-texture-bc7prep-ratios.png


Pushing compression with a slight loss, you can go up to 50% smaller textures files:

Oodle Texture Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO), sometimes known as "super compression", lets you encode BCN textures with your choice of size-quality tradeoff. Oodle Texture RDO searches the space of possible ways to convert your source texture into BCN, finding encodings that are both high visual quality and smaller after compression. RDO can often find near lossless encodings that save 10% in compressed size, and with only small visual difference can save 20-50%.

Oodle Texture RDO provides fine control with the lambda parameter, ranging from the same quality as non-RDO BCN encoding, to gradually lower quality, with no sudden increase in distortion, or unexpected bad results on some textures. Oodle Texture RDO is predictable and consistent across your whole data set; you can usually use the same lambda level on most of your textures with no manual inspection and tuning. Visit Oodle Texture RDO examples to see for yourself.

RDO encoding just produces BCN block data, which can be put directly into textures, and stored in hardware tiled order. Oodle Texture RDO does not make a custom output format and therefore requires no runtime unpacking.

QrkNsJN.jpg


Kraken Hardware Decompressor:

That said, Kraken hardware decompressor (equivalent of 9x Zen2 cores) on PS5 should work best with Oodle Texture, but Oodle Texture can work with any lossless decompressor, like ZLIB HW decompressor on Xbox Series X|S (equivalent of 3x Zen2 cores), and PS4. Xbox Series X|S already have a great solution for texture compression known as BCpack.

Oodle Texture RDO optimizes for the compressed size of the texture after packing with any general purpose lossless data compressor. This means it works great with hardware decompression. On consoles with hardware decompression, RDO textures can be loaded directly to GPU memory, Oodle Texture doesn't require any runtime unpacking or CPU interaction at all. Of course it works great with Kraken and all the compressors in Oodle Data Compression, but you don't need Oodle Data to use Oodle Texture, they are independent.

Sources:



PS5 vs Xbox Series X

As Xbox Series X|S have around similar texture reduction, we can't say Oodle Texture is better than BCpack nor vice versa. But Sony has licensed Oodle Kraken + Texture to all PS4/PS5 developers and it still has 29% size reduction advantage over ZLIB on PS4 and Xbox Series X|S, mated with Kraken hardware decompressor. We also know that Xbox Series S will have gimped versions of the Series X textures, so will put it aside from the comparison. Assuming the textures/assets are the same on both consoles:

meta-chart.jpg


But, with the 297% (~4x times) faster decompression, which should be even better with Kraken HW decompressor, PS5 might leverage the extra space to use higher quality assets.

It doesn't stop right there though, with PS5 unprecedented SSD and I/O, it could eliminate the use of LOD's (Levels of Details), which can be 5-7 images in different resolutions/qualities. Sony Atom View has brought this technique in 2017, using only one high quality asset and streaming polygons as you get closer, resulting in much higher quality textures without wasting size on duplicates (5-7 versions of the same asset) in the old fashion LOD system. Atom View works as a plugin on UE and Unity engines, and probably with other Sony WWS proprietary engines:





Sony has helped Epic Games achieve similar tech known as "Nanite" on their upcoming Unreal Engine 5, using hundreds of billions of polygons of uncompressed 8K Hollywood-level assets with up to 16K shadows, all crunched losslessly to around 20 million polygons per frame for this 4.2 million pixel (1440p) gameplay demo. It only needed a 0.7GB pool of RAM for streaming:

(Timestamped)





The I/O throughput of 22GB/s makes the whole 825GB SSD like a DDR4 RAM! Which is insane:

DDR4 data rates: (single channel)

DDR4 2133: 17 GB / s
DDR4 2400: 19.2 GB / s

DDR4 2666: 21.3 GB / s
DDR4 3200: 25.6 GB / s





Short notes:

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

kraken-3-mod800-oodle.png


Zip1.64 to 1
Kraken1.82 to 1
Zip + Oodle Texture2.69 to 1
Kraken + Oodle Texture3.16 to 1

How does Kraken do it?​


kraken-1-mod800.png


Kraken creates optimized streams for the decoder​


kraken-2-mod800.png


Kraken plus Oodle Texture can double previous compression ratios​


kraken-4-mod800.png


Full text:


TL;DR

PS5 should benefit from this headroom advantage to use higher quality assets than other platforms, or be more efficient with its storage for the same assets quality but smaller game sizes. All this while still being able to eliminate LOD's and use that extra space to have a bump on assets quality for the same smaller game size overall!

Thank you for reading.

EDIT: Thanks to GreyHand23 GreyHand23 for the addition:

This is the quote. "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."

https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-and-oodle-texture.html

They also say this in the comments when asked about a comparison to BCPack.

"I don't think there's any public comparison of Kraken and BCPack. If there was one an unofficial one around, beware it might not include the affects of Oodle Texture. Oodle Texture dramatically changes the way textures compress; we believe it should always be used with textures in games. We're big fans of the Xbox Series X. Their approach is slightly different, but we're glad to see they are taking compression seriously. Oodle Texture works great for the Xbox as well, and we are working with a lot of game companies that are using it on Xbox, so consumers should see lots of games with those huge size and speed savings on Xbox as well. It's up to the individual game developers, as it's not been licensed platform-wide at this time. Game developers are also using Oodle Texture and Oodle Kraken for PC games; most multi-platform devs will be using the same Oodle Texture encoding of their textures for all platforms, it's not platform-specific. On the PC you don't have hardware Kraken, so software Kraken is used on the CPU. To keep up with the fastest SSD speeds this requires several cores; luckily high end PC's also have lots of CPU cores! At RAD we've always just tried to make the best compression possible for games. We plan to continue to work with all platforms in the future."

So far:

Game
PS5
Xbox Series X
Difference
Control Ultimate Edition
25.7​
43.6​
51.7%
Hitman 3
61.9​
64.9*​
4.7%
Subnautica
3.8​
8.3​
74.4%
Crash Bandicoot 4
20.0​
22.2*​
10.4%
Tony Hawk 1+2
23.3​
22.0*​
5.7%
Marvel’s Avengers
74.1​
116.6​
44.6%
AC Valhalla
41.8​
72.1*​
53.2%
Watch Dogs Legion
50.6​
61.1​
18.8%
Immortals Fenyx Rising
22.3​
32.9​
38.4%
Borderlands 3
49.6*​
63.8​
25%
Dirt 5
50.9​
63.3​
21.7%
Mortal Shell
4.6​
8.6​
60.6%
NBA 2K21*
96.6*​
106.6*​
9.8%
Necromunda: Hired Gun
15.8​
35.1​
75.8%
Wreckfest
22.8​
45.1**​
65.7%
Total
563GB* (out of 667GB)
764.2GB* (out of 802GB)
30.3%

*Updated data. Please share your findings if they don't match what you see here or for new comparisons (only native current gen versions).
**Piled files, more like an error, to be changed later when fixed.
 
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Bo_Hazem

Banned
My brain is melting.

I get back to you in three days Bo once i have read all this and looked up some words.

Nice post btw.

Thanks, fish! :messenger_winking_tongue: (y)

Great info

Thanks, mate. (y)

I think its fair to conclude that Sony first party, at the very least, will be hitting that theoretical peak very soon.

That's a given, but it's already extensively discussed around, so tried to make it as short as possible. ;) Thanks for the addition! (y)


:lollipop_tears_of_joy: (y)

Very interesting. Makes me worry a little bit less on that SSD size. Although I would still upgrade it.

Yup, and it also depends if we're talking about competent devs here that are willing to put on the extra work, which is automatic and easy on PS5 though as been explained by Cerny and devs have stressed through several outlets how easy to optimize for the PS5.

You can never count on all devs being due dilligent with their engines and optimization. A lot has improved to avoid duplication of assets etc but there is still legacy in there. You're correct.

Indeed. I personally considering a 2TB-not-so-fast NVMe m.2 just to shit games in and out of the main internal SSD.

That's pretty tight.

Thanks mate!:lollipop_wink_tongue:
 
Thats what ive been saying to everyone thou series x is a stronger machine and majority might peak out with say more 4k games but further down the line ps5 would be around 1440p or 1800p optimised using 8k assets due to kraken, oodle and the speed of the ps5 ssd. Series x would struggle with that unless alot of optimizations are involved
 
We also have to remember that Oodle Texture is very new and Oodle came out and said that it won't be used for all of the launch games because of this, so the game sizes we see at launch may not be the fully compressed ones that we'll see a little further down the road.
Thats when first party studios make use of it properly maybe we get to see 8k assets? With vss?
 
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Allandor

Member
OK, that again?

Yes kraken works more efficient, but if you make fixed function hardware you have always compromises. The is valid for kraken and zlib,...
Speed is not really a thing here because both are hardware based. The difference is just that PS5 seems to have the faster unit, but that has nothing to do with the decompression cpu based speed via the used in that graph.

So the only thing we can talk about is the efficiency. Than you should count in, that you don't want to compress texture data as one big chunk. Instead you want to compress only small chunks so you only need to load texture data into memory that is needed (PRT). Because of the small chunks and because of hardware based compression you loose efficiency on both sides. In the end we may be at an efficiency advantage of about 10% in favor of kraken.
It just won't be big.
The speed of reading the data is a way bigger advantage for zhe PS5. But I have my doubts, that this will make big differences in the end, because both machines have high IO bandwidth that won't bottleneck. We Wil Stil see loading screens because of other cpu heavy work, that can now be done in parallel with IO stuff.
While streaming data in and out the IO speed is so high, that it just won't matter.
 
Awesome post! All of this is super interesting! So if you guys had to speculate from the architecture differences between the ps5 and series x. Is it fair to assume higher quality assets for the ps5 and better ray tracing for the series x? I’m just here to learn. Thanks!
 
OK, that again?

Yes kraken works more efficient, but if you make fixed function hardware you have always compromises. The is valid for kraken and zlib,...
Speed is not really a thing here because both are hardware based. The difference is just that PS5 seems to have the faster unit, but that has nothing to do with the decompression cpu based speed via the used in that graph.

So the only thing we can talk about is the efficiency. Than you should count in, that you don't want to compress texture data as one big chunk. Instead you want to compress only small chunks so you only need to load texture data into memory that is needed (PRT). Because of the small chunks and because of hardware based compression you loose efficiency on both sides. In the end we may be at an efficiency advantage of about 10% in favor of kraken.
It just won't be big.
The speed of reading the data is a way bigger advantage for zhe PS5. But I have my doubts, that this will make big differences in the end, because both machines have high IO bandwidth that won't bottleneck. We Wil Stil see loading screens because of other cpu heavy work, that can now be done in parallel with IO stuff.
While streaming data in and out the IO speed is so high, that it just won't matter.
Its not just about loading times it also includes compress and decompress of texture assets aswell since lods and that will pretty much load faster compares to what series x is using and since ssd on ps5 would nearly reach its 22gbps it would also work alot faster using 8k textures cost of resolution yes! This is where the series x would fall as it wont be near as fast
 
Awesome post! All of this is super interesting! So if you guys had to speculate from the architecture differences between the ps5 and series x. Is it fair to assume higher quality assets for the ps5 and better ray tracing for the series x? I’m just here to learn. Thanks!
Yes that is correct. And correct me if im wrong but be4 4k was a thing. Pc users was able to download 4k assets but required a fast ssd to the assets as it was quicker to decompress?
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
Thats what ive been saying to everyone thou series x is a stronger machine and majority might peak out with say more 4k games but further down the line ps5 would be around 1440p or 1800p optimised using 8k assets due to kraken, oodle and the speed of the ps5 ssd. Series x would struggle with that unless alot of optimizations are involved

With such efficiency, cache scrubbers as well, 4K is achievable, but Sony might use it's new patented AI image reconstruction to boost visual fidelity instead of pixel count while achieving near-native 4K with more computational room at your disposal.

We also have to remember that Oodle Texture is very new and Oodle came out and said that it won't be used for all of the launch games because of this, so the game sizes we see at launch may not be the fully compressed ones that we'll see a little further down the road.

That's very interesting indeed! Then we haven't seen it in action yet. Thanks for the details.

Thats when first party studios make use of it properly maybe we get to see 8k assets? With vss?

I think we already seeing 4-8K assets in Spider-man MM while maintaining 50GB game size vs 52GB on PS4 with all its duplicates and much lower assets quality.
 
With such efficiency, cache scrubbers as well, 4K is achievable, but Sony might use it's new patented AI image reconstruction to boost visual fidelity instead of pixel count while achieving near-native 4K with more computational room at your disposal.



That's very interesting indeed! Then we haven't seen it in action yet. Thanks for the details.



I think we already seeing 4-8K assets in Spider-man MM while maintaining 50GB game size vs 52GB on PS4 with all its duplicates and much lower assets quality.
If thats the case then we could possibly see ps5 to be the console that could not saying it will but could possibly use 12/16k textures say around 1080p and yeah that ai image is like dlss?
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
If thats the case then we could possibly see ps5 to be the console that could not saying it will but could possibly use 12/16k textures say around 1080p and yeah that ai image is like dlss?

Yes:


Patent:

 
Yes:


Patent:

So could be true if they can reach 22 they ps5 could reach upto 16k assets at 1080p with DLSS which would make it more superior to series x it could possibly struggle as its ssd speed is much slower
 
Awesome post! All of this is super interesting! So if you guys had to speculate from the architecture differences between the ps5 and series x. Is it fair to assume higher quality assets for the ps5 and better ray tracing for the series x? I’m just here to learn. Thanks!

I think it has been speculated, all things being equal, that it's that and less pop-in/futher draw distances/instant loading and the like.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
OK, that again?

Yes kraken works more efficient, but if you make fixed function hardware you have always compromises. The is valid for kraken and zlib,...
Speed is not really a thing here because both are hardware based. The difference is just that PS5 seems to have the faster unit, but that has nothing to do with the decompression cpu based speed via the used in that graph.

Speed is important as it can be a bottleneck in the I/O throughput, so it's critical for data streaming at least. Both have HW, XSX|S using ZLIB. Xbox can use Kraken if they decide to, as it works with any kind of lossless HW decompressor, but less effective than Kraken HW decompressor indeed. PS4 uses ZLIB and Sony has license Kraken for PS4 as well, but there is no such thing as data streaming in HDD.



So the only thing we can talk about is the efficiency. Than you should count in, that you don't want to compress texture data as one big chunk. Instead you want to compress only small chunks so you only need to load texture data into memory that is needed (PRT). Because of the small chunks and because of hardware based compression you loose efficiency on both sides. In the end we may be at an efficiency advantage of about 10% in favor of kraken.
It just won't be big.

Overall advantage is around 29% losslessly (Kraken vs ZLIB) for the whole game. Oodle Texture is somehow similar to BCpack in reduction ratio, so not counting any advantage there as it's a case by case matter.

They can use that headroom if they want for higher quality assets, which is already achieveable if they eliminate LOD's without touching that 29%.

The speed of reading the data is a way bigger advantage for zhe PS5. But I have my doubts, that this will make big differences in the end, because both machines have high IO bandwidth that won't bottleneck. We Wil Stil see loading screens because of other cpu heavy work, that can now be done in parallel with IO stuff.
While streaming data in and out the IO speed is so high, that it just won't matter.

Loading screens aren't that much important in that matter though, it's a matter of streaming assets on the fly that will make the system more efficient with its bandwidth/RAM/CPU/GPU along with cache scrubbers.

Regards.
 
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Speed is not really a thing here because both are hardware based.
Performance can then be translated in lower energy requirements and/or smaller hardware footprint of the decompression hardware itself.

It doesn't become completely moot... But what really counts for us is the end result, and if enough studios end up taking advantage of the associated features.

Fixed function hardware rocks.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
Awesome post! All of this is super interesting! So if you guys had to speculate from the architecture differences between the ps5 and series x. Is it fair to assume higher quality assets for the ps5 and better ray tracing for the series x? I’m just here to learn. Thanks!

Not necessarily, 1st party studios would rather utilize it more. And for 3rd party it might be expensive for them to favor one system over the other in terms of taking too much work, but I think devs will have 8K assets already for PC with those RTX 3080/3090 and Big Navi cards so we might see it happening.

As for ray tracing, I'm not so deep into it. But I believe if each CU has an intersection engine (RT cores), XSX could have more rays, and PS5 less, while PS5 would have faster calculation of RT bounces on the fly due to higher clocks. But there are many different things in both systems, so we can't only account these two factors. It's better to wait and see.

Its not just about loading times it also includes compress and decompress of texture assets aswell since lods and that will pretty much load faster compares to what series x is using and since ssd on ps5 would nearly reach its 22gbps it would also work alot faster using 8k textures cost of resolution yes! This is where the series x would fall as it wont be near as fast
Yes that is correct. And correct me if im wrong but be4 4k was a thing. Pc users was able to download 4k assets but required a fast ssd to the assets as it was quicker to decompress?
If thats the case then we could possibly see ps5 to be the console that could not saying it will but could possibly use 12/16k textures say around 1080p and yeah that ai image is like dlss?
So could be true if they can reach 22 they ps5 could reach upto 16k assets at 1080p with DLSS which would make it more superior to series x it could possibly struggle as its ssd speed is much slower

Xbox Series X|S has BCpack, which is as roughly efficient with textures compression as Oodle Texture. PS5 was hitting 20GB/s before Oodle Texture occasionally, not it's expected to hit 17-22GB/s more consistently. It's the same 5.5GB/s raw though, but when decompressed you get up to 22GB/s.

As I'm aware, there is no gaming texture as high as 12-16K, and even with high texture compression it'll still be massive. 8K or even 4K would serve most people fine, assuming you've already eliminated LOD's to compensate for that extra size.

This is 1080p@60fps with RT on PS5, not :







We need to wait for more details about that Ai image reconstruction details.

I think such high res textures would be pretty overkill at such low resolutions.

It's not an overkill though, you only render more the closer you get, but 12-16K isn't available anyway yet, 4-8K is more reasonable.
 
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RoadHazard

Gold Member
Not necessarily, 1st party studios would rather utilize it more. And for 3rd party it might be expensive for them to favor one system over the other in terms of other if it's taking too much work, but I think devs will have 8K assets already for PC with those RTX 3080/3090 and Big Navi cards.

As for ray tracing, I'm not so deep into it. But I believe if each CU has an intersection engine (RT cores), XSX could have more rays, and PS5 less, while PS5 would have faster calculation of RT bounces on the fly due to higher clocks. But there are many different things in both systems, so we can't only account these two factors. It's better to wait and see.






Xbox Series X|S has BCpack, which is as roughly efficient with textures compression as Oodle Texture. PS5 was hitting 20GB/s before Oodle Texture occasionally, not it's expected to hit 17-22GB/s more consistently. It's the same 5.5GB/s raw though, but when decompressed you get up to 22GB/s.

As I'm aware, there is no gaming texture as high as 12-16K, and even with high texture compression it'll still be massive. 8K or even 4K would serve most people fine, assuming you've already eliminated LOD's to compensate for that extra size.

This is 1080p@60fps with RT on PS5, not :







We need to wait for more details about that Ai image reconstruction details.



It's not an overkill though, you only render more the closer you get, but 12-16K isn't available anyway yet, 4-8K is more reasonable.


Sure, I guess if stretched over a large enough surface it could still make a difference. But is there any advantage to using one 16K texture over 4 4K ones to fill the same space, now that seek latency is basically gone?

Edit: I guess that would actually be 16 4K textures.
 
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The door would still inexplicably have an N64 texture.

(Assuming you meant to say FFVIIR)
To be fair PS1 FF vii had textures that were much more impressive than any N64 title.


I am definitely interested in seeing how it turns out, with the integration in unity and ue4 many games will probably support sime of the goodness by default (because devs are too lazy to work their way around it).
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
To be fair PS1 FF vii had textures that were much more impressive than any N64 title.


I am definitely interested in seeing how it turns out, with the integration in unity and ue4 many games will probably support sime of the goodness by default (because devs are too lazy to work their way around it).

Well, background images... The 3D model textures weren't that impressive! Actually, were there any at all, or was it all just colored flat-shaded polygons?
 
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GreyHand23

Member
That's very interesting indeed! Then we haven't seen it in action yet. Thanks for the details.

This is the quote. "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."

https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-and-oodle-texture.html

They also say this in the comments when asked about a comparison to BCPack.

"I don't think there's any public comparison of Kraken and BCPack. If there was one an unofficial one around, beware it might not include the affects of Oodle Texture. Oodle Texture dramatically changes the way textures compress; we believe it should always be used with textures in games. We're big fans of the Xbox Series X. Their approach is slightly different, but we're glad to see they are taking compression seriously. Oodle Texture works great for the Xbox as well, and we are working with a lot of game companies that are using it on Xbox, so consumers should see lots of games with those huge size and speed savings on Xbox as well. It's up to the individual game developers, as it's not been licensed platform-wide at this time. Game developers are also using Oodle Texture and Oodle Kraken for PC games; most multi-platform devs will be using the same Oodle Texture encoding of their textures for all platforms, it's not platform-specific. On the PC you don't have hardware Kraken, so software Kraken is used on the CPU. To keep up with the fastest SSD speeds this requires several cores; luckily high end PC's also have lots of CPU cores! At RAD we've always just tried to make the best compression possible for games. We plan to continue to work with all platforms in the future."
 

PhoenixTank

Member
zlib? AKA deflate... used in gzip files or zip files since what feels like the dawn of time?
Don't get me wrong Kraken looks great but is better compared against LZMA as a starting point for the thread.
And in that case it looks like it does pretty favourably: Immensely faster decompression (though LZMA is single threaded) and most of the compression ratio.

Cool tech to have on board and reminds me of the SNES days with special chips in the carts.
 
It will be interesting to see what the kraken hardware decompressor can achieve - but considering it's made for a newer compression format doesn't this mean we won't see any meaningful difference in load times between the two consoles for last gen and maybe even launch titles?
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
Lord saviour Cerny single handely won the engineering race.

Ssd+i/o is most impressive feature of PS5 :)

Feels like when I saw ps1 for the first time

Yeah man, I remember seeing Tekken package and looking at 3D graphics it was creepy to me coming from Sega MegaDrive. :lollipop_tears_of_joy:

Awesome OP, people will wonder which kind of black magic will be behind these games loading in just a handful seconds.

Loading is the least important thing here, trust me.:messenger_winking:

Performance can then be translated in lower energy requirements and/or smaller hardware footprint of the decompression hardware itself.

It doesn't become completely moot... But what really counts for us is the end result, and if enough studios end up taking advantage of the associated features.

Fixed function hardware rocks.

Well said. (y)

Oh fuck me.

Wait so PS5 will be able to to rapidly stream and compress/uncompress 8K textures for games ?

Compression is something the studio/devs do before shipping the game to us, we mostly or solely use decompression. But PS5 with Atom View or UE5 can render according to the frame budget, and UE5 demo went for an overkill 4:1 ratio, 20 million polygons per frame (not second) for 4.2 million pixels (1440p) to create that natural, shockingly photorealistic final image.

Sure, I guess if stretched over a large enough surface it could still make a difference. But is there any advantage to using one 16K texture over 4 4K ones to fill the same space, now that seek latency is basically gone?

You don't need to, as the system would stream polygons on the fly as you get closer, and offload according to how far you go. It's the aliasing killer when used. Anti-aliasing could become something from the past for PS5. And there is still no 16K textures though for gaming.

To be fair PS1 FF vii had textures that were much more impressive than any N64 title.


I am definitely interested in seeing how it turns out, with the integration in unity and ue4 many games will probably support sime of the goodness by default (because devs are too lazy to work their way around it).

Atom View was independent when that video posted, then Sony acquired them. So I doubt Sony would lend non-first-party studios or non-exclusive games that tech. Epic Games must be thrilled to have the privilege to have their own version of that with Sony's collaboration.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
This is the quote. "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."

https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-and-oodle-texture.html

They also say this in the comments when asked about a comparison to BCPack.

"I don't think there's any public comparison of Kraken and BCPack. If there was one an unofficial one around, beware it might not include the affects of Oodle Texture. Oodle Texture dramatically changes the way textures compress; we believe it should always be used with textures in games. We're big fans of the Xbox Series X. Their approach is slightly different, but we're glad to see they are taking compression seriously. Oodle Texture works great for the Xbox as well, and we are working with a lot of game companies that are using it on Xbox, so consumers should see lots of games with those huge size and speed savings on Xbox as well. It's up to the individual game developers, as it's not been licensed platform-wide at this time. Game developers are also using Oodle Texture and Oodle Kraken for PC games; most multi-platform devs will be using the same Oodle Texture encoding of their textures for all platforms, it's not platform-specific. On the PC you don't have hardware Kraken, so software Kraken is used on the CPU. To keep up with the fastest SSD speeds this requires several cores; luckily high end PC's also have lots of CPU cores! At RAD we've always just tried to make the best compression possible for games. We plan to continue to work with all platforms in the future."

Amazing addition! Put it on the OP.

zlib? AKA deflate... used in gzip files or zip files since what feels like the dawn of time?
Don't get me wrong Kraken looks great but is better compared against LZMA as a starting point for the thread.
And in that case it looks like it does pretty favourably: Immensely faster decompression (though LZMA is single threaded) and most of the compression ratio.

Cool tech to have on board and reminds me of the SNES days with special chips in the carts.

LZMA is slightly better than Kraken for compression, but with games it's not about just sizes. LZMA is extremely slower in decompression, which is a critical factor for game in playability. Kraken is 3233% faster in decompression speed than LZMA! Even ZLIB is 733% faster than LZMA in decompression! That's why they favored Kraken as it's a well-balanced solution.

It will be interesting to see what the kraken hardware decompressor can achieve - but considering it's made for a newer compression format doesn't this mean we won't see any meaningful difference in load times between the two consoles for last gen and maybe even launch titles?

I believe like 1-2 years from now we should expect full utilization of those perks. Oodle Textures might be seen later as well as posted above by GreyHand23 GreyHand23 .

Next gen games developed exclusively for both Xbox Series X and PS5 are going to blow minds.

Can't wait to see the first wave of these.

Melting here!:messenger_smiling_hearts:
 

yurinka

Member
Loading is the least important thing here, trust me.:messenger_winking:
It also means shorter downloading times and taking less space on disk, but I assue the main practical improvement is loading faster because loading times are annoying for players and they see them frequently.

And well, thanks to this extra speed (plus having I/O bottlenecks removed and enough RAM and GPU horsepower) then you can also get extra detail in textures and models, specially because you also get righ of normals/LOD/etc., plus also being able to put even more detail because of due to the super speed to stream, now you don't need to have a big area of the stage in the RAM but instead a very small one, so so can apply even more detail there.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
It also means shorter downloading times and taking less space on disk, but I assue the main practical improvement is loading faster because loading times are annoying for players and they see them frequently.

And well, thanks to this extra speed (plus having I/O bottlenecks removed and enough RAM and GPU horsepower) then you can also get extra detail in textures and models, specially because you also get righ of normals/LOD/etc., plus also being able to put even more detail because of due to the super speed to stream, now you don't need to have a big area of the stage in the RAM but instead a very small one, so so can apply even more detail there.

Yes, the biggest thing about it is it makes that 825GB more like a massive slower RAM! Faster than DDR3 RAM's actually, which is insane!

DIMM TypeMemory ClockI/O Bus ClockData RateModule NamePeak Transfer Rate
DDR3-800100 MHz400 MHz800 MT/sPC-64006400 MB/s
DDR3-1066133 MHz533 MHz1066 MT/sPC-85008533 MB/s
DDR3-1333166 MHz666 MHz1333 MT/sPC-1060010600 MB/s
DDR3-1600200 MHz800 MHz1600 MT/sPC-1280012800 MB/s
DDR3-1866233 MHz933 MHz1866 MT/sPC-1490014933 MB/s
DDR3-2133266 MHz1066 MHz2133 MT/sPC-1700017066 MB/s

 

GreyHand23

Member
LZMA is slightly better than Kraken for compression, but with games it's not about just sizes. LZMA is extremely slower in decompression, which is a critical factor for game in playability. Kraken is 3233% faster in decompression speed than LZMA! Even ZLIB is 733% faster than LZMA in decompression! That's why they favored Kraken as it's a well-balanced solution.

The speed of the decompression is only a factor in terms of silicon cost. By that I mean because Kraken decompresses so fast, the PS5 needed less silicon dedicated to hardware decompression. Theoretically you could decompress the same amount with LZMA or ZLIB as well, but it would have taken much more dedicated hardware to do so. This is the reason that Kraken was the smart move.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
The speed of the decompression is only a factor in terms of silicon cost. By that I mean because Kraken decompresses so fast, the PS5 needed less silicon dedicated to hardware decompression. Theoretically you could decompress the same amount with LZMA or ZLIB as well, but it would have taken much more dedicated hardware to do so. This is the reason that Kraken was the smart move.

That's another fucking great point indeed! That's why Mark Cerny hustled to get it back in 2017 when they nearly went with ZLIB, according to Road to PS5.
 

Kenpachii

Member
This is the quote. "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."

https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-and-oodle-texture.html

They also say this in the comments when asked about a comparison to BCPack.

"I don't think there's any public comparison of Kraken and BCPack. If there was one an unofficial one around, beware it might not include the affects of Oodle Texture. Oodle Texture dramatically changes the way textures compress; we believe it should always be used with textures in games. We're big fans of the Xbox Series X. Their approach is slightly different, but we're glad to see they are taking compression seriously. Oodle Texture works great for the Xbox as well, and we are working with a lot of game companies that are using it on Xbox, so consumers should see lots of games with those huge size and speed savings on Xbox as well. It's up to the individual game developers, as it's not been licensed platform-wide at this time. Game developers are also using Oodle Texture and Oodle Kraken for PC games; most multi-platform devs will be using the same Oodle Texture encoding of their textures for all platforms, it's not platform-specific. On the PC you don't have hardware Kraken, so software Kraken is used on the CPU. To keep up with the fastest SSD speeds this requires several cores; luckily high end PC's also have lots of CPU cores! At RAD we've always just tried to make the best compression possible for games. We plan to continue to work with all platforms in the future."

On the PC you don't have hardware Kraken, so software Kraken is used on the CPU. To keep up with the fastest SSD speeds this requires several cores

Good luck with that.

Unless oodler starts to move those tasks towards the GPU, oodle seems like a nich for console exclusive games.
 
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