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PS5’s SSD is a Technical Gem, Fast Loading Broke Martha is Dead Levels During Development

Loxus

Member
Its anoying cerny did not give more information and examples of how a 5.5gb/s ssd would benifit over a 1gb/s or a 2gb/s ssd, which leads me to believe its a lot of marketing talk.
The Rock Reaction GIF by WWE

FewtSKJ.jpg

I8zDna4.jpg

These are all the list of things Cerny noted that the PS5 does and not seen on any other console.
E.g. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Demon's Souls, etc.


And it's not all about that 5.5GB/s but also the I/O Complex.
q9WMWXP.jpg


Also, check this out for ultra high speed streaming.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
The Rock Reaction GIF by WWE

FewtSKJ.jpg

I8zDna4.jpg

These are all the list of things Cerny noted that the PS5 does and not seen on any other console.
E.g. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Demon's Souls, etc.


And it's not all about that 5.5GB/s but also the I/O Complex.
q9WMWXP.jpg


Also, check this out for ultra high speed streaming.

Try actually reading the thread. Im obviously been talking about when cerny was talking about 4gb per half second streaming from the ssd.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
So you think there's no mathematical ground for Cerny's words? I'm pretty sure the calculations come from Zero Dawn and how they did the stream from an 5400RPM HDD to APU.

ucoln8kedwfglsrlxvm5.gif

So what visual improvements will 4gb per half sec vs 2gb per half sec bring?
 
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ChiefDada

Gold Member

Oh god I remember this crap. C'mon buddy this ended up being untrue it even says as much in the article you're referencing with the Epic CEO's quotes.

I honestly don't want to get into this, I just thought the dev comments about the SSD being to quick for the engine were interesting.
 

Boglin

Member
So what visual improvements will 4gb per half sec vs 2gb per half sec bring?
It brings no improvement. Twice the speed frees up reserved memory or allows to bring in twice as detailed of assets in the same amount of time which won't help visuals at all. Just like a 3GB GTX 1060 and a 6GB GTX 1060 perform exactly the same even though one has more memory than the other. Cerny is probably feeling pretty dumb for not realizing there's no benefit even after all those years of R&D and input from developers.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Oh god I remember this crap. C'mon buddy this ended up being untrue it even says as much in the article you're referencing with the Epic CEO's quotes.

I honestly don't want to get into this, I just thought the dev comments about the SSD being to quick for the engine were interesting.

Digital Foundry also addresed it after they spoke to epic. I would take a look but I have my hands full with other replies, I would appreciate it if u could take a look at it.

 

Loxus

Member
So what visual improvements will 4gb per half sec vs 2gb per half sec bring?
The only visual improvement you may get is more variety of objects (e.g. vegetation, vehicles, pedestrians, etc.) on screen due to better RAM management.

"On PlayStation 5 though the SSD is very close to being like more RAM."
f:id:keepitreal:20200329140011j:plain


"Typically it's fast enough that when you realize you need a piece of data you can just load it from the SSD and use it there's no need to have lots of data parked in system memory waiting to potentially be used."

"A different way of saying that is that most of Ram is working on the game's behalf."
 

8BiTw0LF

Banned
Wouldn't it be nice if cerny/sony showed a demo demonstrating this.
Not really, cause it's all theoretical depending on where the developers are focusing the stream. Like, some will go for fast static streaming of assets and others will go for random generated streams of assets, which all leads up to how many gigabytes there's a need for.

But don't be fooled. Higher speeds matter in all aspects of hardware and so does software/hardware compression tools. Something Sony really focused on with the SSD and Kraken.
We've yet to see what Direct Storage brings to the table, but in my 39 years, hardware has always triumphed software. I do look forward to see how it works tho'.
 
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Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
The only visual improvement you may get is more variety of objects (e.g. vegetation, vehicles, pedestrians, etc.) on screen due to better RAM management.

"On PlayStation 5 though the SSD is very close to being like more RAM."
f:id:keepitreal:20200329140011j:plain


"Typically it's fast enough that when you realize you need a piece of data you can just load it from the SSD and use it there's no need to have lots of data parked in system memory waiting to potentially be used."

"A different way of saying that is that most of Ram is working on the game's behalf."

Yes, a lot of this applies to SSDs in general. But my question is aimed at the visual advantages the superfast aspect of the ssd has over a slower one.
I would of thought textures would be a use for this, because things like goementry and effects are CPU + GPU bound.
If sony had a tech demo showing us, we would not have only speculation.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Not really, cause it's all theoretical depending on where the developers are focusing the stream. Like, some will go for fast static streaming of assets and others will go for random generated streams of assets, which all leads up to how many gigabytes there's a need for.

But don't be fooled. Higher speeds matter in all aspects of hardware and so does software/hardware compression tools. Something Sony really focused on with the SSD and Kraken.
We've yet to see what Direct Storage brings to the table, but in my 39 years, hardware has always triumphed software. I do look forward to see how it works tho'.

Lol, how could anyone suggest that the system architect and legendary game designer and his team could not make some tech demos of likely use cases.
 

S0ULZB0URNE

Member
It brings no improvement. Twice the speed frees up reserved memory or allows to bring in twice as detailed of assets in the same amount of time which won't help visuals at all. Just like a 3GB GTX 1060 and a 6GB GTX 1060 perform exactly the same even though one has more memory than the other. Cerny is probably feeling pretty dumb for not realizing there's no benefit even after all those years of R&D and input from developers.
Developers asked him to include a 1.5GB/s SSD in the PS5.
 

Boglin

Member
Developers asked him to include a 1.5GB/s SSD in the PS5.
That's what I'm saying. Both Sony and Microsoft are retarded for going so fast. Although I bet if some hypothetical but probably non-existent developers, especially among Sony's own ICE team, asked Sony for more than 5GB/s then those developers would probably be laughed out of the room. Cerny only got away with it because he's fun in the hot tub.
My 300MB/s sata drive from 2009 loads games nearly as fast as my newer 7GB/s drive. Clearly we've reached the limit and there couldn't possibly be any other bottlenecks.
Nvidia is also dumb for working on RTX IO. It doesn't even make the drives have faster GB/s lol
 

Hunnybun

Member
The loading is spectacularly fast at times. I really wish they'd let you jump right into games from the dashboard though, because 10 or 20 seconds of splash screens etc kind of defeats the object.
 

8BiTw0LF

Banned
Crl+f “road to ps5”
Yep people still believe that marketing video

If u think that a fast ssd is going to give you more than faster loading times in a game
qIjHwfl.jpg


We will still be at the same position we are in now in 5 years time…you only have to see the last 10 years of pc games as a reference
When storage is as fast as VRAM, the assets can be streamed directly from it and benefit.

 

ChiefDada

Gold Member
My 300MB/s sata drive from 2009 loads games nearly as fast as my newer 7GB/s drive. Clearly we've reached the limit and there couldn't possibly be any other bottlenecks.

Tell me you didn't watch the Road to PS5 without without telling me you didn't watch the Road to PS5.

And this applies to all the new consoles, although more pronounced for PS5. Their memory management and efficiency is the big advantage they have over PC.
 

ChiefDada

Gold Member
Basically why 5.5gb/ and not less.

There was a good discussion in another forum where someone explained why we shouldn't focus on per second bandwidth. I'm too lazy to track but basically it was just saying how this can be applied on a per frame basis aka milliseconds.

For both consoles it was about removing the largest bottlenecks. Like I mentioned to you before, higher throughput allows for higher quality assets, different assets, unique sound and a.i., etc.
 
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Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Crl+f “road to ps5”
Yep people still believe that marketing video

If u think that a fast ssd is going to give you more than faster loading times in a game
qIjHwfl.jpg


We will still be at the same position we are in now in 5 years time…you only have to see the last 10 years of pc games as a reference

The funny thing is in a few years when current gen games start hitting , 3rd party games will have similar differences as we are seeing now so the ssd difference wont be a big deal there and with exclusive sony game with the best looking cave ever seen and we will not be able to know if its just the devs talent or the sdd.
 
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Boglin

Member
Tell me you didn't watch the Road to PS5 without without telling me you didn't watch the Road to PS5.

And this applies to all the new consoles, although more pronounced for PS5. Their memory management and efficiency is the big advantage they have over PC.
Ridiculous. Next you'll be telling me that bypassing the need for the CPU to manage moving data from the SSD to the GPU or offloading decompression to dedicated hardware can allow the CPU to work on other tasks.
 

8BiTw0LF

Banned
Ridiculous. Next you'll be telling me that bypassing the need for the CPU to manage moving data from the SSD to the GPU or offloading decompression to dedicated hardware can allow the CPU to work on other tasks.
Sure, if you have a dedicated chip to decompress.


“This is the kind of advancement that I guess consoles can have that PCs might not generally be able to achieve, because what we’re talking about here, as far as I can understand, is custom hardware,” Chernikov said. “It is literally doing decompression in hardware, it’s not doing it on the CPU or the GPU. There is literally a unit responsible for decompression of this Kraken format, which is like zlib, but a bit better."
 
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Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Sure, if you have a dedicated chip to decompress.


“This is the kind of advancement that I guess consoles can have that PCs might not generally be able to achieve, because what we’re talking about here, as far as I can understand, is custom hardware,” Chernikov said. “It is literally doing decompression in hardware, it’s not doing it on the CPU or the GPU. There is literally a unit responsible for decompression of this Kraken format, which is like zlib, but a bit better."

The decompression chip is pretty crazy, equivalent of 8 zen 2 cores.

3rd parties will have to choose a path which works well with all platforms though, so any custom hardware wont see as much use from 3rd parties.
 

Trimesh

Banned

As I was reading up on the controversy surrounding the game, I came across this interesting article. I remember a similar article where Mark Cerny mentioned how the GPU speed broke the code of a AAA PS4 game in BC mode.

That's just shitty coding. The only way I can think of that reduced I/O latency would break things would be if you were reusing buffer memory and accessing it after it was scheduled for update - which is just really bad buffer management. If you have something that's scheduled to be updated and you are still using it you have set up a race condition and created the risk that the logic will blow up if anything gets delayed.

People pulled tricks like this all the time on the PSX - but that was somewhat more justifiable since it was an extremely memory constrained system and was basically a bare-metal platform with highly predictable best-case latency. There is zero reason to pull tricks like this on anything even remotely recent.

The whole thing is basically saying they have programmers that use bad coding practices and management that are sufficiently clueless that they don't recognize this is not something to advertise.
 

THE DUCK

voted poster of the decade by bots
Hard drives don’t render graphics.
Edit: are we really back to this nonsense again?

No but the speed is still important. A few gens from now (or less) it will be interesting if the overall storage speed is equal to ram speed meaning ram will be a thing of the past. How does 250gb of super fast ram sound to you?
 

Kenpachii

Member
Sure, if you have a dedicated chip to decompress.


“This is the kind of advancement that I guess consoles can have that PCs might not generally be able to achieve, because what we’re talking about here, as far as I can understand, is custom hardware,” Chernikov said. “It is literally doing decompression in hardware, it’s not doing it on the CPU or the GPU. There is literally a unit responsible for decompression of this Kraken format, which is like zlib, but a bit better."

1)
Nvidia NVENC (short for Nvidia Encoder) is a feature in Nvidia graphics cards that performs video encoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the CPU to a dedicated part of the GPU. It was introduced with the Kepler-based GeForce 600 series in March.

2)
Leveraging the advanced architecture of our new GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, we’ve created NVIDIA RTX IO, a suite of technologies that enable rapid GPU-based loading and game asset decompression, accelerating I/O performance by up to 100x compared to hard drives and traditional storage APIs. When used with Microsoft’s new DirectStorage for Windows API, RTX IO offloads dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to your GeForce RTX GPU, improving frame rates, enabling near-instantaneous game loading, and opening the door to a new era of large, incredibly detailed open world games.

Object pop-in and stutter can be reduced, and high-quality textures can be streamed at incredible rates, so even if you’re speeding through a world, everything runs and looks great. In addition, with lossless compression, game download and install sizes can be reduced, allowing gamers to store more games on their SSD while also improving their performance.

In short

Its not a issue for PC, its just software that needs to be made.

No but the speed is still important. A few gens from now (or less) it will be interesting if the overall storage speed is equal to ram speed meaning ram will be a thing of the past. How does 250gb of super fast ram sound to you?

Unless that SSD contains ram modules which will cost them a ton of money that's not going to happen.

Latency is far far far to high on SSD's to be used as ram for gpu's.
 
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S0ULZB0URNE

Member
Sure, if you have a dedicated chip to decompress.


“This is the kind of advancement that I guess consoles can have that PCs might not generally be able to achieve, because what we’re talking about here, as far as I can understand, is custom hardware,” Chernikov said. “It is literally doing decompression in hardware, it’s not doing it on the CPU or the GPU. There is literally a unit responsible for decompression of this Kraken format, which is like zlib, but a bit better."
Which I have heard=the fastest consumer I/O in gaming.
 

THE DUCK

voted poster of the decade by bots
1)
Nvidia NVENC (short for Nvidia Encoder) is a feature in Nvidia graphics cards that performs video encoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the CPU to a dedicated part of the GPU. It was introduced with the Kepler-based GeForce 600 series in March.

2)
Leveraging the advanced architecture of our new GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, we’ve created NVIDIA RTX IO, a suite of technologies that enable rapid GPU-based loading and game asset decompression, accelerating I/O performance by up to 100x compared to hard drives and traditional storage APIs. When used with Microsoft’s new DirectStorage for Windows API, RTX IO offloads dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to your GeForce RTX GPU, improving frame rates, enabling near-instantaneous game loading, and opening the door to a new era of large, incredibly detailed open world games.

Object pop-in and stutter can be reduced, and high-quality textures can be streamed at incredible rates, so even if you’re speeding through a world, everything runs and looks great. In addition, with lossless compression, game download and install sizes can be reduced, allowing gamers to store more games on their SSD while also improving their performance.

In short

Its not a issue for PC, its just software that needs to be made.



Unless that SSD contains ram modules which will cost them a ton of money that's not going to happen.

Latency is far far far to high on SSD's to be used as ram for gpu's.

It is right now, might not be in 20 years.
 

Cyberpunkd

Gold Member
I thought the "NEXT TO NO LOAD TIMEZ," shit was just promo fluff, but having spent a couple of months with my PS5, I can really say the snappiness of the console is a literal game changer. I was never one to mind loading times unless they were *absurd*, but playing FFXII right now, a title that I have a good bit of experience with starting with it's PS2 release, and hitting a zone line only to be essentially immediately met with the next zone is fucking legit.
It’s exactly the same as Xbox SSD, load times for games are more or less the same (within a few hundreds of a second).

Man, developer was giving his all promoting a normal functionality, then Sony censors his game anyway.

Hot Fuzz Shame GIF
 

Vognerful

Member
Digital Foundry also addresed it after they spoke to epic. I would take a look but I have my hands full with other replies, I would appreciate it if u could take a look at it.


You should also bring that the later demos they released on xbox and PC also demonstrated the amount of data streamed is still managed by slower SSDs.
 

Duchess

Member
Bonanni said, “We are all amazed by the performance of the PS5 SSD, which in itself is a technical gem. However, the element that really makes the difference here is the PS5’s data reading and writing system, which is extremely efficient. Even on some occasions we have found the fact that PS5 loads some scenes too quickly compared to other consoles and PCs, literally broke the loading of the levels because it was totally unexpected, so we had to get our hands on the code to counterbalance this excessive loading speed.”
Ha! I knew this would happen eventually! I said this ages ago during the now-defunct next-gen speculation thread - PS4 games on PS5 can't take advantage of the SSD because it could break the data loading sequences. Funny :)
 

assurdum

Banned
Talk is cheap.

The PS5 SSD is nice and performs well but we still have not seen it show any worthwhile advantages over a slower NVMe system.

But of course we are early in the gen, but based on the GPU caperbilities of the systems I dont thinks its going to be anything major and SSD wont help lighting, particle, fluid simulations and other GPU +CPU intensive visual components.
They technically explained to you in the OP because it's amazing (in their opinion) but never change Xbox fanboy, continue to find a way to downplay whatever it's not full RDNA2 and mesh shaders
 
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arvfab

Banned
Sure, if you have a dedicated chip to decompress.


“This is the kind of advancement that I guess consoles can have that PCs might not generally be able to achieve, because what we’re talking about here, as far as I can understand, is custom hardware,” Chernikov said. “It is literally doing decompression in hardware, it’s not doing it on the CPU or the GPU. There is literally a unit responsible for decompression of this Kraken format, which is like zlib, but a bit better."

Seems like people are not getting B Boglin 's sarcasm in his posts in this thread....
 

Dr Bass

Member
Talk is cheap.

The PS5 SSD is nice and performs well but we still have not seen it show any worthwhile advantages over a slower NVMe system.

But of course we are early in the gen, but based on the GPU caperbilities of the systems I dont thinks its going to be anything major and SSD wont help lighting, particle, fluid simulations and other GPU +CPU intensive visual components.
Yeah talk IS cheap.

Like saying we haven’t seen any advantages over slower systems when games like Ratchet and Clank exist and built gameplay features around that very feature.

Come on now. No need to deny simple reality.

Why does this happen around here?
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Until PC gets direct storage the ps5 ssd is twice as fast as anything on the market. I hope we see it getting utilised this generation and within the next couple of years but with the current state of affairs with chips it may never happen. Would be such a shame.

did digital foundry ever get around to testing that nerfed ssd on ratchet? I really thought that would be an interesting experiment.
 
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