I prefer 10-20 hours games. In any case, the insane assets they included in the demo were too detailed. Way more than the console resolution can render, so their detail can be reduced without losing fidelity in gameplay.
If when exporting to the disk files UE5 keeps there the original files instead of optimizing them for the maximum detail possible considering the areas where the camera can move and the native resolution that the game uses, devs may create a tool to do that.
In addition to that, many devs -specially the open world ones- are moving to a more procedural world building to create landscapes, buildings and so on tiling stuff like houses or fences, with different variations, etc. in addition to the typical techniques of slightly changing position/rotation/size/texture of rocks/trees/etc.
I mean, with the current gen hardware they did stuff like Uncharted 4, Horizon, God of War, RDR2 and so on. Not counting stuff like extra compression, now they'll have the double of space in the bluray and memory, probably the standard AAA size goes up to ~100GB instead of the traditional ~50GB, and on top of that game updates as Cerny said would have a smaller size.
This, mixed with the extra productivity coming from avoiding stuff like normals, LOD, and so on, and having way more horsepower, capable of rendering with the insane detail we saw in the demo and allowing great global dynamic illumination even without using RT, I'm pretty sure that the non-crossgen next gen AAA games will look stunning specially when using an engine properly optimized for next gen.
I mean, a fucking random rock doesn't need millions of triangles and 8K textures for a 4K or 1440p game.
This only proves that the demo wasnt pulling 5 GB/s as people like you are saying. Because the files you need are ALREADY IN memory and are less or about 1 GB. Because theres such use of repeated assets you are not constantly loading from the SSD. Completely debunking the whole this can only run at same quality on PS5.
You cant have your cake of eat it too. but ofcourse constantly contradicting yourself is part of the plan.
PS5 puts ~8-9GB/s of data from the SSD to the memory, not 5. It doesn't mean they will be streaming always at maximum capacity and filling the whole memory every time they stream, obviously they will only when needed and for the amount they need.
They shown the assets store from where they took the assets for the demo. There were more than 6 rocks and wasn't all of them.
I've heard kraken can probably be used to compress polygonal data.
The idea is that all the data stored in the SSD and in the bluray is compressed with Kraken. And when loaded to the RAM it gets decompressed at the same speed it gets read. So in a second 5.5GB of SSD compressed data are read and decompressed by a dedicated custom chip to become around 8 or 9GB of GPU native data in the RAM.
But do you think that 200GB is enough really need that PS5 SSD speed, or will slower SSD's also manage if it's "only" 200GB for the whole game? Because that's the only question I'm asking myself. PS5 SSD is extremely fast, but will the games exist out of big enough assets to use this to its advantage.
With SSD they don't need to repeat some data many times as they did with HDD, and now post launch patches will be smaller, and they won't need normals, LoD, etc, and now they use a better compression. A 50GB of the current gen game but made for PS5 would take way less space of HDD, probably even like way less than the half. In addition to this, I'm pretty sure they'll have some smart way to optimize SSD data usage as mentioned by Cerny I think it was at Wired, where you only install the part you'll use (let's say core of the game + episode 3 of the single player mode that you are playing, and maybe episode 4 and once it's completed episode 3 is deleted until you want to play it again).
They won't need 200GB, because with 100GB they will be able to store there way more than they did in 100GB in the last gen, and because the PS5 blurays will be 100GB. And that will be more than enough for most games.