underwater
Member
When developers are presented with a new capability, it takes time to fully utilize it. First they have to wrap their heads around what they can do with it, then it takes time to implement it and iterate it and eventually push it to the limits.I think people are forgetting that R&C loads assets in&out on the fly, as you rotate the camera, which is an extremely demanding task since you have literally single milliseconds to do it, if not less. So if the slowest available drive on the market wouldn't be up to the task it would've been immediately visible on the screen with missing textures or entire objects, no benchmarks are needed for that.
With R&C we are seeing Insomniacs very early use of the PS5 hardware. For this reason it may indeed run "fine" on a 3500MB/s SSD. However anyone buying such an SSD will experience issues as we progress further into the generation. Guaranteed. Unless you have money to burn, buy a 7GB/s SSD. Or wait for the beta to conclude and then Sony will detail how they will handle the "too slow" problem. A too slow SSD may simply be locked out, or it may be restricted to PS4 games only. Just because they are allowing people to test slow SSDs in beta does not mean this will carry over once beta concludes.
Some developer quotes:
Behind the scenes, there’s so much to peel back about the SSD and the I/O around it. We’re just scratching the surface of it.
This title is the first one where we made the content knowing it would only ever be running on the PlayStation 5. And so our artists would say “What kind of mesh density can I have?” And I’d be like “... I don’t know.” Because we didn’t have the hardware. And we didn’t know, as the engine evolved, how the trade-offs would manifest themselves. Even once you have the hardware, it still takes you months or a year for your engine to evolve into it where you know how you want to spend your frame budget, what you do on the GPU versus the CPU, all that kind of stuff.