• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Xbox Series S load times

Decent load times; people should keep in mind that non-Series versions of these games not programmed against the XvA APIs won't benefit from most of the XvA featureset, though.

Hopefully MS demonstrates a game or two programmed with XvA features in mind for load and latency display demonstration purposes (and also that they've made this as easy as possible for 3rd party developers to utilize).

You should really try to understand how games currently load their assets (read my other comment above.. To complicated to merge the answers from my mobile phone)

But I really don't understand why Ms isn't showing new games. Maybe they don't have one properly running, or they just want to keep it for another presentation.

I've heard rumors that they've switched from specific Xbox GDKs to a Windows GDK encompassing PC and Xbox consoles. Lines up well with the Gamecore stuff I also read about, so I'm guessing the Windows GDK and Gamecore are the same thing.

If that's true, it'd mean they're making that transition to integrate their GDKs into a unified package, but it's seemingly come with some setbacks and a few difficulties for various developers as things get ironed out. Also sounds like they've changed a lot of things when doing this integration, too. Sony apparently just have an evolution of PS4's SDK and API set for PS5 so devs are just carrying on as normal (except maybe Capcom, apparently, at least with RE8 but I blame that more on RE Engine than PS5 SDK state).
 
Last edited:

Pimpbaa

Member
This is not how it works. Loading an asset is abstracted away under an API call, as in, yes, it is automatic, the programmer doesn't have to code the entire process of accessing the HDD and obtaining some asset. Aside from some techniques of replicating assets on disk to make them load faster, the reason why some games take longer to load than others is because some games are able to only load what they need at the moment they need it, which is much more difficult than it sounds.

If loading speed was due to replication of assets, then SSDs should show a significant improvement in load speeds across the board (like on PC). But it doesn't because decompression is being done on the slow ass Jaguar CPU cores. Games that take forever to load still take forever to load (replicated assets provide no benefit on a SSD). The large variation in speed in loading in current gen games can only be due to the skills of the developer and how they code their loading routines (and how many CPU cores they use to do it). No generalized API should produce such wildly differing loading speeds (especially on a SSD).
 

Azurro

Banned
If loading speed was due to replication of assets, then SSDs should show a significant improvement in load speeds across the board (like on PC). But it doesn't because decompression is being done on the slow ass Jaguar CPU cores. Games that take forever to load still take forever to load (replicated assets provide no benefit on a SSD). The large variation in speed in loading in current gen games can only be due to the skills of the developer and how they code their loading routines (and how many CPU cores they use to do it). No generalized API should produce such wildly differing loading speeds (especially on a SSD).

Again, to preface I'm out of my element as I don't do game development, but even if those mechanisms are different, wouldn't they be abstracted away behind the same API call? I can't imagine the game actually coding the routine to go get the package of data and then explicitly telling the CPU to decompress it, so in my head I would expect whatever logic is performing that function to be rewritten by MS in their SDK to make use of the Xbox's I/O pipeline.

IMO they would basically have to, as both next gen and current gen have to use the same hardware pipeline and have to use the same SSD. There will be a bit of a performance delta due to how the data is packaged, but I wouldn't expect performance to drop dramatically.

Also, I don't think we have seen any of those super fast loading on Xbox X|S, they are fast but nothing super fast or mind blowing, so I don't think what you describe is what's going on.

Edit: spelling/grammar.
 
Last edited:
Ahhhh what a first world problem to have for me personally . For some reason I feel underwhelmed by 10 second load times. Maybe marketing set me up for failure? But on the other hand, can’t even imagine going back to destiny 2 with those traveler forsaken load time on console. One of the sole reasons I built a PC. Next gen gonna be litty 🔥🔥🔥.

Also, I would like to see more videos on games optimized for XVA and load times of PS4 games on PS5
 

Pimpbaa

Member
Again, to preface I'm out of my element as I don't do gaming development, but even if those mechanisms are different, wouldn't they be abstracted away behind the same API call? I can't imagine the game actually coding the routine to go get the package of data and then explicitly telling the CPU to decompress it, so in my head I would expect whatever logic is performing that data to be overwritten by MS and making use of the Xbox's I/O pipeline. IMO they basically have to, as both next gen and current gen have to use the same hardware pipeline and using the same SSD. There will be a bit of a performance delta due to how the data is packaged, but I wouldn't expect performance to drop dramatically.

Also, I don't think we have seen any of those super fast loading on Xbox X|S, they are fast but nothing super fast or mind blowing, so I don't think what you describe is what's going on.

I dunno to me it's like expecting old software rendered PC games to take advantage of 3D acceleration. But like you I'm not in game development and could be thinking too old school in regards to that.
 

Azurro

Banned
I dunno to me it's like expecting old software rendered PC games to take advantage of 3D acceleration. But like you I'm not in game development and could be thinking too old school in regards to that.

You think so? Wouldn't those be very differently coded titles? I mean, taking advantage of hardware acceleration means using something like DirectX, so the engine would be using some API call at the bottom to let the hardware perform whatever function it needs, while a software based renderer would have been coded entirely in the game and those functions written explicitly in the game's code and executed by the CPU, so it would make sense that it does not get enhanced by 3D acceleration.
 

martino

Member
I dunno to me it's like expecting old software rendered PC games to take advantage of 3D acceleration. But like you I'm not in game development and could be thinking too old school in regards to that.
you probably forgot that for some hardware support at the time you needed specific executable giving you support for it (and it was not always included)
best example from top of my head are Tomb raider and Pod...but there surely are lot of others.
 

MrLove

Banned
Not impressed. The PS5 load current gen less one second. and next gen alwasy less 2 seconds, dont matter wich game. 8-9gb/s at least is practically not theoretically. 2,4 gb/s theoretically not practical




 

Pimpbaa

Member
You think so? Wouldn't those be very differently coded titles? I mean, taking advantage of hardware acceleration means using something like DirectX, so the engine would be using some API call at the bottom to let the hardware perform whatever function it needs, while a software based renderer would have been coded entirely in the game and those functions written explicitly in the game's code and executed by the CPU, so it would make sense that it does not get enhanced by 3D acceleration.

That depends on how loading is done on current gen titles (and PC). It's just that some games take so goddamn long to load like Metro Exodus that it leads me to believe that loading must be done by the developer. On the opposite end, you have games like Ghost of Tsushima which loads incredibly fast (I know this is an xbox thread, but that's what springs to mind recently of a fast loading game). Whether I'm right or wrong, I'm just glad this shit won't be a problem for next gen games (I hope).
 
You should really try to understand how games currently load their assets (read my other comment above.. To complicated to merge the answers from my mobile phone)

But I really don't understand why Ms isn't showing new games. Maybe they don't have one properly running, or they just want to keep it for another presentation.
well in less than 2 months we will find out. Isn't part of MS' big pitch that BC works without needing patches? Theoretically, do you think BC games on PS5 will load at approx the same speed as MS has shown with BC games? 10-12 seconds?
 

Azurro

Banned
That depends on how loading is done on current gen titles (and PC). It's just that some games take so goddamn long to load like Metro Exodus that it leads me to believe that loading must be done by the developer. On the opposite end, you have games like Ghost of Tsushima which loads incredibly fast (I know this is an xbox thread, but that's what springs to mind recently of a fast loading game). Whether I'm right or wrong, I'm just glad this shit won't be a problem for next gen games (I hope).

Well, just because you are calling a function at the very bottom that abstracts away the nitty gritty details, it doesn't mean that the overall strategy on how games load their assets doesn't change drastically.

Again, I'm speculating but I imagine how games generate their open world's varies wildly, how big the assets are for each "chunk" of the streamed world are, how many need to stay in RAM and so on. I imagine game engines handle this kind of stuff really, really differently.
 

Allandor

Member
well in less than 2 months we will find out. Isn't part of MS' big pitch that BC works without needing patches? Theoretically, do you think BC games on PS5 will load at approx the same speed as MS has shown with BC games? 10-12 seconds?
Maybe 1-2s faster but not much. The CPUs are faster, but they still have work to do. Without explicit HW/SSD awareness patches, it won't get much better than this.

Not impressed. The PS5 load current gen less one second. and next gen alwasy less 2 seconds, dont matter wich game. 8-9gb/s at least is practically not theoretically. 2,4 gb/s theoretically not practical

Don't mix raw bandwidth with compressed. The 2.4GB/s are raw bandwidth. Those are always available on xbox series S/X. But compressed they get roundabout 4.8GB/s with compressed assets. Just like the PS5 figure of 8-9GB/s. You just cannot say ... "hey on PS5 we compress it all but on xbox we won't" that's not how it works.
 
Last edited:

Gravemind

Member
11 seconds ? This is not even a next-gen game with more assets. This is a XB1 game with max 5GB of data. So they'll need 15 sec for a next-gen game running on XSS (7.5GB) and >20 seconds for the XSX version with bigger assets (13GB).

People are going to be disappointed of their Xbox I/O when they'll see the other side.

giphy-downsized.gif


Ouch.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom