asturur:

People got used to buying fast and expensive gpu, they will do the same with disks right? If not they will lower details and resolutions exactly as people with older gpu do. So what's the new?

Well gpu and disks are a bit different with a poor gpu or cpu you can just lower the details and resolution as you mentioned. And that will keep your fps up and hopefully lock it to at least 60. But you always going to have to load data, now for the majority of games we just have a loading screen and that's all fine and dandy. But what about games that don't have loading screens that load the data on the fly? I mentioned earlier star citizen where you need an ssd or its choppy and runs with horrible frame pacing due to it not being able to load fast enough. Can Google it on YouTube and you can see people test it out. Games right now are all made with a hard drive in mind, so they either have low data streams or loading screens. Based on the presentation by Sony and xbox they are looking to get rid of loading screens and load games on the fly, this means high data streams. So anyone using a hdd or ssd, how will that cope? Will they throw in extra loading screens, will it be choppy to play on or will they just not port it over. That's my big question really. And maybe you are right if we lower the detail and resolution it will be fine. Though would be amusing to see a 2080ti have to have a lower detail due to running from an hard drive or ssd

Ricepudding:

I agree, lots are going over to nvme myself included. But the vast majority are using hdd or Sata ssd which doesn't compare right? So will games be broken for them? Or will developers just not port games over that require these insane speed transfers?

If you want enthusiast performance you need enthusiast hardware, so yeah it will be slower for "most" people, including some gamers, but that's how it always used to be.

Fediuld:

X4 Foundations copies the whole game from the memory to save file, after serializing it. Including every NPC ship with it's orders, every station, with this orders and current production status. The whole lot. And is the only 100% fully simulated game for a reason.

yeah nah thats false.

You guys are just looking at the same GB/s speed of the PS5 SSD. This isn't what you should be looking at. You should turn your attention to the custom flash hardware they are using. 12 lanes of data streaming 6 lanes of priority (PC NVME drives have 2 lanes of priority), the flash has custom firmware and hardware dedicated to decompression which is said to be around another 2/4 Zen2 cores on its own. The hardware can be bypass file I/O checks like normal HDD, SSD, and even current PC NVME drives have to do. Not to mention that if the data compresses well enough the drive can reach 22GB/s. Also this doesn't mean games get bigger in fact it means they get smaller and more efficient. Cerny mentioned this when talking about the PS4 and the Spiderman game. In order to get around the limitations of the PS4's HDD they actually have some file assets saved to the HDD multiple times (Some in the region of over 100 times). This is the try and get around the horrendous seek times and low read speeds of the HDD. You wouldn't need to do this for an SSD. This is the reason why during the last few years of the current generation of consoles we have seen a HUGE increase in game install sizes. It's not because they are using higher quality assets with larger resolution textures its because they have to duplicate files so they can save them in different sectors of the HDD in order for them to be accessed quicker during fast gameplay, or to load a game faster. Will this matter for third party games.... I don't think so as devs will make games for the lowest common piece of hardware but for exclusives I think you will see a lot of PS5 games that simply wouldn't be possible on the Series X without huge draw backs. Same goes for third party games but for the PS5, you will see more 4K games on the Series X than the PS5 where it will more than likely be around the 1800p range.

I think the most obvious solution for lesser disk read speeds would be aggressive pop-in and/or lower quality assets. That could solve the problem of compatibility between hardwares, and frankly it seems likely to me. So devs would either cater for the lower-end storage hardware - mainstream PC's and XseX - while using better / more assets per distance in the PS5 OR; have games that really push for the PS5 specs and that run like garbage / not at all on mainstream PC's and XseX. Obviously the latter will happen for exclusives, and the former will happen for multiplats.

I hope Playstation 5 is the best ever,yet still not enough to even tease me to buy a console. Console free since 1988 lol.

With all this praise from Epic, i can´t wait to see what amazing games they are going to release on the PS5... I´m also waiting for someone to ask their opinion about the next Xbox and and about PC games because of their store.

Ricepudding:

Well gpu and disks are a bit different with a poor gpu or cpu you can just lower the details and resolution as you mentioned. And that will keep your fps up and hopefully lock it to at least 60. But you always going to have to load data, now for the majority of games we just have a loading screen and that's all fine and dandy. But what about games that don't have loading screens that load the data on the fly? I mentioned earlier star citizen where you need an ssd or its choppy and runs with horrible frame pacing due to it not being able to load fast enough. Can Google it on YouTube and you can see people test it out. Games right now are all made with a hard drive in mind, so they either have low data streams or loading screens. Based on the presentation by Sony and xbox they are looking to get rid of loading screens and load games on the fly, this means high data streams. So anyone using a hdd or ssd, how will that cope? Will they throw in extra loading screens, will it be choppy to play on or will they just not port it over. That's my big question really. And maybe you are right if we lower the detail and resolution it will be fine. Though would be amusing to see a 2080ti have to have a lower detail due to running from an hard drive or ssd

That what you call data has classification based on purpose for which it is going to be used. Which in itself makes you contradict yourself. Most of data you are to load for game are different kinds of textures. So, when you go into space of reducing GPU capabilities and therefore reduce rendering resolution (as you wrote), you will not need high resolution textures. Then again, you like to repeat same discussion which I had before and before. Storage controller may be fast and may be able to deliver a lot of data. But you are unable to come with sensible scenario where it is useful. Sure, one can create something stupid that just pulls in 6GB of data per second, discards it and starts with other data and sure it can continue with unique data for 30 seconds. Do the math yourself. AS for "no loading screens" slow consoles had elevators, WoW had tunnels you walked through. Many MMORPG had openworld which had no loading times unless you teleported tar enough. But in reality, that was never limitation. There was LoD for reason. Sure HDD needs it. SSD don't as much need it as it is tradition with keeping HDD crowd in the game. Very long tie ago when I had high performance laptop with mere mobile Sempron 3000 and Mobility Radeon x700 128MB, I used to play Lineage 2. There was common strategy to throw trash around port target, so it would take long time for player jumping in to start loading assets for players as loading had distance based priority. It took some month of modding of this weird UE 2.5 game client. But I removed artificial time delay between processing each new object and removed unnecessary LoDs. When others put us into unfair disadvantage, we turned tables with practically instant loading. And that was in times of HDD and Single Core CPUs. Lot of problems come from bad coding that enables certain artificial bottleneck. Other comes from being unreasonable for sake of being unreasonable. And making fast storage shine through asset switch is sadly case of doing something unreasonable.

inb4PS5has1yearepicexclusive

I think PS5 exclusive games are the only ones that will really see any advantage here, as they will likely be deliberately coded to take advantage of the hardware. For non-exclusive games, they will still use traditional methods of loading. Let's not forget though: people are going to want to upgrade their console's storage, and I'm sure that if PS5 has a storage upgrade, it will definitely be slower than the built-in storage. Games must be able to accommodate the slowness. In general, I don't think there will be an issue for PC gamers. Even on hard drives, I've played console-ported games that load so quickly that more time is spent transitioning to/from the loading screen than it spent actually loading in data. Then there are games that load so slowly (even on an SSD) that I don't even think RAID'ing M.2 drives would make a difference, since storage doesn't appear to be the bottleneck. I think games could be programmed in a way where they can adapt to the way they handle data/loading based on what you have. For example, maybe a game could detect how much RAM you have and deliberately dump more assets into it even if they're not used, just so the gaming experience encounters fewer hiccups in case your storage speed is too slow. Or perhaps it can keep track of how long it takes to load the title screen, where it will adapt the in-game loading behavior based on the performance it measured. Another thing to keep in mind is now that games are more multi-threaded, there should be a lot less stutter due to iowait.

Fox2232:

That what you call data has classification based on purpose for which it is going to be used. Which in itself makes you contradict yourself. Most of data you are to load for game are different kinds of textures. So, when you go into space of reducing GPU capabilities and therefore reduce rendering resolution (as you wrote), you will not need high resolution textures. Then again, you like to repeat same discussion which I had before and before. Storage controller may be fast and may be able to deliver a lot of data. But you are unable to come with sensible scenario where it is useful. Sure, one can create something stupid that just pulls in 6GB of data per second, discards it and starts with other data and sure it can continue with unique data for 30 seconds. Do the math yourself. AS for "no loading screens" slow consoles had elevators, WoW had tunnels you walked through. Many MMORPG had openworld which had no loading times unless you teleported tar enough. But in reality, that was never limitation. There was LoD for reason. Sure HDD needs it. SSD don't as much need it as it is tradition with keeping HDD crowd in the game. Very long tie ago when I had high performance laptop with mere mobile Sempron 3000 and Mobility Radeon x700 128MB, I used to play Lineage 2. There was common strategy to throw trash around port target, so it would take long time for player jumping in to start loading assets for players as loading had distance based priority. It took some month of modding of this weird UE 2.5 game client. But I removed artificial time delay between processing each new object and removed unnecessary LoDs. When others put us into unfair disadvantage, we turned tables with practically instant loading. And that was in times of HDD and Single Core CPUs. Lot of problems come from bad coding that enables certain artificial bottleneck. Other comes from being unreasonable for sake of being unreasonable. And making fast storage shine through asset switch is sadly case of doing something unreasonable.

I do agree with a lot of what you say, but the matter of it is this is going to be the first generation of games not to be built around a HDD. Which makes me wonder about game limitations as we have now them, as you pointed out we had elevators and long corridors. But even mmos lod stopped somewhere normally with fog or mountains right. There was other methods used like lower texture quality the further away something was. But if you look at the ps5 demo games like ratchet and clank porting between worlds or least thats how it looks almost instantly that is not possible with hard drives or ssds you would need a nvme drive at least to do that. Now this game won't come to pc but i still find it interesting about how these fast drives can change a lot in how developers currently make games Now right now do we need 6GB/s speeds, no of course not its all built for hard drives. But what I'm questioning is where gaming is going in the future and could games start to require this level of power. Just like they do with Ray tracing or physx or one of the other many features that requires certain technology. Now for users of ssds, mainly nvme won't have issues I reckon. But anyone on hdds might find they won't be able to run games regardless of their other specs or they will have random load times or implementations to help them such as a fog wall in the distance. But yes it is all about good coding, but I find it very interesting that for the first time at least in the main stream space pc tech at least in terms of hard drives will actually be behind in this regard. It's rather exciting to say the least as this might really push nvme drives to become a mainstay or something new comes along such as a new Sata connection

Fox2232:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism

I don’t believe that applies in this instance. The reviews on TLOU2 vs. user reviews is an example of AJ.

schmidtbag:

I think PS5 exclusive games are the only ones that will really see any advantage here, as they will likely be deliberately coded to take advantage of the hardware. For non-exclusive games, they will still use traditional methods of loading. Let's not forget though: people are going to want to upgrade their console's storage, and I'm sure that if PS5 has a storage upgrade, it will definitely be slower than the built-in storage. Games must be able to accommodate the slowness. In general, I don't think there will be an issue for PC gamers. Even on hard drives, I've played console-ported games that load so quickly that more time is spent transitioning to/from the loading screen than it spent actually loading in data. Then there are games that load so slowly (even on an SSD) that I don't even think RAID'ing M.2 drives would make a difference, since storage doesn't appear to be the bottleneck. I think games could be programmed in a way where they can adapt to the way they handle data/loading based on what you have. For example, maybe a game could detect how much RAM you have and deliberately dump more assets into it even if they're not used, just so the gaming experience encounters fewer hiccups in case your storage speed is too slow. Or perhaps it can keep track of how long it takes to load the title screen, where it will adapt the in-game loading behavior based on the performance it measured. Another thing to keep in mind is now that games are more multi-threaded, there should be a lot less stutter due to iowait.

I read that the PS5 does have a storage upgrade option, but the drives need to minimum requirements and be certified by Sony. I've not read anything that explains what happens if you use something not certified though. Since Epic seem to be helping with the marketing of the PS5 i would like to see or even read something more specific from them. We all have theories, but Epic need to come out and tell us or show us how a PC or a Series X game suffer when running UE5 games.

Why is Epic on snoy's nuts so hard? Exclusives incoming.

Ricepudding:

I do agree with a lot of what you say, but the matter of it is this is going to be the first generation of games not to be built around a HDD. Which makes me wonder about game limitations as we have now them, as you pointed out we had elevators and long corridors. But even mmos lod stopped somewhere normally with fog or mountains right. There was other methods used like lower texture quality the further away something was. But if you look at the ps5 demo games like ratchet and clank porting between worlds or least thats how it looks almost instantly that is not possible with hard drives or ssds you would need a nvme drive at least to do that. Now this game won't come to pc but i still find it interesting about how these fast drives can change a lot in how developers currently make games Now right now do we need 6GB/s speeds, no of course not its all built for hard drives. But what I'm questioning is where gaming is going in the future and could games start to require this level of power. Just like they do with Ray tracing or physx or one of the other many features that requires certain technology. Now for users of ssds, mainly nvme won't have issues I reckon. But anyone on hdds might find they won't be able to run games regardless of their other specs or they will have random load times or implementations to help them such as a fog wall in the distance. But yes it is all about good coding, but I find it very interesting that for the first time at least in the main stream space pc tech at least in terms of hard drives will actually be behind in this regard. It's rather exciting to say the least as this might really push nvme drives to become a mainstay or something new comes along such as a new Sata connection

What changes is compression level. When we finally move from HDDs (Which in my book should have happened years ago on PC.), engines will opt not for best compression ratio that's heavy on CPU during both compression and decompression, but they'll go for something much lighter on CPU. Before when HDD could read ~120MB/s, heavy compression enabled CPU to turn it into 200~300MB/s of actual usable data. But that held back SSDs due to CPUs not being able to decompress 500MB/s source data into 1~1.5TB/s. Things will speed up significantly for general loading. As for R&C, you can do it with SSD, no problem. Maybe there will be bit lower LoD, but you can do it. And that demo is obvious. "Dimensions" into which player does not jump are not rendered in real time from 3D assets. Those are static assets like images of videos. At best there is use of refraction above larger image that makes illusion that angle does change. Then 2nd part of it is that game uses loading tunnels. It is that "portal dimension". Player jumps into this low asset space, old assets are unloaded, and when new assets are ready, portal out of this transition space is open into target space. Yes, it is quite fast, but that ultimately falls down to image quality you expect upon entering next area. Considering animation style and heavy motion blur, Game would get away with 1/2 LoD for all assets that are not in immediate vicinity of portal. Video shows 5 new areas within 40 seconds. That's 8 seconds to get data required for next area into system memory. I am pretty sure you can load 6~8GB of assets into system memory in that time depending on compression from SSD. Then as player enters transition area, this data will be moved to graphical memory faster than PS5 can load it from from NVMe. And that's the thing. Console may have 14GB of memory available as VRAM +CPU(engine) memory. But current PCs which will target same visuals have 8GB of dedicated VRAM + 12GB of system memory for CPU(engine) & shared GPU memory pool. And when it comes to such prescripted tunnel experience like in given video, its creator does not need many brain cells to preload data as needed.

Super speed Fortnite skin packs, available for 30 dollars, will render on your character in half the time vs. ancient mechanical drives. Don't delay! Get your speed boost today!

Did epic buy sony stocks or something?

Corbus:

Did epic buy sony stocks or something?

I love how this is the viewpoint of PCMR folks. Maybe.... just maybe EPIC knows what they are talking about and the PC with its antiquated HDD and inefficient compression and decompression will be the lowest common denominator.

Loophole35:

I love how this is the viewpoint of PCMR folks. Maybe.... just maybe EPIC knows what they are talking about and the PC with its antiquated HDD and inefficient compression and decompression will be the lowest common denominator.

It's just odd they picked a new horse in the race. Either console can make them a lot of cash and in the past, they sided up more with Microsoft. And even then, weren't so vocal. that's what's odd to me. Epic usually doesn't go this hard to be an ad for someone else. They usually push their own stuff. Their games, their store, their engine. It has nothing to do with PC. Epic abandon PC 15 years ago.

This Epic / PS5 lovefest is weird, especially with the way they keep blurring comparisons between the hardware and the PlayStation OS that runs the system. The PS5 is essentially a 3700x with a 5700 GPU (non-xt) and a bleeding edge PCIe 4.0 SSD that is specc'd to 825gb for over-provisioning. It is also as close to the Xbox hardware as any two competing console have been at launch. There is no "special sauce". The PS5 is just a solid gaming computer with the typical console optimizations and no overhead from Windows. The (proprietary?) PCIe 4.0 SSD won't even be the fastest available by the PS5 launch date - the Samsung 980 series is rumored to be over 6GB/sec read and that should launch by Fall. Other than vague mentions of superior compression (this is in the software/OS) or what might be proprietary SSD controller, there is nothing notable here that can't be argued for any console like being optimized for games or not dealing with the full overhead of a desktop OS. The PS5 looks cool and it to appears to be a good value for the money, but all this praise should be taken with a grain of salt.