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exdeath on 02 June 2015
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solidpumar said:
GribbleGrunger said:
Hynad said:


Simple. The data that needs to be accessed is too big for the bandwidth speed of the blu-ray drive. So installing the game on HDD makes up for this.

I've been thinking about this and I'm wondering whether some assets could be streamed directly from the disc whilst the majority of the game is installed. Much has been said about 'cloud' and how you can stream physics and AI but what about streaming that data directly from the disc? It's not actually doing anything once the game's installed, it's just verifying you own the game. If data can be streamed via the internet then it makes sense it could be simply streamed from the disc ... no?

You are streaming video from internet. While on the console you need to read data, to compute. Video is a linear data with every frame being the same amount of data. While data to compute is spread "randomly" on the blu-ray disc, thus reading is not at the full speed and needs to change reading placement constantly.

Uncharted achieved that, because Naughty dog, implemented really nifty tricks to make the data on disc more linear, doing some data redudancy, to achieve maximum performace on the slow blu-ray.

Today tho, with high resolution assets and the huge amount of the assets themselves, this wouldn't be possible, or would be too engineering difficult and not worth when the Hard drive is such a cheap option.

When Ps3 launched, 60gb cost the same as 1tb cost today. So sony and consumers pressured developers for lower data installs. Now the standard is the limitless hard drive install, which makes life easier and cheaper for developers themselves.


Hard drives aren't fast enough either when you consider the main memory is capable of almost 300 GB/sec when a magnetic hard drive can only do 100 MB/sec on a good day in a best case scenario with all the stars lined up. (eg no seeking, perfectly sequential data, eg, not the real world)

Human non volatile storage media is so laughably far behind RAM and CPU capabilities.

Can the PS5 please just have 2048 GB of directly CPU addressable non volatile STT-MRAM or something with no need for any sort of "drive" at all?  Just turn it off, and turn it back on and everything is still there in "RAM".

It's about time we have a real storage revolution that changes the way we use computers in ways as monumental as the transistor and microprocessor itself.