Pemalite said:
ArchangelMadzz said:
But games have to be optimised for those SSD's. SSD's load faster because of the faster technology.
But the data sizes are large because certain information is doubled, tripled, quadrupled etc so that Hard drives don't have to search through the entire file directory to load assets. This will still be the case for PC versions of games as you cannot guarantee that a PC user will have an SSD. Unless there is a HDD download version and an SSD version.
With the new consoles you can guarantee that they will have an SSD so the file directories will be streamlined much more. Basically what I'm saying is that the same exact SSD on console should in theory load games build for next gen, faster than the same SSD in a PC.
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Mechanical hard drives actually perform best when the data sizes are large and sequential.
SSD's and more specifically NAND's main advantage is actually when there are small random reads/writes as it doesn't need to spin a disk to seek, today SSD's thanks to not being limited by SATA are the best of both worlds, low access times, high throughput thanks to PCI-E.
Data on a mechanical hard drive though isn't doubled/tripled/quadrupled either, optical disks that happens because they are orders-of-magnitude slower again... And thanks to the laws of physics, have different performance characteristics depending if you are reading near the center or the outer edge of an optical disk... And often consoles were trying to stream that data from optical disks due to lack of Ram anyway, so data duplication had to be done for performance reasons.
In general, most gaming PC's these days are using an SSD for the OS... It's been that way for years... And games are dropped onto mechanical mass-storage. Aka. "Steam Drive".
From there if you load up a game, it will load it's assets into Ram and the OS will even create a cache on the SSD to accelerate those memory transactions.
I was an early adopted of SSD's before they were even cool, started off with the OCZ Vertex 2 from a decade ago, so I am well versed in their performance characteristics... Yet I am also able to run StarCitizen just fine from mechanical storage without much drama, because I have tons of Ram for caching/Ram Drive and I have an SSD for the OS with large caches.
File directories won't be changing just because you have an SSD though, SSD's are actually treated differently to mechanical storage on the PC, but file structures remain the same.. And not because of mechanical storage either.
Also... One thing we need to keep in mind is that the Xbox One Series X and the Playstation 5 might still support mechanical storage anyway, it's to early to start making assumptions on that front that it will be an entirely-SSD world when we don't have all our drives in a row.
kirby007 said:
Yes thats why crysis was so far behind on consoles, it wasnt optimised for pc pathing
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Or it was simply because the consoles could not match the PC's CPU/Ram/GPU capabilities.
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Hasn't it been confirmed that these next gen consoles come with a 1tb SSD? Surely, MS and Sony wouldn't be making such a fuss about it if it wouldn't help loading times and assets streaming. When SSD becomes baseline with next gen - game design will change with it. That's the difference compared to SSD we see now on pc where games are designed with HDD in mind. Next gen games will no longer have to hide loading screens behind closed doors and corridors and can speed up openworld gameplay. Building games with ssds in mind is a big deal and it's something we haven't quite seen before.
