In Theory: How SSD Could Radically Change Next-Gen Games Beyond Faster Loading (Digital Foundry Video)

[Pemalite]

mjk45 said:

Cobretti2 said:
Cool and all but when the game is 50GB plus it doesn't leave much space for installing games / patches etc..

Getting tired of consoles having incomplete games that the gamers user test and all they do is patch all the time with day 1 patches and having to uninstall games to install others. these systems will never become a Retro console as these new system replayabilty is zero once you can no longer get patches for games, I guess when every gen since 3 they keep releasing "enhanced" versions of the game and people keep buying they will go down this path.

You have to look at what came before, before patching you were stuck with what was on the disc for good or bad , no hd's , and you had to to load from disc every time, sure the digital world has uncertainties and convenience has a price where the reliance on the platforms and publisher support is much larger now,but things like patching can be mitigated by saving ,it's not just a console thing either.

Basically next-gen should give us a similar experience to what we had with the Nintendo 64... Super fast, low latency ROM loads directly into Ram in almost real time.
It means developers can be more efficient with Ram usage as they have much more bandwidth to stream textures and meshes to DRAM in real time.

Let me be clear though, NAND is not a replacement for lots of fast Ram, but it does mean Microsoft and Sony can cut back and save money on Ram... And thus shift the burden back onto developers, So the video with the Radeon Graphics SSD is not a good example, that is for professional datasets that exceeds the Ram buffer on GPU's.

The PC however, doesn't need it as much as Consoles as the PC has lots of available Ram with massive System and GPU memory pools.

Patching is here to stay though.

Also one thing to keep in mind is that the Switch uses solid state storage, but still has load times with some games, it's all down to the developer and how they manage memory.