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src on 20 March 2020
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DonFerrari said:
src said:

Xbox extra power leads to resolution and frame rate bumps but the bump is not nearly enough to make noticeable differences afaik. SSD speed is game changing. Both Xbox and PS5 have game changing SSD but PS5's is on another level.

Will the PS5 SSD show big gameplay changes from the XBX's? This is a question that can only be answered once we see the games.

We will never be sure since multiplats will need to work on both systems and exclusives we won't know if that is decision of devs, capability of them or really the SSD difference.

Yes but aspects that are scalable is something third parties always take advantage on with different hardware: framerates, resolutions, texture sizes, LOD etc

Hiku said:
starcraft said:

I read that as well, and agree that it is interesting. But again this thread likely overstates the distinction. It wouldn't be enough that Sony can do that. It would have to be the case the the MS console cannot do that. I consider it unlikely that that will be the case, as MS was surely mindful of this in designing its console with two different types of RAM.

Add to that, even in the worst case where the PS5 can somehow achieve this and the Xbox can not, it would be limited to a few very advanced PS5 games, and even then whats rendered on screen would look worse than the most advanced Xbox games - try marketing that!

I would hope that XSX could use the SSD in a similar manner, even at a slower degree, because then that means multiplatform games would be able to take better advantage of this. Though it seems like that wasn't MS's approach.

In which case the use of this for third party games may be limited to things like making more use of higher resolution assets in general.
A former Naughty Dog developer talked about this:



Essentially from my understanding, Xbox Series X is more capable of generating higher resolution assets. But you can only go as far with the quality of assets as the memory allows for the game. Basically, the memory is a bottleneck. And I think XSX primarily uses RAM for this.
But PS5's SSD would be capable of delivering higher than usual resolution assets, and more of them, on screen.

For first party exclusive games, this could impact the game design in general. But it's capability of handling large amounts of high quality assets will be interesting to see in multiplatform games as well.

From my understanding the SSD speed is a real gamechanger as it allows devs to load a larger amount of assets from the SSD to the RAM.

Lets say 1080p/60fps of a game requires 4GB/s. Therefore the 4GB needs to be loaded into the RAM so CPU/GPU do all the calculations that result in the frames being rendered on TV. We have 16 GB of RAM so we can store 4 seconds of gameplay in advance. With SSD speeds, devs can simply load only 2 seconds of gameplay at the same frame rate (8GB per second) and hence each frame can use more data.

Perhaps someone with more knowledge can explain how the SSD -> RAM -> output pipeline works in terms of data transfer for games.