which next gen console are you looking forward to the most?

[vivster]

Hiku said:

vivster said:

It's gonna be a design difference but not necessarily a speed difference. Just like in old times where they used elevator rides for loading, you'll see similar tricks. Be that being spawned in a corridor so that the world outside can load or just a bit longer black transition between scenes. The SSDs in the consoles aren't miracles and general PC SSDs are just as fast where it counts.

Loading screens in general have been phased out more and more and actual loading times aren't bottlenecked by how fast your SSD is, but other processes in the background. Loading times haven't been a thing on PC for some time now. The only time where PC gamers notice them is when console players take longer to join the lobby.

I wasn't exclusively referring to the ability to load in larger assets quickly for level design, though that is an aspect.
But PC SSD speeds are pretty irrelevant in this case, because no game will have its levels designed around high SSD speed. They have to function properly on HDD (until a fast SSD is a requirement for a game), and will be designed that way. There's still going to be a corridor or a ladder between the big areas even if you use an SSD. The speed at which your character can move and turn around will also be the same, because they're not going to bother designing for two separate versions that are so drastically different.

Using an SSD for a game designed with HDD in mind will improve loading screens, but not in as many cases or as much as if the game was designed purely for SSD.
Adding in a super fast SSD on top of that, and we might see 0 seconds become the norm in those cases, but that remains to be seen.

Because the systems require these fast SSD's. We will get an equivalent to the PS5 SSD soon on the market, and SATA 4 etc.
But if it's just optional to have, and not a requirement, then those games will be held back by their HDD compatibility.

Granted, this will be the case for a lot of PS5 games as well that are multiplatform. Less so if it's only planned for PS5 and XSX, and PC that requires a certain SSD speed to run.

I think you're vastly overestimating developers willingness to design specifically around high SSD speeds when there is next to no benefit compared to traditional design. You will always have a fast experience with an SSD no matter if the game was designed for it or not. Hell, you don't even need SSDs at all for fast loading times. All you need is enough RAM and a predictive loader. Modern GPUs hold everything they need in VRAM without the need to constantly stream large amounts of data from storage. The use cases where lots of data needs to suddenly be streamed to RAM/VRAM are limited and mostly only occur when you start up a game. This is great for the instant game resume feature on the consoles but less useful from within the game.

Take a normal use case for example. An open world game is the most taxing thing when it comes to heavy visual applications. Lots of of high quality assets at the same time that need to be constantly loaded in to be rendered. Pop ins are basically eliminated on SSDs despite games not being designed specifically for SSDs. Now imagine fast traveling between two far away places with completely different textures. Another very taxing activity as lots of assets will have to be exchanged within the VRAM. In this case you will have a loading screen for HDD users while for SSD users it's barely there and the bottleneck lies within the CPU and GPU to construct the scene. Now if you designed that for SSD only you will maybe completely lose the loading screen that pops up for a second but it'll be replaced by something else, a one second black screen or other kind of transition. Because even with the fastest SSDs loading won't be instantaneous. If it is instantaneous then the data was already present in RAM since memory bandwidth is about 100 times faster than the fastest SSDs.

So in that case "optimizing for SSD" would mean nothing else but replacing a loading screen with something else while loading just as fast. Maybe you can name a specific use case where it is needed to specifically code with SSDs in mind to get a significant speed boost.