Neat. 2028 can't come soon enough.
Pemalite said:
vivster said:
Yeah, that's pretty much how I would've thought. Swap files aren't new to me, but I can't imagine that whatever the consoles are doing with their SSDs is gonna improve performance a lot.
The main feature that utilizes those SSDs will be the instant game resume, but we have had that sleepmode functionality on PCs with SSDs for a long time, just not for games. I find it hard to imagine a scenario where a game is specifically designed around SSD storage having a performance edge against traditionally designed games.
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Streaming of assets is a big beneficiary.
It means that a developer can reserve a chunk of Ram for models/textures rather than load everything into Ram at once and just stream those assets on-demand.
One of the most notable games that did this during the 7th gen was actually Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2... And some games even took it a step further and would stream from both the hard drive and optical disk in tandem.
The games themselves wasn't processing those textures/assets on the hard drive so the hard drive never acted as a type of Ram, it was just a better use of limited resources... I mean, there is zero point in adding a texture for a rock if the player isn't going to see said rock, might as well keep it ready to stream into Ram rather than have it sitting in Ram.
I think some individuals see the SSD as a sort of "extended Ram" which is pretty far removed, but one thing is for certain it will mean that we can be more aggressive with streaming from storage, making better use of limited Ram pools... That way it's just lots of reads from NAND and won't make unnecessary writes to NAND which will reduce the life of the drive.
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But how would that gain actually look like in gaming? Reduce pop ins? We already basically don't have those on PC. Reduce loading times that are already barely present on PC?
I would really like to know a use case that could sell me on a game specifically designed around faster storage load times as opposed to every other game.
