| vivster said: 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. |
Longer draw distances with reduced pop-in and higher quality assets.
It allows for an uptick in fidelity especially with distant assets.
For example... For near-sighted objects like rocks, buildings, barrels and so forth... We can actually have a very high degree of fidelity on those objects... With complex shading and high polygon counts.
But often for distant assets we employ techniques like "impostering" which is the method of replacing a 3D distant model like a high-rise building with a 2D one... And sometimes they can look rather jarring and low-resolution in some games. (Depends how good the developer is I guess and how good your eyesight and display is.)
That removes that issue entirely.
It also allows us to create world-sized databases that can be constantly and heavily updated with lots of scripting... Potentially allowing for the tracking of significantly more assets in real-time... Think bigger scales than even the largest Battle Royale games.
I am sure there are other aspects I haven't though of... But initially we are only going to see incremental improvements over 8th gen titles until we are entrenched in the 9th gen and developers start to experiment, the main advantage is going to be load times though. - And that isn't always going to be eliminated either.
In saying that, the Nintendo 64 is probably the best example of where storage (Cartridge) had an insane amount of bandwidth relative to Ram, which meant that developers were actually using the cart as a read-only section of memory, it didn't solve the Nintendo 64's memory limitations in regards to fixing the low-resolution, stretched textures because of the Ram limitations, but when GPU rendering wasn't a limitation we could have lots of assets and long draw distances relative to other systems with the same memory amounts but slower storage. (I.E. PC)
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