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goopy20 on 12 May 2020
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Pemalite said:
goopy20 said:

Didn't MS and Sony already stated that they'll be able to use the SSD as virtual ram? DF did a whole video about it a while back, making comparisons to the Radeon Pro SSG. Obviously, that's a $7000 professional gpu that was never meant for gaming, but it does look like Sony and MS are using a similar approach just on a smaller scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR-uH8vSeBY

We have been using mechanical hard drives as "virtual ram" for a third of a century, it's nothing new or novel. Even the Original Xbox did it on it's mechanical disk.
It's just the technology that the "virtual ram" operates on has fundamentally changed, but the concept is identical.

This is the issue when people don't actually understand the technology in question and just parrot from sources (Microsoft and Sony) that have a vested interest in selling a product, it's the hype train effect.

That isn't what is pertinent to this discussion though, we are talking about the storage on the GPU's themselves.

Oneeee-Chan!!! said:

PS5 loading time will be much faster than PC with current nvme SSD.
Of course, it is incomparable with XBOX's.

Unless you're talking about the future that comparison is pointless.

Most PC's. You can build an SSD setup that completely dominates the Playstation 5's 5.5GB/s drive via a 16x PCI-E card/RAID, that is not a common setup though, it's an enthusiast/professional grade setup.

setsunatenshi said:

I'm not entirely convinced the majority of PC gamers are not running games on hdd though, I'd need to see some surveys around that, even I have a mix if m.2 drives and hdds both on my desktop and laptop, about half my games are still running on hdds and keeping the OS and some more multiplayer focused games in the m.2s.

I am actually not able to find the thread, but I will keep looking, it had the full market breakdown of gaming rigs with SSD's and how PCI-E drive marketshare had started to beat SATA.

Allot of gamers still use mechanical drives with games installed and SSD as the OS drive. Many just use an SSD. SSD's have been cheap for years, hence why mechanical drive sales are plummeting every quarter for years.

I know virtual ram is nothing new, but it sounds like the SSD tech will just make it a lot more efficient for actual game applications. I'm no game designer but I'm guessing there's a reason why Sony has been talking so much about their SSD and why they're going with 825GB instead of just 1TB. We will see how developers will support it and also what it means for pc gaming in general, but it's still pretty common to see a 250SSD used mainly for the OS and a 1TB HDD on pc. Except for maybe Star Citizen, I also can't think of any pc game that requires any SSD, let alone one that's compatible with the ps5 which aren't even on the market yet. 

Maybe it's all marketing BS but I don't think Sony would be taking such a big gamble (production sounds expensive) if they had any doubt in its usefulness. Maybe its not meant to make the ps5 more powerful but I did hear it's a lot easier to develop for. So maybe next gen will be less about the hardware and more about the quality that studios can achieve with their time and budget?