MS Executive says Devs will need to learn how to work around Slower SSD on XSX

[DonFerrari]

Bonzinga said:
Devs wont need to learn anything, they will do exactly what they have been doing since the beginning of the industry. Also if gamers are expecting majority of devs to take full advantage of the PS5's SSD than they might be sadly disappointed next gen, unless its exclusives.

Its the same thing every gen.
Sega - Blast Processing
Sony - Power of the Cell Processor
Xbox - Power of the Cloud
Sony - (Insert SSD brand moto here)

All these motos work and the technology actually exists however devs wont flock to it if it makes them the minority in the industry unless they are paid to do so eg: Exclusives. Cell was a very powerful CPU, leagues ahead of anything we have seen yet devs didn't jump onboard, Power of the Cloud showcases we can stream in majority of the game reducing load off the GPU etc and devs didn't jump on board, and now we have a super fast SSD light years ahead of anything else.. and most likely again, devs wont jump on board because again the industry isn't up to that standard yet. Gamers need to understand and accept this as all will come is disappointment when majority of 3rd party games releasing on PC, Xbox and Switch wont be utilising the full potential of the PS5's SSD.

Also Devs aren't exactly stupid either, if they can make games like Red Dead 2, TLOU 2, BOTW, Halo Infinite and Cyberpunk 2077 on basic HDD than its not going to matter as good games will always do the talking over technology.

At first I was going to give a full explanation, but Setsu already gave most of it for me so I'll mostly reinforce.

Sega - They trully had a faster CPU and it was used fully, the blast processing was real (and reason Sonic was able to be that fast) but since the system had worse GPU and some other parts it was generally weaker than SNES.

Sony - Cell Processor was really much stronger than the one in Xbox to the point that it covered for the weaker GPU and still had some juice left, the problem was that the type of specialization that CPU had wasn't the best fit for gaming programming at the time. Nowadays perhaps it would have done better since at the time most devs were threating it as a single core.

MS - Yes power of the cloud was total shenanigan since it neve made Xbox 3 times more powerful than without it, but still had some minute use. You can't use the power of the cloud to parallel processing because of the internet speed and latency. Today it is either totally generated on the HW or totally streamed (so you only need the bandwidth for video and input signal), with the exception of some heavy calculation that is "totally independent" of bandwidht and latency.

Sony again - SSD and I/O are real and implemented on the system if you want to believe it won't be used that is your prerrogative, but still would be false.

Pemalite said:

DonFerrari said:

As Pema said raid SSD drives (althought there is already commercial drives over 7Gb/s) and RAM Drives. But the main problem as put by some dev (like Epic boss) is that the computer itself isn't programmed to take advantage of the fast I/O yet.

In the case of a Ram drive, it completely bypasses the I/O that SSD's connect with, removing any of those technical limitations.

But a Ram drive is volatile unlike NAND which is non-volatile.

padib said:

Right. That's why I asked for an example, because from what I understood from the Linus video is that the limited I/O pipe in a PC (even Linux) the actual throughput of the AORUS Gen4 AIC Adaptor is not 15.5GBps but perhaps half of that.

We need to keep in mind also that there is different types of "tasks". - It is all well and good to proclaim you are the "speed king" in sequential reads... But if your performance tanks doing a random write and your application requires lots of random writes, then sequential reads are actually a useless metric.

The messaging I am trying to build however across the forums is that...

People need to stop grabbing one number or terminology and ignoring the rest of the system... A console or PC is functionally a heap of different parts cohesively working together... And only using terms like "8GB GDDR5" or "Teraflops" or "SSD" without understanding their fundamental implications to rendering a game is doing a disservice to the amount of engineering that gets put into a console.

The Playstation 5 has so much more hardware behind the SSD and so much more to offer that we need to move past the SSD advertised feature and start asking the question of what those other components are going to mean for gaming? Because honestly that's not really happening... It honestly just feels like a pissing match to see who  has the bigger wang.

Thanks for mentioning the RAM Drive skipping some of the limitations, but that still wouldn't solve the problem at hand while devs don't make their games use this feature right? Without it That would really be a solution that would mostly only improve loading time and quality of textures/pop in right?

setsunatenshi said:

Bonzinga said:

Care to prove your point or is that your best argument?

You basically just agreed to my post by saying we let the games do the talking which has been the very point since platforms existed.

You are talking out of ignorance comparing things that have no possible comparison.

Blast processing was a marketing buzzword used by Sega which simply had no application to games in the Mega Drive / Genesis.

Cell processor was a real thing, an extremely advanced architecture (multi core cpu) that was simply not adopted widely, it was highly efficient, but very challenging to code for. Subsequently, made the backwards compatibility with the PS3 extremely challenging. The de facto industry standard is x86, hence why the cell was discontinued.

Cloud gaming is real and both PS Now, Stadia, etc are proof of that. What was bullshit was some fanboys assumptions that you would parallelize compute tasks between local hardware and some other GPU sitting in an Azure dataroom somewhere. Having said that, apparently the new flight simulator will leverage streaming of the world map from the Azure servers, which is a really cool thing. It means the game is only playable with an internet connection, but hey, it is what it is.

The new PS5 SSD - I/O solution is also the real deal and a paradigm shift. Extremely fast access to game assets without requiring loading times, elevator rooms, walk and talk moments means you can actually develop new kinds of experiences. Flying in games? Yes please. No duplication of assets on the storage (even in multiple LoDs). Let's go. Instant loading of games, switching between games on the fly, no texture pop in on large open worlds... I could go on and on but it should be enough to make the point.

Look at the UE5 demo, look at the Spider Man demo showing the loadtimes and fast moving through the city and finally, feel free to watch today's games presentation. If you don't think these things are real benefits, then probably you're not a gamer.

Good Summary.