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

[DonFerrari]

goopy20 said:

Pemalite said:

Games used to be tied to clockrate on the PC for the longest time for a games internal tickrate. (Hence why PC's introduced a Turbo-button)
So consequently when you dropped in a new CPU, the games speed would increase at the same rate.

Zipping around levels is entirely possible to do at that speed on even an Xbox 360 without an SSD. - You just need that working set data entirely in Ram... Which means you will need to make cutbacks to asset quality to ensure all the required data is available on demand in working memory.
So yes, it was entirely possible to achieve on older hardware.

Think of it this way... On older consoles you needed to preload "possible" data 30 seconds ahead of time, we saw this in games like Metroid Prime on the Gamecube where the game would start preloading the new level area as soon as you started to approach the door to a new area and unload that data if you started to back away.

With the SSD we only need to preload data a couple of seconds ahead of time, which means that we don't need to start preloading that level until we hit the "open door" button.
What that ultimately means is that we don't need to reserve a chunk of the working memory for future level areas, we can use more memory for the current area improving overall visuals. - But we will still need to preload data ahead of time, the SSD is only 5.5GB/s, it's still a limitation.

In short, it's making more efficient use of the limited 16GB of Ram, it doesn't solve all of our I/O limitations and ills.

As for the expediency of traveling through landscapes, many racing games have been able to do it for years, they just keep less assets in memory in order to pull it off, there have been other city-scape games where you have traversed over city areas without that "hitching" seen in the Spiderman demo. GTA 5?

Plus loading and streaming data is not just attributed to storage capabilities either, the CPU needs to do allot of heavy lifting in order to handle things like draw calls, procedural generation, decompression/unpacking, scripting and so forth. Allot goes into it, more than people realize.

The difference this time around is that, although the SSD is still very much a hard physical limitation as it's only 5.5GB/s verses the 448GB/s of Ram bandwidth, it's significantly alleviated as it's leaps and bounds ahead of mechanical disks... And that means big things for developers.

My issue is that people aren't focusing on the other generational defining hardware characteristics of the next-gen consoles like the very impressive memory bandwidth, the ray tracing cores, the very capable Ryzen processors and so much more which will hopefully result in far more interactivity and degrees of simulation that just wasn't possible on older devices.

Pretty sure this would not be possible on 360/ps4, at least not without ruining the whole effect.

Obviously there's more to the ps5 than just the SSD, but we saw like 3 games where inter-dimensional travel seemed to be a core gameplay mechanic. Ratchet & Clank, Returnal and Dead Loop. My guess is that's because the developers went out of their way to use the SSD as some kind of tech-demo. If that'll make the gameplay better is another matter, but I believe SSD will end up being the biggest leap compared to current gen.

With early games, developers are typically just testing the water when it comes to new tech, but hopefully it'll change the sense scale and immersion of games in more meaningful ways later on.   

I don`t remember any game with this smooth of transition from a world to the other.

Heck on PS3 GT5 and GT6 to reload a race that you were already playing took a good 30s or more, and fighters on PS4 still in some cases take several seconds and that is same small scenario where you actually only need to reset health bar, special bar, timer and fighters positions.