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Pemalite said:
iron_megalith said:

Maybe PC should start catching up for once.

Next-Gen consoles aren't even out yet. Nothing for PC's to catch up to.

* PC's don't stagnate for 7~ years, they constantly improve every year with new hardware updates.
* PC's have potentially faster SSD technology than the Playstation 5, if you are willing to pay for it. (I.E. Raid/Ram Drives etc')
* PCI-E 4.0 SSD's with 6.5GB/s transfer rates will be on the market before the next-gen consoles. (I.E. Samsung 980 Pro)
* PC has more than 8-core CPU's @3.5Ghz. (Hows about 32 cores @3.7-4.5Ghz?)
* PC has more than just 16GB of Ram. (16GB System+8GB Graphics is a fairly mid-range amount today.)
* PC will have second generation Ray Tracing before next-gen. (Geforce RTX 3080)

As long as consoles rely on PC technology, but fail to use the absolute top of the line technology, then the PC will always have the technical edge if you are willing to pay for it.
And whilst a console is typically competitive with a PC for the first year or two of it's life, they quickly fall behind after that, Microsoft and Sony tried to rectify that to a degree with the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X to an extent, but AMD wasn't leading the performance pack so they fell short at the time relative to the PC, they were still good consoles that provided tangible benefits.

KratosLives said:
But with the extra gpu power on the series x, can't they use the spare resources to make up for the smaller ssd. Considering you got mesh shader technology aswel for larger worlds. Or does gpu have nothing to do with loading in more detailed worlds?

A console is the sum of it's parts, not just a singular component.
There are parts of the GPU that will expedite memory transactions and decompression such as textures using the 3Dc+ texture decompression blocks.

But overall, the SSD will aid in loading, load screens will be significantly reduced due to it's performance. - But things like installing from optical disk will still take 84 years as the SSD or HDD is not the bottleneck there, the optical drive is.

goopy20 said:

Will Series X also be able to do it? Who knows, but we already have a MS exec talking about elevators...

Yes it can. A 2.5GB/s a SSD is still a fast SSD. It's still a very capable SSD.

eva01beserk said:

So basicly its a game changer, but only to the exxtend the xsx can handle. Any extra juice after that is waste potential? This aparantly will be one of thouse ocassion where extra power does not scale right? 

I could see why you wherent ipressed with ratchet and clank, but I would recomend you look outside your buble and catch up what people are saying online. Everyone seems to be amazed at the near instant ttransitions from the warping. and lets say the xsx was attempting the same game, if that little purple tunel was the hidden loading screen and i took the ps5 like 1s to switch, how fast do you think the xsx make the transition?

We don't know what the limiting factor/bottleneck is for those transitions, might be Ram bandwidth due to the extensive use of heavy alpha effects? It might be the CPU due to all the post-process/particle effects?
The SSD isn't the be-all, end-all. - A console is a collection of hardware that cohesively works together with a degree of efficiency... Chalking everything up to the SSD is doing a disservice to the amount of hard work and engineering that Sony and AMD has invested in every single other component over the years.

Immersiveunreality said:

Can someone explain to me why SSD's keep having a high price for such a lengthy period,the progress of this technology seems slower than what happened with HDD right?

I'm curious about the resources,royalties,patents,productioncycle.

Material costs.

Basically we are at the point where costs are fixed and cannot get any lower, it costs money to build and manufacture the devices, it costs money to fabricate the NAND chips (Which is a commodity product subject to supply/demand pressures which influences price), it costs money to design and fabricate memory controllers.

So basically in the low-end of the SSD market... In order to make SSD's as cheap as possible, SSD manufacturers have essentially ditched the DRAM cache, the SSD controller is very simple and bare-bones and they might only feature 2-4 NAND chips...

Essentially you cannot go any lower in price.
But what a manufacturer can and does do... Is when newer NAND chips come available that are higher capacity, they will swap the NAND chips out and sell it for the same price.

So capacities and performance increases, but the price stays the same.

My first SSD for example was the mid-range OCZ Vertex 2 64GB back 10~ years ago for about $150 AUD, that drive was MLC and had an DRAM cache... Fast forward to today and you can get a 512GB SSD in the same class (I.E Includes DRAM) for about the same price or an 8x improvement.

In the low-end you can get 120GB drives for about $50 AUD, often they are using QLC rather than TLC/MLC/SLC NAND, lack a DRAM or SLC Cache and are generally barely an improvement over mechanical drives due to the small number of NAND chips.

In the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X's case, I am going to assume Sony and Microsoft are employing a number of QLC chips to extract parallel memory transactions to increase performance, but dropped the DRAM/SLC caches to keep costs in control, so they have fantastic theoretical numbers and fantastic read speeds which are the most important functions of loading data.


kirby007 said:

because SSD tech has barely started like mainstream 5-10 years ago so the production plants, R&D and materials needs to be recouped, while the HDD tech has been recouped 30 years ago

HDDS are ancient really really ancient

SSD's were mainstream on PC 5 years ago.

It's when the NAND market price dropped out and the introduction of mainstream TLC and QLC NAND became abundant that we could really make super bargain basement drives.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5067/understanding-tlc-nand

IBM introduced the Mechanical Hard Disk in 1956. 64 years ago, their dominance was cemented in the 1960's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives

DonFerrari said:

Probably because of the type of memmory, just like RAM isn't increasing at the same pace anymore, it is costly and the demand is high since almost all markets needs it.


December 24th 2004. - 37.76GB/s ATI Radeon x800XT PE. GDDR3.
August 23rd 2006. - 64GB/s ATI Radeon X1950 CE. GDDR4.

Increase of 69.49% in a span of 20 months.

August 23rd 2006. - 64GB/s ATI Radeon X1950 CE. GDDR4.
June 25th, 2008. - 115.2GB/s AMD Radeon 4870. GDDR5.

Increase of 80% in a span of 22 months.

June 25th, 2008. - 115.2GB/s AMD Radeon 4870. GDDR5.
December 15th, 2010. - 176GB/s AMD Radeon 6970. GDDR5.

Increase of 52% in a span of 22 months.

December 15th, 2010. - 176GB/s AMD Radeon 6970. GDDR5.
June, 2012. - 288GB/s AMD Radeon 7970. GDDR5.

Increase of 63.63% in a span of 17 months.

June, 2012. - 288GB/s AMD Radeon 7970. GDDR5.
July, 2019. - 448GB/s AMD Radeon 5700XT. GDDR6.

Increase of 55.55% in a span of 85 months.

So for almost an entire console generation memory bandwidth (by the numbers!) only increased by about 55.55%.

However, there is more to it than that, AMD employed memory bandwidth conservation tricks such as delta colour compression, the first generation DCC improved bandwidth by 40% in Tonga. (GCN 3.0/1.2) And 17% in Polaris. (GCN 4.0/1.3)

Vega (GCN 5.0) introduced Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer and Primitive Shaders which also drove up memory bandwidth efficiency... And that got refined/fixed/improved with Navi.


So in short the black and white numbers between the 7970 and 5700XT might only be 55.5%, but real-world might have it closer to being a 750GB/s or 160% improvement on the memory front.

It's still not as rapid as before, but the point I am trying to convey is that spec sheets don't tell the whole story, improvements are being had even when there is no apparent technological memory shifts.

iron_megalith said:

I am. But that doesn't change that Consoles are still far more efficient than PCs.

Indeed they are. And they need to be as their hardware doesn't ever improve over time, plus they can only afford to put mid-range components in consoles at most, so they need to make the best bang for buck for the hardware they have.

In saying that... The PC OS of Windows 7 was more efficient than the Xbox One/Playstation 4 OS... Windows 7 didn't need steal 3-3.5GB of Ram and 1-2 CPU cores just for itself...


Thanks for all the valuable information as always.

Just wanted to put a small caveat. Although I agree that Console can have similar level of HW with mid or even high gen PCs for the first couple years but PC will always keep pushing higher while console stagnate I'll put the caveat that typically because of the nature of fixed HW and learning curve the consoles on the level of games and details the PC to have the same level of performance at the end of the gen isn't the same as on the start of the gen.



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