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chakkra on 20 January 2021
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Azzanation said:
shikamaru317 said:

To be fair, this is a cross-gen game. If we do see benefits from SSD's beyond reduced load times, they will certainly be on fully current-gen games. I can see some ways where an SSD might speed up some things like texture loads, but I personally don't think we'll see much in the way of SSD secret sauce techniques on PS5, like not rendering assets behind the player to boost graphics in front of the player, by utilizing the SSD and RAM to quickly reload what is off-screen before the player can turn and see that it was missing. While it works in theory, I can't see many devs, especially multiplat devs, taking the extra time to do anything with PS5's SSD that wouldn't also be possible on the Series S/X SSD and slower PC SSD's.

Exclusives are another matter, I do think we could see Sony 1st and 2nd party devs implement some SSD secret sauce techniques throughout the gen, but many of those same techniques, or similar techniques, will also be possible for devs on Series S/X. For instance Series S/X supports Sampler Feedback Streaming, which allows devs to only load on-screen textures into the RAM at any point in time, allowing higher res textures on screen than would normally be possible due to textures for off-screen objects also taking up some RAM space. The SSD speed allows those off-screen textures to be loaded back into the RAM and rendered by the GPU before the player can turn and see they were missing, in theory at least. Rather the Xbox Series SSD is actually fast enough for that, we'll have to wait and see, heck even the PS5 SSD might not be fast enough for things like that to work.

Tech will always improve during a generation, however the secret source SSDs aren't doing anything special outside reducing load times by fair margins, which is exactly what we would expect from a faster SSD. Weather or not devs find the magic to make these SSDs work in their favor would also have to take into account the average gaming PC etc. 

I believe we will see better uses of the SSDs however that marketing was clearly what it is, marketing. It was their to sell you a product, especially Sony since they couldn't market the CPU and GPU since the Series X has higher numbers. The SSD was their ground they could hold, however its embarrassing seeing so many run with the tech just because a company says so, much like the PS3's Cell processor. Also the SSD is suppose to be twice as fast as the Series X/S yet 1 second difference isn't really doing it justice here.

Either way its too early to tell but i wont be surprised if this is what it will be for the rest of the generation.

Also just wanted to add, 1st/2nd party games isn't exactly a good way to compare tech since they will normally be exclusive which will mean, we wont know the difference between how it runs on other hardware to compare it to.

lol I didn't want to say it like that, but you would think that after 8 generations people would learn that these companies promise the exact same things every single time: "new ways to play" and "gameplay not possible before"; and we always end up with the exact same thing, better graphics and bigger maps.

At least it looks like this time 60 fps is here to stay.