| shikamaru317 said: I wonder if 8GB of RAM would be enough though, it doesn't seem like it would be, Steam Deck has 16 GB for a reason, but 16 GB would be costly for Nintendo, who are likely going to be looking to cut costs as much as possible to reach that $300 price point of Switch 1 again while also selling at cost (Nintendo doesn't seem to be ok with selling hardware at a loss these days). That is why I figured they might go for 10 or 12 GB instead, Series S has 10 GB afterall and it works well for it. |
If they map the memory so that 2GB of the "slower" portion of the RAM is for the OS only, then that would be fine.
But... This is also Nintendo.. They don't have the software engineering that Microsoft has to elegantly pull something like that off.
16GB is unlikely to be much more costly than 10GB to be honest, not with density of chips increasing.
The Series S is a console of compromises.
| shikamaru317 said: Wouldn't you say that they will need faster than eMMC to have any chance of getting ports of most PS5/SeriesX/PC only games though? |
Keep in mind that eMMC and SSD's are actually based on the same technology... Which is NAND.
If you have enough DRAM, you don't actually need an SSD... It just means the compromise will be a longer initial load time unless you use procedural generation.
| shikamaru317 said: I wonder if 8GB of RAM would be enough though, it doesn't seem like it would be, Steam Deck has 16 GB for a reason, but 16 GB would be costly for Nintendo, who are likely going to be looking to cut costs as much as possible to reach that $300 price point of Switch 1 again while also selling at cost (Nintendo doesn't seem to be ok with selling hardware at a loss these days). That is why I figured they might go for 10 or 12 GB instead, Series S has 10 GB afterall and it works well for it. |
Keep in mind the Steamdeck is in the PC ecosystem, which typically tends to be more memory rich.
Case in point... My PC has 64GB of system memory, but also 16GB of Graphics memory for a total of 78GB of Ram... Kinda' makes the 16GB in the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 seem anemic by comparison...
| shikamaru317 said: The whole hype of this being the first SSD generation was that games would start to be built to properly take advantage of SSD's, using them for more than just faster load times, using them for techniques like reducing the graphics quality of areas of the game world that are off-screen when the player isn't looking at them, and then rapidly feeding the higher quality assets back into the RAM so that the GPU can render them back to high quality as the player turns to look at them, those freed up resources from rendering low quality versions of things off-screen being using to improve the quality of what is on-screen. |
What are you describing is culling.
Culling itself has been a technique developers have used for several decades now, it's actually not new... For example, 22! years ago AMD implemented Hypzer-Z into it's GPU's which is actually several techniques...
Technique 1: Hierarchical Z.
Technique 2: Z-Compression.
Technique 3: Fast Z-Clear.
Hierarchical Z is basically where the rendered pixel is checked off against the Z-Buffer before it gets rendered.. And if it gets a negative result (I.E. Outside of a players view) it gets discarded saving on resources.
I won't elaborate on the other features as they aren't a form of culling exactly, but they all do play a role with each other.
AMD introduced the Primitive Shader a few years ago with it's Vega architecture, nVidia much earlier than that (Likely Maxwell, so the current Switch has a similar technique), where a new shader stage was implemented instead of the Vertex and geometry shader paths, which allows for the discarding of primitives.. Which reduces the overdraw of polygons rather significantly.
We can also take something like Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2 from the Xbox 360 which implemented mesh and texture streaming from the optical disk to stream those assets on-demand into system memory... And as we know, Optical disks are orders of magnitude slower than a mechanical disk with much higher latencies.
Again, SSD's weren't required for any of this.
So what we can surmise from this is that... Loading things "on demand" is not an SSD requirement.
Culling is also not an SSD requirement.
What an SSD does do however... Is expedite the process. It's about how much memory you can shift into system memory *over time*.
If you have enough DRAM, you can sidestep all of this entirely, you just need a lengthier initial load.
Another famous example is actually Metroid on the Gamecube, it starts loading new sections of a level as you approach a door... And unloads them as you step further away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwhS76r0OqE
Again, no SSD required.
| shikamaru317 said: If that is something that SSD's bring about this gen, it would seem like eMMC like what is in the base Steam Deck, which has a max speed of 500 MB/s I believe, wouldn't be fast enough to handle ports of PS5/Xbox Series/PC only games which are designed to run on the 2.4 GB/s Raw, 4 GB/s compressed rated SSD in the Series S/X. It seems like they need to at least put a cheap 128 GB NVMe SSD in Switch 2, basically a mid step between the base Steam Deck and the mid range Steam Deck storage. |
The biggest benefit an SSD has over traditional media is actually access times. You don't need to wait upwards of 15ms, data is available in as little as 0.1ms.
And that becomes increasingly important once you start doing allot of random reads/writes where a mechanical or optical disk can jump upwards to 100ms or more.
Just remember that eMMC memory is NAND, just like an SSD, it's how they are "controlled" which is the ultimate differentiator.
Besides, the market seems to be going towards UFS as we see in the mobile sector... As eMMC has stagnated since 2019. UFS allows for 2.9GB/s and higher anyway and is the eMMC successor.
But an SSD isn't going to be a requirement to receive Playstation 5/Xbox Series X/PC ports, lots of PC's still run games from spinning rust drives.
www.youtube.com/@Pemalite
