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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Why the SSD is a big deal for PS5, Series X.

Hiku said:

It's not that this was a 'design choice' in the past. It was always a hardware limitation forcing them to deign the games around it.

- They had to create a flight of stairs here so that they could load in a new area in front of you while fading away the one behind. If that area could load up in time without the long flight of stairs, they wouldn't have needed to add it, and could have done something they actually wanted there instead.
- If it takes you 1 second to turn around, they had to limit the amount of objects in a room to the amount able to load by the time you turn around to see them.
- They had to put up a wall here, and have you turn a corner, rather than seeing everything in the area the whole time.
All this goes for linear games as well.

A high fidelity game like Final Fantasy 7 Remake for example could make very good use of this.
Though even with PS5's SSD, I still can't imagine that it would be possible to load in all of Midgar properly as you fly over it at high speed with the airship. That still seems impossible without trickery. But it certainly would work a lot better now, at the very least.

I guess my point is, those stairs would have existed anyway because if a house has stairs it will have stairs. If you are in an alleyway than you are going to have walls and objects there. I can see this working with games where flying is a thing as you mentioned flying over cities or landscapes and games like Star Citizen but the every day type game like platformers and FPS games, I honestly cannot see much use here aside from the fast load times. 

Last edited by Azzanation - on 19 March 2020

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Hiku said:
Azzanation said:
SSD drives are great however I cannot see it making that much difference when it comes to how games are designed. Developers will still go with there own game design choices. Linear style games wont see much difference because they are designed around scene by scene while openworld games can benefit but how much are devs willing to invest and design even bigger worlds? Is there a thing as too big? because sometimes for me, when I play openworld games, being too big can be a chore.

I welcome the faster load times on both consoles and honestly that's all id expect, if they do more with it great but I couldn't care if they do or not. They just need to continue to make great games.

It's not that this was a 'design choice' in the past. It was always a hardware limitation forcing them to deign the games around it.

- They had to create a flight of stairs here so that they could load in a new area in front of you while fading away the one behind. If that area could load up in time without the long flight of stairs, they wouldn't have needed to add it, and could have done something they actually wanted there instead.
- If it takes you 1 second to turn around, they had to limit the amount of objects in a room to the amount able to load by the time you turn around to see them.
- They had to put up a wall here, and have you turn a corner, rather than seeing everything in the area the whole time.
All this goes for linear games as well.

A high fidelity game like Final Fantasy 7 Remake for example could make very good use of this.
Though even with PS5's SSD, I still can't imagine that it would be possible to load in all of Midgar properly as you fly over it at high speed with the airship. That still seems impossible without trickery. But it certainly would work a lot better now, at the very least.

They can using the geometry engines to load and differential texture mapping detail by distance.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

Hiku said: 

You're only thinking about objects created because they're actually supposed to be there. I'm talking about objects forced to be there (or removed) due to hardware limitations.
And btw, even stairs in a house can be used to offset loading speed issues. Though I was more thinking of something like this:

I completely understand what you mean however.. how would a super Fast SSD benefit games like Ori and the Will of the Wisp or a 2D Platformer? Just to name this genre as an example.



Hiku said: 

So in a side scrolling platformer, they can use this technology to for example allow you to move much quicker without making notable artistic sacrifices.
From my observation you can move much quicker in Bloodtained than in Oro. The tradeoff is that Ori has much higher fidelity instead.
And if the textures in Ori are so detailed and beautiful that they push the limits of what the system is able to load in, then the faster and bigger the memory, the more beautiful they can make the game.

Okay, I just wanted to know if we will see improvements to other style of games. 



the-pi-guy said:
Azzanation said:

I completely understand what you mean however.. how would a super Fast SSD benefit games like Ori and the Will of the Wisp or a 2D Platformer? Just to name this genre as an example.

We could say something like LittleBigPlanet.  

The thermometer on the left:

Could probably be eliminated.  

The reason it was there was because on the PS3 in particular, you'd have to keep the entire level into memory.  So you would be constrained to the 256 MB limit.  

There's a bigger limit on PS4, but there's still a limit.  

With an SSD, if a game designer wanted to make bigger levels, they could.  

Want to make a huge 2D world that is completely continuous, (ie imagine if every level of Super Mario Bros was connected and all on the same screen.), you can.

Want that world to have moving parts all over?  You can.  

Okay thanks, Hiku explained it to me as well. Well lets see if devs take full advantage of these super fast SSDs next gen



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Hiku said:
DonFerrari said:

They can using the geometry engines to load and differential texture mapping detail by distance.

Right, that's what I meant by trickery.
It wouldn't be the same fidelity Midgar we're able to see up close.

Yep, those are a few. They even talked about how being able to fill the RAM in 2s would allow for faster turning around or having more show because you won't crash when you talk that 1s to turn around. I'm very interested in all the tricks they are going to use this gen to make even better showing than last gen.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

Azzanation said:
the-pi-guy said:

We could say something like LittleBigPlanet.  

The thermometer on the left:

Could probably be eliminated.  

The reason it was there was because on the PS3 in particular, you'd have to keep the entire level into memory.  So you would be constrained to the 256 MB limit.  

There's a bigger limit on PS4, but there's still a limit.  

With an SSD, if a game designer wanted to make bigger levels, they could.  

Want to make a huge 2D world that is completely continuous, (ie imagine if every level of Super Mario Bros was connected and all on the same screen.), you can.

Want that world to have moving parts all over?  You can.  

Okay thanks, Hiku explained it to me as well. Well lets see if devs take full advantage of these super fast SSDs next gen

If the number one request from devs was SSD and both platform holders put very good and fast solutions then it is for them to take advantages.

Of course not all titles or genres will use it, not sure why choose indie games to ask how that would improve those games. But if they want they can make much better games with this.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

Hiku said:

One thing I'm a bit confused about.
What exactly is it that makes the PS5 SSD able to function as RAM? It's not just the speed, I'm sure. Because Cerny said that other commercial SSD's will need to be faster than the PS5 SSD's 5.5 GB in order to work on PS5.

Is it the custom I/O unit?

Or the flash controller giving the PS5's SSD 6 true priority levels instead of 2 like other SSDs?
He mentioned that the custom I/O unit would need to make up for the lack of true priority levels on industry SSD's, instead of that drive's flash controller.

I would say it is the controller. Because even old PCs with slow HDD used that for "cache" as some virtual RAM.

So when SSD is very fast on PS5 it can help the RAM without being an issue for the performance I guess. There is also the coherence unit that will support the fill and removal of data from the RAM and that is on the SSD solution.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

twintail said:

An analysis from NXGamer makes the hypothetical claim that with the SSD that Sony is using, they could move OS operations onto it and effectively give games like 15.5GB ram usage.

Thoughts?

That would be really interesting, but it needs to go to CPU/GPU and I don't think there is a direct link to SSD. But perhaps since it is so fast it stay out of the RAM and dump all at once when you press home.

Mar1217 said:
So basically, we could get Sonic games that run decently :0

Could be kkkkkk



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

Great thread , actually i planned to make one. But afraid being challenged by many smart people.