vivster said:
I think you're vastly overestimating developers willingness to design specifically around high SSD speeds when there is next to no benefit compared to traditional design. You will always have a fast experience with an SSD no matter if the game was designed for it or not. Hell, you don't even need SSDs at all for fast loading times. All you need is enough RAM and a predictive loader. Modern GPUs hold everything they need in VRAM without the need to constantly stream large amounts of data from storage. The use cases where lots of data needs to suddenly be streamed to RAM/VRAM are limited and mostly only occur when you start up a game. This is great for the instant game resume feature on the consoles but less useful from within the game.
Take a normal use case for example. An open world game is the most taxing thing when it comes to heavy visual applications. Lots of of high quality assets at the same time that need to be constantly loaded in to be rendered. Pop ins are basically eliminated on SSDs despite games not being designed specifically for SSDs. Now imagine fast traveling between two far away places with completely different textures. Another very taxing activity as lots of assets will have to be exchanged within the VRAM. In this case you will have a loading screen for HDD users while for SSD users it's barely there and the bottleneck lies within the CPU and GPU to construct the scene. Now if you designed that for SSD only you will maybe completely lose the loading screen that pops up for a second but it'll be replaced by something else, a one second black screen or other kind of transition. Because even with the fastest SSDs loading won't be instantaneous. If it is instantaneous then the data was already present in RAM since memory bandwidth is about 100 times faster than the fastest SSDs.
So in that case "optimizing for SSD" would mean nothing else but replacing a loading screen with something else while loading just as fast. Maybe you can name a specific use case where it is needed to specifically code with SSDs in mind to get a significant speed boost.
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Isn' RAM more expensive than an SSD? I mean you can get a 250GB SSD for under $50 right now and I am guessing those prices would continue to drop. And have you tried playing star citizen without an SSD? I don't know why the PC folk on here seem to have some sort of selective intelligence, but there isn't a debate here. There hasn't been a game designed for an SSD on PC outside SC... and even with that one it's debatable. Make no mistake, you would see SSDs become minimum requirement for PCs by the end of this year and onwards for games on the PC.
Why do our PC friends have a way of invading all console threads?
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