| goopy20 said: I know virtual ram is nothing new, but it sounds like the SSD tech will just make it a lot more efficient for actual game applications. |
SSD's will bring forth a slew of advantages for game developers, that's not in question.
| goopy20 said: I'm no game designer but I'm guessing there's a reason why Sony has been talking so much about their SSD and why they're going with 825GB instead of just 1TB. |
Sony went with 825GB instead of 1TB because of cost.
If Sony used the same NAND chips as the 825GB implementation, but added more of them to achieve 1TB, they would have actually increased performance even more. But it would also cost more.
Memory transactions scale with more memory chips as it's a parallel transaction, which is why larger SSD's are often faster than smaller SSD's, because they have more memory chips.
| goopy20 said: We will see how developers will support it and also what it means for pc gaming in general, but it's still pretty common to see a 250SSD used mainly for the OS and a 1TB HDD on pc. Except for maybe Star Citizen, I also can't think of any pc game that requires any SSD, let alone one that's compatible with the ps5 which aren't even on the market yet. |
The PC is also not Ram starved like consoles...
A Mid-Range PC sold today has 16GB of System Ram and a 8GB of GPU Ram or 24GB in total.
High-end Enthusiast PC's are coming with 32GB of System Memory and 10-16GB of GPU memory, so there is less of a functional need to stream assets into memory if there is enough memory to hold more data, meaning less successive disk transactions.
A few games like StarCitizen has taken a different design approach, they are using the faster disk access in order to essentially create a database in order to keep track of all the games object containers and will swap them in and out on a per-needs basis.
However, StarCitizen took this approach to reduce memory usage and increase it's reliance on disk access, they are building a universe, not a constrained game world, the same thing could functionally be achieved with a mechanical hard drive, but with more Ram to hold more containers in memory, reducing the reliance on disk accesses.
It's a balancing act.
SSD's are NOT a replacement for more, fast Ram.
It is simply a more cost-effective way to reduce your Ram requirements as NAND is allot cheaper, albeit... Also extremely slow compared to RAM.
For the longest time Ram improved at roughly the same rate as disk bandwidth with a rough 80-140x bandwidth ratio differential, which worked okay and enabled games to stream assets like open-world games such as Morrowind effectively.
However once mechanical drives hit around 120MB/s their bandwidth improvements started to stall, whilst Ram continued to increase at it's normal pace... Resulting in differences of upwards of 1,500-2500x or more like in the Playstation 4, which meant that streaming from mechanical hard drives had started to become a less optimal approach.
Essentially SSD's bring the disk bandwidth back inline with the Ram improvements, but with the benefit or low-latency access times.
But Ram is still faster.
You could for instance... Install StarCitizen onto a Ram Drive on PC so that it makes even an SSD look embarrassingly slow.
| goopy20 said: Maybe it's all marketing BS but I don't think Sony would be taking such a big gamble (production sounds expensive) if they had any doubt in its usefulness. Maybe its not meant to make the ps5 more powerful but I did hear it's a lot easier to develop for. So maybe next gen will be less about the hardware and more about the quality that studios can achieve with their time and budget? |
It's not marketing bullshit, nor is Sony making a big gamble... SSD's were the future 10 years ago... That was 10 years ago, we have come a long way since SLC NAND drives.
Today they are cheap, fast and good enough to be included in every device, which is why every manufacturer in the console and PC space is embracing them, thus it's not a gamble.
It's people expectations and understanding that is simply not aligned properly, hyping it into oblivion.
I mean the Nintendo 64 had a full solid-state storage solution with it's carts, the carts offered 264MB/s of bandwidth... Which is an insane number considering that it could fill up the Nintendo 64's Ram 33x every second... And it's Ram bandwidth was only 562.5MB/s... So developers would stream assets directly from carts on a per-needs basis.
The SSD in the Playstation 5 is no where near as lucrative as the Nintendo 64's bandwidth situation between storage and Ram of course, but rendering capabilities have increased substantially since then, so we should see some tangible improvements across the board in terms of load times and asset streaming... But it's not the second coming of christ.
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