Just read the thread, we had one or two post putting how the SSD won't matter because the PCs with HDDs will be the minimum common denominator.

no we didn't, we had a few people say multiplatform games wouldnt utilise the full potential of the ps5 ssd, not that ssd wouldnt matter

stick to the facts and not "i feel that people said this"

You're saying we can't judge both streams because the masses will praise Sony over MS anyway? General consensus aside, MS's stream was a snooze fest compared to Sony's and we both know why. If you're not impressed with what Sony showed then I'm seriously curious which Series X games MS showed during their stream, that did impress you.

Unless you're a game developer with experience using both consoles devkits, we simply have no idea how having half the throughput will limit the Series X compared to what's possible on ps5. Obviously, both consoles have amazing hardware and now that Sony has made its first move,its up to MS's first party studios to show something with the same wow factor. It's not an impossible task and I don't think people will be more impressed by whatever Sony shows by default. MS just has to show more than current gen games with a bunch of optimized for Series X logos. 

how do you explain the other guys comment?

The SSD is a love letter for developers, a gift to streamline games design and development, and possibly cut down on the time it takes to get games up and running. Hence, why lots of developers are literally singing praises for the PS5. The differences for us gamers aren't going to be as pronounced, and that doesn't take away from SONY's efforts.

I feel like some are upset the new Xbox isn't getting enough attention and determined to explain to us what we already know? Redirect your anger, tweet@PhilSpencer and let him you're disappointed with the xbox reveal event instead.

Next-Gen consoles aren't even out yet. Nothing for PC's to catch up to.

* PC's don't stagnate for 7~ years, they constantly improve every year with new hardware updates.
* PC's have potentially faster SSD technology than the Playstation 5, if you are willing to pay for it. (I.E. Raid/Ram Drives etc')
* PCI-E 4.0 SSD's with 6.5GB/s transfer rates will be on the market before the next-gen consoles. (I.E. Samsung 980 Pro)
* PC has more than 8-core CPU's @3.5Ghz. (Hows about 32 cores @3.7-4.5Ghz?)
* PC has more than just 16GB of Ram. (16GB System+8GB Graphics is a fairly mid-range amount today.)
* PC will have second generation Ray Tracing before next-gen. (Geforce RTX 3080)

As long as consoles rely on PC technology, but fail to use the absolute top of the line technology, then the PC will always have the technical edge if you are willing to pay for it.
And whilst a console is typically competitive with a PC for the first year or two of it's life, they quickly fall behind after that, Microsoft and Sony tried to rectify that to a degree with the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X to an extent, but AMD wasn't leading the performance pack so they fell short at the time relative to the PC, they were still good consoles that provided tangible benefits.

A console is the sum of it's parts, not just a singular component.
There are parts of the GPU that will expedite memory transactions and decompression such as textures using the 3Dc+ texture decompression blocks.

But overall, the SSD will aid in loading, load screens will be significantly reduced due to it's performance. - But things like installing from optical disk will still take 84 years as the SSD or HDD is not the bottleneck there, the optical drive is.

Yes it can. A 2.5GB/s a SSD is still a fast SSD. It's still a very capable SSD.

We don't know what the limiting factor/bottleneck is for those transitions, might be Ram bandwidth due to the extensive use of heavy alpha effects? It might be the CPU due to all the post-process/particle effects?
The SSD isn't the be-all, end-all. - A console is a collection of hardware that cohesively works together with a degree of efficiency... Chalking everything up to the SSD is doing a disservice to the amount of hard work and engineering that Sony and AMD has invested in every single other component over the years.

Material costs.

Basically we are at the point where costs are fixed and cannot get any lower, it costs money to build and manufacture the devices, it costs money to fabricate the NAND chips (Which is a commodity product subject to supply/demand pressures which influences price), it costs money to design and fabricate memory controllers.

So basically in the low-end of the SSD market... In order to make SSD's as cheap as possible, SSD manufacturers have essentially ditched the DRAM cache, the SSD controller is very simple and bare-bones and they might only feature 2-4 NAND chips...

Essentially you cannot go any lower in price.
But what a manufacturer can and does do... Is when newer NAND chips come available that are higher capacity, they will swap the NAND chips out and sell it for the same price.

So capacities and performance increases, but the price stays the same.

My first SSD for example was the mid-range OCZ Vertex 2 64GB back 10~ years ago for about $150 AUD, that drive was MLC and had an DRAM cache... Fast forward to today and you can get a 512GB SSD in the same class (I.E Includes DRAM) for about the same price or an 8x improvement.

In the low-end you can get 120GB drives for about $50 AUD, often they are using QLC rather than TLC/MLC/SLC NAND, lack a DRAM or SLC Cache and are generally barely an improvement over mechanical drives due to the small number of NAND chips.

In the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X's case, I am going to assume Sony and Microsoft are employing a number of QLC chips to extract parallel memory transactions to increase performance, but dropped the DRAM/SLC caches to keep costs in control, so they have fantastic theoretical numbers and fantastic read speeds which are the most important functions of loading data.

SSD's were mainstream on PC 5 years ago.

It's when the NAND market price dropped out and the introduction of mainstream TLC and QLC NAND became abundant that we could really make super bargain basement drives.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5067/understanding-tlc-nand

IBM introduced the Mechanical Hard Disk in 1956. 64 years ago, their dominance was cemented in the 1960's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives

December 24th 2004. - 37.76GB/s ATI Radeon x800XT PE. GDDR3.
August 23rd 2006. - 64GB/s ATI Radeon X1950 CE. GDDR4.

Increase of 69.49% in a span of 20 months.

August 23rd 2006. - 64GB/s ATI Radeon X1950 CE. GDDR4.
June 25th, 2008. - 115.2GB/s AMD Radeon 4870. GDDR5.

Increase of 80% in a span of 22 months.

June 25th, 2008. - 115.2GB/s AMD Radeon 4870. GDDR5.
December 15th, 2010. - 176GB/s AMD Radeon 6970. GDDR5.

Increase of 52% in a span of 22 months.

December 15th, 2010. - 176GB/s AMD Radeon 6970. GDDR5.
June, 2012. - 288GB/s AMD Radeon 7970. GDDR5.

Increase of 63.63% in a span of 17 months.

June, 2012. - 288GB/s AMD Radeon 7970. GDDR5.
July, 2019. - 448GB/s AMD Radeon 5700XT. GDDR6.

Increase of 55.55% in a span of 85 months.

So for almost an entire console generation memory bandwidth (by the numbers!) only increased by about 55.55%.

However, there is more to it than that, AMD employed memory bandwidth conservation tricks such as delta colour compression, the first generation DCC improved bandwidth by 40% in Tonga. (GCN 3.0/1.2) And 17% in Polaris. (GCN 4.0/1.3)

Vega (GCN 5.0) introduced Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer and Primitive Shaders which also drove up memory bandwidth efficiency... And that got refined/fixed/improved with Navi.


So in short the black and white numbers between the 7970 and 5700XT might only be 55.5%, but real-world might have it closer to being a 750GB/s or 160% improvement on the memory front.

It's still not as rapid as before, but the point I am trying to convey is that spec sheets don't tell the whole story, improvements are being had even when there is no apparent technological memory shifts.

Indeed they are. And they need to be as their hardware doesn't ever improve over time, plus they can only afford to put mid-range components in consoles at most, so they need to make the best bang for buck for the hardware they have.

In saying that... The PC OS of Windows 7 was more efficient than the Xbox One/Playstation 4 OS... Windows 7 didn't need steal 3-3.5GB of Ram and 1-2 CPU cores just for itself...

Thanks for all the valuable information as always.

Just wanted to put a small caveat. Although I agree that Console can have similar level of HW with mid or even high gen PCs for the first couple years but PC will always keep pushing higher while console stagnate I'll put the caveat that typically because of the nature of fixed HW and learning curve the consoles on the level of games and details the PC to have the same level of performance at the end of the gen isn't the same as on the start of the gen.

Being bold and going first can have it's downsides. It's no doubt part of the reason why SNY has been waiting. It gives them more info about what MS are doing and where they are likely headed, and allows them to make some adjustments and target what they feel will benefit them the most. You can bet that for the most part, every time MS goes first and makes a less than stellar impact, that SNY will counter with an improved version of their own, if it's part of their plan and they feel the need to cover that type of presentation on a competitive scale.

MS decided to throw short jabs bit by bit over the fight so far. SNY mostly has been ducking and dodging. SNY finally decided to throw a haymaker, and MS is disoriented for the moment but not down and out by any means. MS need to collect themselves, focus, and start swinging back.

SNY didn't reveal the PS5 price for good reason. They want to catch MS off guard if and when they can.

You can judge whatever you want, but using public praise or chatter is irrelevant because again, they were beating MS in that regard even when all they had done was show a logo. Of course a showcase will blow up. That’s not to say MS had a better showing, your barometer is just flawed.

The second paragraph is hilarious because you and a vast majority of the other PS fans around the Internets are also not game devs with both dev kits yet you can speak so factually about how limited the XSX is or how superior the PS5 design is. You also routinely speak factually about how limited first party XSX games will be but you aren’t a developer for MS so how would you know? Try to practice what you preach. 

I already said Ratchet was impressive. I also enjoyed quite a few of the smaller scale titles and moneyhat games. Unlike the XSX event feedback, I don’t mind smaller titles that end up being cross gen. In fact two of the most impressive looking games imho were cross gen, Little Devil Inside and whatever the Zelda type game was.

can you imagine shadow of colossus 2 running on ps5??