PS5 SSD Is 'Far Ahead' of High-End PCs, Epic Games CEO Says [IGN]

Discussion in 'Games, Gaming & Game-demos' started by Carfax, May 14, 2020.

  1. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    Well it's time of the decade again, when new consoles are on the horizon and all manner of cretins industry professionals are extolling them to high heaven and making dramatic statements concerning how powerful and capable they are in comparison to PCs.

    In this case, Tim Sweeney.

    Now I usually don't have a problem with Mr. Sweeney, but he does have a habit of doing this every console cycle and perhaps it's just to build up hype among peasants console gamers, but anyone with an ounce of knowledge about PCs knows that this is false and storage speed will likely not be a major factor due to PC architecture.

    Storage speed matters much less on the PC due to its much larger disparate memory pools. Since the CPU and GPU have their own memory pools which are connected to each other via PCIe, storage speed is almost trivial. In a PCIe 3.0 system, the system memory can transfer data to the GPU at up to 16GB/s which eclipses the PS5's SSD transfer rate at 5.5GB/s by a huge margin. In a PCIe 4.0 system, the system memory transfer speed is twice as fast, at up to 32GB/s to the GPU.

    So assuming that you have a good contemporary gaming PC with a large amount of VRAM and system memory, it can still stream more data faster than the next gen consoles provided the engine has good PC optimization, let alone a next gen Ampere or Navi 2 GPU paired with a PCIe 4.0 capable CPU.

    If I'm wrong or you disagree, I'm sure I'll hear about it! :D
     
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  2. JonasBeckman

    JonasBeckman Ancient Guru

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    Depends on how it's built but these up-to speeds I don't think matters too much long as you have any SSD and remove the immediate HDD bottlenecks though higher is better for loading and streaming. :)
    New NVME and PCI Express 4.0 ups the possible max speeds too but these ideal values are pretty optimistic and more regular file transfer speeds are often far lower.

    Plus games would need to be built both with assets and the game engine taking advantage of data streaming which on PC currently a SSD helps but some games benefit more and others still take significant amount of time to load up the menu or the in-game and then threading is either very limited or the memory is extremely conservative like 512 - 1 GB for texture storage forcing frequent loading and unloading though these new consoles should over time start removing existing bottlenecks and practices as the new hardware shouldn't have any issue with them.

    A big thing is also the cache for this new console generation and how that impacts loading by keeping core data something like a RAM drive in effect I believe but it can make transitions nearly instantaneous if done well.

    Gameplay wise the direct benefit is less of this.
    [​IMG]

    Long hall of loading and other transition barriers like squeeze that convenient vent or wall passage. (Jedi Fallen Order apparently loved these!)


    I do expect the console SSD's to be incredibly fast but software would have to build up to utilize this fully and there's other bottlenecks although removing I/O and going from HDD to SSD as a standard is huge.
    Asset quality and such will be a thing too though we're already hitting close to 100 GB or more for some games and now also before DLC or optional texture packs and SSD pricing / quality is going to be a bit of a balance act as triple cell layers make way for quad or penta layer even as max theoretical speeds improve or storage capacity goes up.

    So for PC any PCI-E SSD or M.2 or even the SATA3 models should be good especially this first year or two same as just about every console generation ever as devs get familiar with the hardware and start getting more out of it and updates and other improvements allow for pushing things farther too.
    In the meantime PC hardware improves as well making upgrades like six core CPU's affordable while still offering excellent performance and the new GPU models for getting into D3D12_2 / DX12 Ultimate come out on the market along with next year possibly seeing DDR5 and finalizing PCI Express 5.0 although that might still take a bit more time to see implemented in consumer motherboard hardware. (With 4.0 not really limited by much at all it's not a critical upgrade but could have some neat appliances.)


    Tech wise beyond that would be ray tracing and we're split between D3D12 and DXR but that then goes through NGX from NVIDIA and RTX and either game engine implementations (Like with Cry-Engine.) or whatever AMD's SDK will have which risks fracturing things up a bit and then on Vulkan more extensions are landing and I believe they're doing a bit more here to standardize these in the core of Vulkan 1.2.140 and newer and the next major version which might bridge in the D3D12_2 stuff I assume and support for these mesh shader groups and more allowing comparable features and functionality as before across either of these API's even if there's a few differences and various vendor specific extensions for certain things. :D
    (Although D3D12 has NVAPI and AGS as well and some extension through that.)

    Again it's still early on and support and implementation will start pretty small and scale up also bound by new hardware and availability, D3D12_2 might be more of a extras and optional early on until more of the market actually has GPU's that support these and as such any major advantages from coding without limits from earlier feature levels and lack of support for certain functions will be held back.
    (For possibly several years, D3D11.2 and newer and improvements to DXGI or the WDDM could still be better and some features are really lagging behind here even now.)



    EDIT: So the consoles will shake things up a bit but I expect it will be at least one or two years for this to truly set in and I don't think these hyped up marketing features will be that massive just yet although the change and removal of various bottlenecks going from HDD to SSD as such are big changes even if hitting Gigabyte speeds for reads and writes might be less of a factor in itself. :D

    Or how to say, definitively has some nice possible uses and then these other tech things well we'll see how this all goes and how many years it might take this time for that to be more of a standard on PC I guess.

    Windows 10 somehow has to surpass Win7 and Win8 and 8.1 for market majority and it has to be 2004 or newer coming out in a week or two or something like that for general availability plus the hardware situation will need the majority of the market to have a late 2020 GPU or newer that's not going to change quickly far as getting these fancy new D3D12 or later on Vulkan features as the new standard and baseline.

    Could still extend into and utilize 12_2 feature level functionality where available but coding for it directly and fully utilizing these features that will be difficult unless PC sales stop mattering entirely somehow and forcibly try shifting the baseline hardware requirements way earlier than ever before.

    (We're still predominantly seeing D3D11 as the standard API and that's not changing anytime soon I'd imagine even as D3D12 and VLK support move into a bigger role now.)



    EDIT: Oh and less of this about waiting on loading is a big thing as mentioned. :p

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2020
  3. WhiteLightning

    WhiteLightning Don Illuminati Staff Member

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    On PC games will be optimized for the lower segment of hardware , not the upper one. (mainly because it will sell more).
     
  4. Ghosty

    Ghosty Ancient Guru

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    In the long term PC gamers will see the benefit the most, as it will push 4k//8k to be more mainstream with developers. The first platform will be the PC as it will be easier to port over to the new consoles with minimum effort.
     
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  5. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    The way it's being presented in the media is as though the SSD is fast enough for the GPU to render from, which is ridiculous. Yes, the SSD can stream data very quickly, but how is that any different from the PC's main memory which can copy data into the GPU's VRAM even faster?

    That's why the PC version of games typically have longer draw distances and less aggressive LoD than the console versions when tuned properly.

    PCs have had SSDs for so long now, and while they have dramatically decreased loading times compared to HDDs, that's about all that they have done. I'm still skeptical of the notion that an SSD can be used to actually increase performance or detail in a frame.

    Faster streaming is important, but the PS5's SSD is not nearly as impactful as the media suggests. In fact, it's less optimal than having the memory architecture that a PC uses.
     
  6. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    I don't think it's a question of high end vs low end. A properly optimized PC game or 3D engine is just that. Ever wonder why some games have very poor draw distances and LoD compared to others? It's because of optimizations and how they utilize the memory that's available.

    Some developers also purposely handicap a game's draw distance or LoD to lower CPU requirements/cycles. Witcher 3 is a great example of that!

    At any rate, I just found it amusing how Sony and Epic are hyping the PS5's SSD like it will be some kind of revolutionary gamechanger when it could never be. When the next gen multiplatform games arrive, the order of performance and IQ will be like this:

    1) PC

    2) XSX

    3) PS5
     
  7. Seketh

    Seketh Ancient Guru

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    So, if this SSD is so incredibly spectacular, how will games perform on the terribly slow third-party PC SSDs that you'll have to buy in order to expand the 825GB of available storage on the PS5?
     
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  8. kx11

    kx11 Ancient Guru

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    poor Tim , never saw IdTech engine in Doom Eternal and how it doesn't allow textures pop-ins to happen while his UE still struggle with it so bad he had to announce that they won't have the problem anymore in UE5
     
  9. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    I watched Mark Cerny's PS5 presentation, and from what he says, it's really the hardware Kraken decompression block that's the special sauce and not the SSD itself. According to him, the hardware decompression block can decompress data at up to 22GB/s, which is admittedly blistering. For comparison, he said that it would take 9 Zen 2 cores to achieve a similar level of decompression performance.

    I'm sure the Zen 2 cores on the PS5 will likely have modifications, ie less cache to save on die space. So basically, a strong high end PC with a big multicore CPU should be able to brute force the decompression performance of the PS5's hardware decompression block.

     
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  10. Yxskaft

    Yxskaft Maha Guru

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    Sony was obviously talking from the perspective of the PS4, but their reasoning was that a fast SSD can fill the RAM in about two seconds. So almost all RAM on the PS5 will be usable in a beneficial way. The problem for the PS4 is that much of the RAM is being wasted because they contain data for the next 30 seconds, which is the time it takes to load the new data from the HDD to RAM on the PS4.

    Both Microsoft and Sony obviously have a budget constraint but both still chose to spend a portion on the SSD, Sony apparently more than Microsoft, so I'm prepared to be positively surprised by the results.

    Sony has already said they'll release a list of approved SSDs

    I do think PC gamers are underestimating the impact of games actually being able to be optimized for SSDs. Microsoft is even planning on releasing their Directstorage extension to improve the I/O on PC.
     
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  11. Seketh

    Seketh Ancient Guru

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    Thank you for pointing that out.

    So a Corsair Force MP600 for example has 4,950MB/s reads and 4,250MB/s writes. That still isn't near the "breakthrough" performance of the PS5 SSD. There are currently no drives in the market that can be used with the PS5.

    Maybe later this year a lot of higher performance NVME SSDs will be released, just in time for the PS5 launch. These approved drives must at least match the performance of the PS5 SSD. Because if the approved SSDs are slower than the PS5 SSD, gaming performance will of course be affected. Otherwise, if you can just use a slower, normal PC NVME SSD, then this PS5 SSD marketing is just the usual marketing BS.

    Games will, of course, begin to be designed with SSD performance in mind, and it will likely create a new minimum requirement for the PC. But no game will require an MP600. Hell, I can't see why games won't run just fine on a SATA 860 Evo on the PC.

    What this PS5 SSD performance will truly be used for is instant resume/suspend of multiple game states. Now that is something a SATA 860 Evo can't do. But the Xbox Series X already showed us on Youtube that instant resume can be achieved with its non-breaktrough PC NVME SSD.

    Marketing.
     
    Last edited: May 15, 2020
  12. WhiteLightning

    WhiteLightning Don Illuminati Staff Member

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    Witcher 3 is 5 years old, it was never handycapped, it was right for that time at release.
    in textures LOD is mainly because of normal maps,ook at all those PC texture packs released by them, they are usually not really good.
    people on nexus mostly do a way better job and with smaller texture size even. it totally depends on the artist.
    It was nice to see that UE5 scales everything, so LOD is a thing of the past.
    I think there is more to it than you say. Id like to hear a developer talk why there are still popups in games, while it obviously should have been optimised to PC and thus using more ram or vram.

    The PS5 will have fake resolutions no doubt, so 4k 60fps will not be that in reality. hence the IQ being worse then on PC. Id like to see if microsoft can handle the real 4k 60fps, otherwise the IQ will just be the same as on PS5.

    But are you seeing your own hard ware as 'spokes person' for the entire PC community ? Because it isnt.
    It will also be interesting to see how PC will handle games at 4k 60fps. I mean if you look at steams survey GTX1000 series are most popular. with 1060 being first.
    This is their target of optimisation , not gtx2080TI which is used by 0.81% of total users.
    I think the same goes for ram , vram and cpu's.

    So performance is divided into several things, you probably think of FPS , but load times are also a thing.
    i think PS5 will be the fastest when it comes to loading things / assets because of the speed of their SSD.
    im not quite sure what XSX speeds are, but i guess its like 5gb/s like nvme's are now ? same as PC i guess.
    FPS wise SSD's wont matter at all, and we all know that PC will handle it better always.

    So i cant really name a top 1,2,3 here.

    So it will be interesting how affordable things will be for the PC community so people will upgrade, because a 1060 3gb is now the top used card.
     
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  13. Hmm I think the early adopters of PCI-E 4.0 NVMEs probably can find something similar or already have. I am not one of them but I'd be surprised if PS5 is using some mythological tech outside of that. Excited to hear Sony went with the latest
     
  14. k3vst3r

    k3vst3r Ancient Guru

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    XSX is 2.7GB/s uncompressed
    PS5 is 5.5GB/s uncompressed quoted figure of 8GB/s to 9GB/s for compressed data on the fly

    Sony teamed up with Samsung to make the nvme ssd drive found inside the PS5. Basically it's custom made an probably similar to what Samsung will be launching later on in the year, Samsung 980 pro pci-e 4.0 nvme.

     
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  15. Ghosty

    Ghosty Ancient Guru

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    How do you know Samsung made the NVME? I don't recall hearing it mentioned, unless I missed something.

    Sony doesn't mention it on their official specs. Microsoft opted to use Seagate, but that's common knowledge.

    825GB.
    5.5GB/s Read Bandwidth (Raw).
     

  16. k3vst3r

    k3vst3r Ancient Guru

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    Mark Cerny said so during presentation? Samsung 840 pro pci-e 4.0 nvme, does 7GB/s read according to Samsung. So sounds like be 840 pro for expansion drive on PS5.

    Video I linked from youtube, they also say it's Samsung drive 12 channel with 5.5GB/s output.
     
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  17. Ghosty

    Ghosty Ancient Guru

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    No idea where they got that info from. Sony hasn't disclosed the brand, if any.
     
  18. k3vst3r

    k3vst3r Ancient Guru

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    Well if you google PS5 samsung ssd, whole front page is saying it's Samsung too.
     
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  19. Ghosty

    Ghosty Ancient Guru

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    I did. I saw words like 'could' and 'may'.
     
  20. -Tj-

    -Tj- Ancient Guru

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    He is a tool, enough said.
     
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