Did MS and Sony over estimate their SSD requirements for this gen?

Conversation can organically move in unpredictable directions. Podcasts are a pretty good example of how topics can flow into other topics. Internet forums are different because multiple people are part of the conversation. I attempted to summarize how we arrived at that point but the general decorum would be to not let a topic get too far away from the original discussion. That said a conversation that is too constrained can be equally unpleasant. If in doubt it’s generally a good idea to find a way to circle back to the original conversation.

All I can say is that SSDs are not being used in a ground breaking sense yet

Mostly because Engines are not built for that purpose yet.

These high bandwidths will only make sense for loading times for now.

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This is what I have always said when discussing this. You’d have to be designing an entirely acid-trip style game where every second uses entirely different assets to require those sustained speeds. The internal storage size simply isn’t large enough for a game like that. The only way is if the “game” is under 140 seconds.


2x compression ratio * 700 GB internal storage / 10 GBps = 140 seconds
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No games take advantage of these speeds because they need to be able to run on older PCs and previous gen consoles. This includes Unreal Engine 5.

But once games are exclusively designed for next gen you’re going to see that these speeds are necessary because games will deal with memory completely differently.

5500MB/s means 91 MB per frame for a 60fps game or 182MB per frame in a 30 fps game. With compression you can double those numbers for both. You can bring in a pretty detailed animation within that frame.

So if you’re playing a shooting game and you kill a baddie you can, within a frame, load in a custom death animation. So instead of having five death animations in memory, you can have enough space to hold five reserved, and then load in from hundreds of animations.

But say you wanted a custom sound effect to play with that particular animation, you need even more bandwidth. So you can’t have enough.

These kind of speeds mean that Hollywood quality animations or models could be loaded and used in real time. That instead of filling up your RAM with highly detailed animations, models and sound effects, that they can be loaded within a frame and discarded when they are no longer needed allowing you to load the next high quality animation, model, or sound effect. The more bandwidth means higher quality versions of those things.

In an FPS game you wouldn’t need highly detailed models used by your character stored in memory. You can load it as soon as you pick up the weapon and discard it as you drop it.

In theory you could have PS5 games pulling far ahead of Xbox Series games in terms of fidelity if those PS5 games were custom built and leveraged the PS5’s SSD speeds. There’s a big gap between the two if we’re to believe the numbers they throw around. But here’s the thing, with Sony realizing the importance of PC support in terms of recouping their cost of game development and to make as much money as possible, I can’t see them banking on PCs having SSDs with 10,000MB/s speeds (let’s not forget about the on-the-fly compression that occurs on the PS5). And I’m not talking about SSD speeds I’m talking about the whole I/O throughput being able to leverage SSDs that are at least that fast.

So Sony is going to be held back by PCs when they create their next generation games. While Naughty Dog might be able to bring in a 300 MB Hollywood quality reload animation that blows everything out of the water (one of ten highly detailed reload animations) and can do it within a frame…if they’re are also targeting PC they simply can’t have that. Or maybe in the PC version they will stick with one animation and leave the variety on the PS5 version.

So it could be argued that while the Series consoles could have benefited from a faster drive, that they made the smart choice when it comes to creating games for both the Xbox and the PC in order to hit larger audiences. With DX12U cards being the standard for PC’s going forward, features like Direct Storage and Sampler Feedback could be leveraged for PCs with typical hard drives.

I have no basis for this but I wonder if the SSD speed on the PS5 was influenced by Epic, much like how Epic influenced Microsoft into packing the 360 with 512 megabytes of RAM. It was an unusually high target and could really benefit engines like UE5.

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hmmm we don’t know yet there is a reason Sony went really high speed SSD maybe a game pitch or something else pushed them to this. Sony answer would be with naughty dog next game.

I think when we look at the amount of variability possible we lose track of the effort required to create those assets and the amount of storage they take.

You just described 3 gigs of reload animations. How many custom sound effects are we talking about?

I believe when Sony asked developers, around 1 gb/sec was the number that they settled on.

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this thread is at least 2 years early

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yup.

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Sony did it, MS just made the obvious technology jump while supplementing in hardware and software innovations like the SFS.

Its Xplainin bro. Missed these kind of threads god bless him.

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No, neither did.

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ohhhh shit it is. Then keep at it, no problem. It’s good haha

I agree with the posters saying this thread is too early. On the other hand we have not seen new gameplay elements in the last 10 years or so outside Battle Royale (and that runs on a phone). So I predict there will be no new game design mechanics only possible with the speed of SSD. But they will make live of developers easier so thats already a win in my book (so no, MS and Sony didnt overestimate their SSD requirements).

So the portals by Ratchet dont count?? Damn

Portals with instant travel to different ‘dimensions’ is not a new game design mechanic. Too Human did this on 360 directly from DVD and there were other games before with this :woman_shrugging:

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Those gameplay mechanics existed prior to current-gen.

(For those who didn’t read the original question filled with sarcasm).

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what Rift Apart initially sold is the setpiece moments that we saw in the initial trailer as something you naturally get to do during gameplay (which if if were the case would 100% be revolutionary), and not relegated to on-rails cutscenes. The portal stuff that was more persistent during gameplay was just moving around within the same level to other points, which as cool as it definitely looks and feels, is perhaps not the paradigm shift many expected.

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I need to add /s to my stuff lol.

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Like Psychonauts 2 did something similar and nobody made a fuzz about it.

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I think it’s just about world fidelity in that case, Rift Apart’s worlds are much bigger, denser and have more shit happening, and while Psychonauts 2 has it, it won’t get as much attention due to its inherent art direction not focusing on that kind of fidelity and density. It also wasn’t part of its marketing, while Rift Apart built its entire game around it.