By the end of the generation hopefully developers will also start optimising for Velocity Architecture tech for Xbox, PC. But even if they do I hardly think there will a scenario when it breaks the user experience on non PS5 devices.
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Yup itâll be utilized more in the upcoming year hopefully with direct storage debuting on windows 11 and 10. I doubt ssds will be pushed to the limits by the end of the generation. I would be happy to be proven wrong though
In this case the way they talked about the SSD was equivalent to Xbox and last gen âpower of the cloudâ.
Yes both offer some potential cool stuff but neither mitigate the power gap nor offer real tangible advantages in the immediate future and both were designed to provide a bullet point for their fans to cling onto.
The reality of the PS5 SSD I/O is that you might shave a second or two off loading at best but in terms of impacting game design? No.
What? You mean the PS5 SSD cannot plan and execute a Mars landing or cure Alzheimers? wtf Iâve been lied to. 
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How silly would your post be if future games donât run into issues on these drives? Speculation is irrelevant, this video and the discussion that it warrants specifically addresses that at least at this point in time the promises of the SSD bandwidth delta were overblown. That is a fact at this juncture, no speculation. More importantly, yes we always talk about how it takes years to take advantage of new tools and hardware, but hereâs the reality presented by the PS5 on those two points: IO bandwidth is the easiest thing to take advantage of, it requires no new tools or design mantras to be utilized. Otherwise, we wouldnât have the inherent (and often massive) improvements in load times, data streaming, and more, all without any interference by the original designer. Furthermore, the tools environment by all accounts is an evolution of the PS4 dev environment, so thereâs not even that initial re-learning that had to occur going into the PS4 or as devs have had to with the new Xbox GDK.
Loading data, which is all IO does, doesnât require anywhere close to the same interference as developing for completely new architecture, languages, or software efficiencies (think SFS, VRS, etc.) does. Iâm judging the current crop of performance by the data we have, and it largely highlights that the bandwidth delta was overblown.
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I will happily accept a full fledged realistic game (not a tech demo) that breaks the experience on XVA but runs correctly on PS5 SSD. Xbox also has few extra features which help to load only a fraction of the data thereby freeing up lot of processing/IO bandwidth.
The important talk around PS5 SSD or any any SSD in any next gen console should be about how much easier it would make the devs time.
No one talks about it. Thatâs much bigger of potential.
I predict it will reduce the Performance Development time of the games by half.
In general we could have avg game development time reduced by 30-40%
Thatâs big.
So when developers like David Springate say itâs going to take a lot of engineering effort to properly utilize these SSDs, heâs wrong? Itâs just so easy to design data structures so that assets can be pulled from the drive at the same time a draw call is made and pulled into memory fast enough for the GPU to process that draw call?
This is a lot of words to justify console warring and I prefer we not do that on this forum.
And regarding how silly my post would look. Iâm confident it wonât look silly in a couple years. Especially when Iâm not looking for justification to be a troll.
First off, read what I said; I never said that thereâs no work to be done. I said it was the easiest in comparison to a new dev environment and compared to complete paradigm shifts in things like SFS, and the other new efficiencies enabled by elements present in RDNA2, etc. SSDs arenât new by any means, and developers have been taking advantage of them to a certain extent on PC, and weâve seen that there are limitations in the promises that some would like to pretend otherwise. David Springate specifically is on record mirroring those statements, but because he also said something about the fact that SSDs will require some engineering it negates those facts? How about what Jon Burton stated about how R&C could be done on PS3, because despite what we may pretend as otherwise, the portal sections are on-rails for a reason (itâs still a masked loading screen at its heart).
Furthermore, if you think Insomniac didnât spend a significant amount of time completing those âengineering effortsâ to utilize the SSD, despite them directly stating how much the game was built around the additional bandwidth and its âimpossibilityâ of achieving the same on other hardware, I donât know what to tell you. The fact that it runs on a slower drive that isnât even utilizing host memory buffer (because the PS5 doesnât support it), suggests at a minimum that the bandwidth delta thatâs been weaponized is overblown.
Making legitimate observations from data observed isnât console warring, itâs accepting reality. What isnât a good look for the forum is assuming anyone who has a justifiable criticism for a Sony product (or Xbox), especially those borne from verified data, is trolling. This entire thread is aimed at the legitimate discussion of technological differences, shortcomings, etc.
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An ssd and low level apis, able to handle hundreds of thousands of requests and with a high throughout can definitely affect game design.
But this wonât happen overnight, and definitely will not be exclusive to one single console (or even pc which as always by the time this happens will be ahead of both consoles stacked together).
Edit:
And that paradigm shift is taking advantage of the fact that with ssds you can fetch tons of data in just a few milliseconds to achieve a near perfect memory efficiency.
For example holding data in memory so everything has a perfect fidelity at all times would require a tremendous amount of memory. With an ssd the games can be designed to just hold whatâs on screen at said fidelity and load the rest of the scene as you turn around or forward/backwards.
Though even that is not a total paradigm shift from the streaming systems we have now, it would be more like since the cache is that much faster we donât need to store as much in the main ram.
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I did read what you said and I agree with you but when you said:
I read that as not needing to design data structures or data management to best utilize these SSDs, which does need to be done. So hopefully you can see how your previous comment came across to me.
I have to be honest that Iâm not familiar with those David comments you mention he mirrors. I know of the interview where he compares previous generations where on the PS2, the question was how to get data quickly off the disc, and on the PS4/XBO, itâs how to efficiently get data off the HDD, and now itâs less about how to quickly get that data but how to properly utilizing the throughput. The example given was how entire tracks are loaded now but in the future, racers may only have 10 meters loaded in memory at the highest fidelity while constantly streaming in data off the SSD and how much that could impact the game. Itâs that type of engineering and really rethinking data management to best use the available throughput, memory, GPU, etc.
Iâm also familiar with Jonâs video and it was great. However I think a lot of context is lost just by name dropping it in a conversation. Heâs right that portal effects can be done on the PS3, Prey is a favorite example I like to give from the early 360 days. Yes R&C could have been done on the PS3, but it wouldnât have been the same game. Insomniac themselves have said there are scenarios and portal where data is pre-loaded into memory and this is the technique that has always been used in the past, but Insomniac has also said in interview on how they go beyond whatâs been traditionally done in past generations and itâs here where new gen games will benefit over past generations. We see portals that are within the same area, portals to new worlds that follow on-rails, portals to new worlds that arenât on rails, etc. so there are a few different ways the portals are used. I think my concern with people taking his video and applying it directly to R&C in a 1:1 way is it appears some assume that means Rift Apart would be the same on the PS3 but at lower graphical settings, 720p, etc. when it would really be a different game in the end. Even if the SSD utilization in R&C is just to the extent where they are able to stream in more data to free up more memory for assets, world density, etc. itâs still one of the improvements that makes this generation exciting, on both system.
Not really sure why quotes are being used. Engineering efforts was a comment by a developer, not me. Iâm also not familiar with this impossibility quote youâre referencing because Insomniac devs specifically said whatâs being done in R&C can be done on the Series X, which makes sense. So maybe whatever youâre referencing was talking about past systems? The fact that R&C runs fine on a slower drive tells me there is more can be done and I donât think we can judge anything about the delta when neither SSD is being maxed out. That is the point Iâve been trying to make. Whatever the delta is, whether itâs 2x, 1.5, 1.2, or whatever, I think itâs premature to look at an early gen game and make claims about how itâs all marketing. The general consensus by developers is that MS and Sony have taken different approaches to feed data off the SSD where Sony went for more speed and brute force while MS has a slower drive but developed features like SFS to minimize the amount of data that even needs to be passed through or stored in memory. I guess Iâm just saying like I said before, itâs too early to read too much into this video other than it supporting what Insomniac has said and itâs safe to say games will get more demanding in the future, even with the IO needs.
I completely agree, 100%. Unfortunately thatâs not what happened here. Summarizing the DF video as meaning the SSD in the PS5 is nothing more than overhyped BS does not make for a constructive conversation. Some are so quick to take pot shots or bring in marketing instead of even entertaining the whys, hows, or what this may mean (outside of âsee itâs overhyped marketing etcâ) because at the end of the day none of us know all the details or data. Thereâs a difference between jumping on the overhyped marketing train and actually having a discussion on technology. Iâd prefer the thread sticks to the latter, some were jumping on the former.
But it is an entirely valid conclusion to make at this time from this data point. A slower SSD can run R&C exactly as a faster one. So all the claims made to the contrary were just marketing hype.
Your contention that this will change later in the gen doesnât make that conclusion at this point in time invalid. Data analysis is not static we donât have to wait for more data to make a conclusion we make one now and then change it later if the evidence changes.
I have to say I kinda jumped out of this thread due to a small number of people constantly shouting down any criticism of PS5 and declaring it as trolling no matter how valid or justified and this seems like another example of that.
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Donât disagree with you at all.
Iâm talking about the way Sony specifically tried to sell the idea that their I/O and SSD speed was unique or at least encouraged that sort of view.
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Which current racing game loads the entire track in memory? And why would it do this?
Here is a presentation from Forza Motorsport 3 (three) about how Turn 10 streams track data:
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Can I ask what claims youâre referring to? Insomniac said R&C could run on the Series X. Which is why the findings in this video shouldnât be that surprising. Most of the overblown claims generally came from fanboys on Twitter and other corners of the internet, so is it their claims youâre referencing?
Regarding coming to conclusions this early in the gen, Iâm sorry but it makes no sense. If weâre going to form conclusions on the delta in SSD, does that mean that we also have formed conclusions on the raw GPU performance as well? For the most part, we havenât seen the gap we thought weâd see on paper but still know whatever gap we see will only widen as the generation goes on. I know people in this thread think this because weâve had this conversation in the past. I donât think itâs fair to conclude on the raw performance of the GPU any more than it is to form conclusions on the SSD, but doing the latter is different? I think itâs valid to draw conclusions on how R&C is utilizing the hardware, but the raw performance of the consoles alone? I canât agree with that. For what itâs worth, do I think weâre going to see a 4.8 GB/s vs 9+ GB/s sustained delta at the end of gen? No, not at all but if weâre drawing conclusions on this video alone, that suggests there is little to no delta and I canât agree with that either.
The entire history of console development supports the notion that utilization will only improve and that goes for all aspects of these systems. If using that slower SSD was a valid approach going forward, I donât think DF would have recommended not using that drive at home. If the chance wasnât high that it would cause issues down the line, why not recommend buying a slower drive to save viewers some money?
And regarding the trolling talk, Iâm sorry you felt that way. For what itâs worth, Iâve never thought that about your posts. However if someone has little to no engagement in this thread and then pops in to only talk about overhyped marketing, I think itâs easy to see how some would see the motives as a bit suspect.
If you all want to believe that the SSD in the PS5 is tapped out and we wonât see higher utilization going forward, thatâs anyoneâs business. I would just prefer the rhetoric to stick to what this thread should be about with technology and not some low hanging fruit like marketing.
Dirt 5. That isnât to say there isnât any streaming of data in Dirt 5, Iâm sure they arenât loading the entire full fidelity map but according to Springate, they load the whole map. He was just using that game as an example of their current approach and how it may evolve over this generation.
Great link BTW, really appreciate that.
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âIf weâre going to form conclusions on the delta in SSD, does that mean that we also have formed conclusions on the raw GPU performance as well? For the most part, we havenât seen the gap we thought weâd see on paper but still know whatever gap we see will only widen as the generation goes on.â
We are seeing the gap already and the Series X isnât even using all of itâs feature set yet.
Almost every 3rd party game jointly released on Series X and PS5, has the Series X out in front by millions of pixels and usually with higher fidelity settings as well. Also with the latest OS firmware update, the Series X is now starting to match the PS5 for steady 60fps at these higher resolutions and graphics settings.
Never mind that Series X is slaughtering PS5 when it comes to games that are 120fps compatible.
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I made many of those same points in my response, and I too have done the same largely because rightful criticism (read: analysis) is seen as console warring, which is not. This is a thread about the analysis of games utilizing the hardware theyâre developed on, and the discussion around the limitations/issues we see as a result.
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No, marketing doesnât need to be absolute statements as implied ones are just as powerful if not more. So I guess Iâm referencing the whole way the super speed SSD was marketed by sony/Cerny et all feeding into the marketing for R&C as it was sold as the SSD poster child in many many interviews. The implication was that you needed all of the whizzy SSD speed to achieve R&C results. As evidenced by the overblown fan boy twitterers you reference (and many media sites).
I think the problem is you are dealing in absolute conclusions where others are not. Is it valid to say this data means PS5 SSD is all fake and wonât improve? No. But it still doesnât make sense to tell people they have to wait until the end of the gen. to form an opinion. As of now it doesnât make a difference. True fact. If this changes later in the gen people can re-evaluate. I highly doubt (m)any of the posters here really believe that SSD utilization wonât improve as engines mature.
So yea if you need extra storage and are low on cash why not buy a cheap under spec SSD and then upgrade in a year or two or three when the full speeds start to get utilized and faster drives are cheaper?
Although I can see where you are coming from with the GPU performance comparison but I think itâs a bit of a false equivalence in this case. You did specifically limit your comparison to raw GPU performance but many posters here when comparing predicted deltas are also basing on the extra HW features Series X has over the PS5 chip that make a larger delta over time more of a certainty.
Iâm happy for the forum to ban discussion of marketing claims but only as long as we do the same for posts claiming that social media views/likes are an indicator of anything at all 
For one thing, using 1 single data point is never very helpful for forming conclusions from. Also, we already knew slower SSDâs could run the game fineâŚbecause Insomniac literally told us XSX could do it just fine despite having a slower SSD.
The claims you guys are reacting to in most cases didnât come from Insomniac or even Sony, but rather from Sony fanboys or ignorant ppl online. Yes, Sony talked up their SSD as they should! Just as MS talks up their various focal points.
I donât think ppl here realize just how early in the scheme of things we are still. We are still a year away from seeing even the first proper use of next gen tech in meaningful ways and years away from the machines really being tapped into. MS/Sony promoting their tech designs by hyping the potential is fair game since that is what we will see devs tapping into down the road, but lets not pretend this was promoted by Sony themselves as something it wasnât.
Big oof comment right here, lol.