PS5 IO System to Be ‘Supercharged’ by Oodle Texture, Bandwidth Goes Up to 17.38GB/s

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It’s interesting tech but with both consoles, I’m still waiting to see what industry changing development processes leverage fast I/O in a way that changes the lowest common denominators from being CPU or GPU bound. I understand being able to eliminate masked loading screens but I’m talking about anything beyond that. A dev who works on graphics told me both consoles lowest common denominators for next gen innovation is still the CPU. Is there a paradigm change in the way devs approach game development due to I/O? Not saying it doesn’t exist or won’t happen. Just that more I/O without any other info seems to be past the point of diminishing returns. Would love some tech heads to explain why that’s not the case.

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It’s great to be able to bring in textures really quickly, but the biggest hurdle is the limited amount of memory.

the Xbox Velocity Architecture has DirectStorage and Sampler feedback streaming which can achieve this speed if not faster.

Man, I can’t wait to see the DF comparisons when people realize that the SSD performance is actually 99% similar.

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To be honest texture quality is the least of concerns for next gen, its already pretty good. Higher ssd + io bandwidth may allow more polygonal data, but then its limited by the CPU + GPU, we have yet to get really a firm answer on what the data + polygon limits of the CPU + GPU are! Its no good having 17gb of io bandwidth if the gpu can only render 5GB/s.

That’s a 3rd party tool that’s available on all platforms.

Good that they are improving their tools right of the bat for next gen consoles but hardly something that only ps5 benefits.

Overall I’m pretty confident in Ms solution as well. Cerny mentioned on the PS5 presentation talk that his goals of ssd was to achieve the nirvana of loading as in, to be able to load what lies behind the player in the few seconds you have until the player turns. And Ms showed exactly that working on a SS in the SS announcement video in the SFS demo.

That’s the most important, all consoles next gen are able to quickly load GBs of data right before you need it so memory constraints are not as impactful.

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As I said in a different topic, the PS5 is said to get up to 22GB/second while XSX is said to get up to 96GB/second. We’ll see how it all plays out but I wouldn’t be surprised if XSX outperforms PS5 in this aspect.

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That would be quite something because this article at the end says the exact opposite.

Just to clarify Sampler Feedback doesn’t make loading textures faster, but it loads the right parts of the texture at an appropriate level of detail. The end result can be faster. You may know this already, just explaining it for those that don’t know.

The PS5 vould load an 8K texture in its entirety 8 times faster than how fast the Series consoles would, with this licensed compression tech.

But that’s loading the entire texture into memory. Which Sampler Feedback and Direct Storage allow developers to only load parts of the texture seen, and the highest quality version of that texture if it’s closer to the camera, with lower quality loaded if it’s far (or at an angle) and the boost in quality is unnecessary.

Which ties into my earlier point about memory being an issue. MS’s solution allows for extremely effecient loading and memory usage. Using less memory is a huge advantage.

That said, part of the reason why we may be hearing some developers prefer the PS5 is because they are using traditional development methodologies. Direct Storage presents a new way of doing things. When developers see the benefit of it, this may become the new standard though. The point is that developers have to put in the work to get these efficiencies.

So comparison between both SSDs would favour the PS5 SSD in all cases except where DX12U features like SF is taken advantage of, and in that case I imagine it would look similar, if not favouring the Xbox.

Just saw a video about this by ReviewTechUSA…

It wouldn’t surprise me if this is the one and only thing PS5 will best XSX at. I have no idea by how many seconds it will beat XSX loading times but we’re surely gonna see that in videos soon after both systems have released.

It certainly isn’t a reason for me to buy a multiplatform game on PS5 over XSX though. I doubt we’re going to see shocking differences. In their own titles perhaps, but not in multiplats. A shocking difference I would consider XSX taking a minute to load a level/save and PS5 basically in one minute. Basically the difference of some games on One X now versus the same game in XSX SSD.

Sorry to bump a 2 week old thread, but I just realized something odd.

They’re pushing the idea that they can store a lot of texture data into RAM very quickly. Which is a great thing obviously. But I wondered about the timing of this and why they would make this a big deal.

I think it has a lot to do with the benefit of sampler feedback not being replicated on their console. It sounds like the benefits of sampler feedback truly allows developers to bring in a texture instantly and Sony needed a solution of their own. Their solution having the flaw of having to load the whole texture into memory, but still It allows for speed.

The reason why I say this is because there is an incredible benefit to Oodle’s compression that oddly wasn’t brought up: Game sizes.

Textures make up a good amount of your game install. Code, animation, and meshes are increasing but it’s really those 8K textures that will take a lot of storage.

So this is what I think the biggest benefit of this compression is the fact that it can drastically reduce gaming sizes. And I find it bizarre that Sony didn’t focus on that. You’re seeing a multiplier of 3 in regards to the effective bandwidth used, so perhaps it can reduce textures data by the same ratio.

For that reason I think this is potentially big news. Or maybe I’m wrong about how this works and this is why Sony and Oodle Texture didn’t focus on this.

This IO speed thing is being misrepresented, mostly by Sonys fans to try and limit the reality of lower PS5 performance. Having a faster SSD will allow you to feed the Ram quicker. Of that we know. This will absolutely represent in the PS5 having quicker boot times. However, the Ram size of approx 13.5gb will not need to be fully replaced every couple of seconds. If you are feeding 5gb of data into the Ram every second during game play, then your game is going to be terabytes in size. At no point is the Ram going to need that level of speed. Both the XSX and PS5 will be more than adequate. But, and here’s the real issue, LOD and pop in are not solely due to IO speed. LOD is still massively dependent on the GPU and the Ram bandwidth. As the XSX has faster Ram and a more powerful GPU, it may well have less pop in and LOD than PS5 games. GT7 shown running on PS5 hardware, including the PS5 SSD still demonstrated pop in. We had Sony fanboys claiming Ratchet was showing just how good the PS5 was over the XSX with its rift scene changing ability. Again, horse shit. Anyone playing Fortnite on their Xbox or PS4 Will have done the exact same rift jumping as seen on Ratchet, except using a HDD instead on an SSD.

Keep this in mind, if faster IO speed can improve graphics on screen, then MS could have upgraded the XO HDD with a 7200rpm one and closed the power gap with the PS4…

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Oodle Texture doesn’t have much to do with Sampler Feedback Streaming, it’s RAD’s answer to Microsoft’s texture compression tech called BCPack. Both of those apparently achieve similar compression ratios, but Xbox Series S|X consoles support BCPack in hardware, while PS5 obviously does not. Good news for multiplatform devs is that Oodle Texture can allegedly be used with both Sony’s and Microsoft’s hardware decompressors, with minimal overhead.

SFS then offers benefits on top of that. It doesn’t look like PS5 will have an answer to SFS, although similar functionality can theoretically be implemented in software, but it would have higher CPU (and/or GPU?) overhead, perhaps prohibitively high. Of course, PS5 has other advantages, like higher raw throughput, and hardware support for Kraken general purpose compression (so not specifically optimized for textures, like BCPack and Oodle Texture are), which is somewhat better than ZLIB used on Xbox consoles.

Overall, I think that both solutions will be trading blows when utilized to their fullest, but that remains to be seen.

(Edited for some naming errors)

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Oh yeah sorry I didn’t mean to compare the tech directly, but rather pointing to the end result of sampler feedback, as it truly is a multiplier in loading textures quickly through effeciency. Why was Sony’s messaging centered around how quickly textures would load? I personally think focusing on reduced game sizes would have made more sense.

But you’re absolutely right about BCPack being a direct comparable and Sony really needing an answer for that, with Oodle Texture being it. I don’t know how the two compare so I know what I’ll be researching this week.