There is more to it than just bandwidth. Bandwidth is not speed, latency is. Bandwidth is how much data you can transfer at the same time or time period.
But if you need to stream directly into scenes, like Sony and Microsoft advertise, then latency or at least expected latency is really important. It depends on the design, but you probably need to similar to or better than the internal solution. It also needs sustained speeds without overheating/throttling.
It was why the comparison was so disingenuous on resetera. It was typical Sony fanboy speak being allowed to scream about Microsoft’s solution, only comparing bandwidth and older tech. And Sony of course keeps this info hidden and only speaks about how wide the bus is. Thus it made some people even feel that they could use any m2 pci4.0 drive.
So while Microsoft was raked over the coals for it’s naming, and even got people banned that called others out, this was allowed and actually got people to buy the wrong stuff. Even now the defense force there is defending this. It’s so transparent!
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good console, and I love Sony’s other products… like their phones. But this was really confusing and everybody with some technical background would know this. Those on other era that had the background and acted like that obtuse, are really complicit in screwing/scamming people. I guess they were afraid of a bann, with people reporting you for not liking their toy, it still shows a lack of ethics!
I agree with you that Latency is the actual bigger part why SSDs are so much better for gaming. If you read the forum you mentioned I made 3 posts with benchmarks on that very topic with stating the same in my conclusions (see “About SSDs Part 3” in one of the Next Gen threads).
In my comment you responded to I was referring on Sony’s own statements which only referenced bandwidth (GDC talk). They never gave any other reference point IIRC.
Yeah they didn’t, all the magical saint Cerny said was :“at least 7gb/s”. Which was very disingenuous, as any drive with some cache can reach that, until its overheating or gets caching issues and the speeds slums down to a crawl. (Like those cheap intel 660p drives, great for office work though. So still a good drive.). He didn’t even talk about latency, which is really important, if your going to stream directly into the scene. Otherwise you’ll get popup. It can be high, but you need to be sure you can calculate on it not going over that high latency number, so you won’t get unpredictable results. If you know it’ll stay under that high number than you can develop with that handicap in mind.
Ps: by reaching 7gb/s I mean that the drive can, not the bus. An intel 660p will not go 7gb/s as it’s controller and the bus it’s simply don’t allow for that. It is maxing out the bus though, until it runs out of cache lol or gets too hot. Please don’t buy a 660p and expect it to go that fast, it will go as fast as the speeds advertised and then mostly only in bursts.
Sony told people to wait for the list… back in March I think, and may have even warned it might not be ready for launch.
People basically played themselves. People said to be careful dropping money on a drive before Sony confirmed compatibility and got attacked by fanboys over it.
I don’t agree here, I think the approach Sony has taken here is confusing for customers, I mean what percentage of their userbase will even have watched the road to PS5 vid. or payed attention to the part where they said wait for a list. Instead they specifically highlighted the expansion bay in the tear down and as I recall there was no obvious disclaimer about no launch support there.
I find it hard to understand why they have handled storage expansion and it’s messaging in this way. When developing the machine they knew storage would be >1Tb they knew people would want to expand, why not partner with a drive maker at that point to ensure that at least one compatible drive was available at launch? And if you chose not to then be crystal clear in your marketing the time lines for support. Will the list come a month post launch, 6 months 1 year?
It’s misleading marketing to imply support is 1-1 with the series consoles at launch when it’s not. You can’t blame consumers for the confusion when it’s intentional.
Not everyone buying a PS5 has watched that video nor can remind every detail of it at the point in time the pre-order started. Sony is really doing a bad job of pro-active communication this launch. Just the same with the HDMI cable. Instead of list it in the specs or package content precisely they invite speculation and confusion on those topics. It is a mess. And I only say that from a customer perspective if I would have pre-ordered a PS5. I did not because including those reasons.
I don’t think the way Sony handled it was good… They either should have said “compatibility coming post launch” from day one or had a partner lined up so that at least one device would be certified by now.
But I do think a lot of self proclaimed experts on the internet jumped on those couple SSDs as clearly compatible (because it pushed a narrative that Sony storage solution was cheaper) and they burnt people who believed them.
So far as I’m concerned if peak read speeds were the only factor Sony wouldn’t need to certify drives. It would be pretty straight forward.
I just have a hard time being sympathetic because I took a lot of heat on Era for saying people should be careful and wait to buy drives.
It was done on purpose, and has no excuse. They knew their fanboys would run with it, same reason they are now running with “Tempest 3D!” there are literally topics on other era about that vs Dolby Atmos (One is a standard the other is sound IC they are not comparable. Now comparing it to Xbox One’s shape or whatever solution the Series X/S has is comparable). This is modus opperandi for Sony’s console devision, they always have done this. Claim somethign nebulous and watch teh fanboys run with it. “Emotion Engine!” (A R5900 MIPS chip with some extra Vector units! Raw Floating point seemed really high, until you realize: All the same size triangles without textures, lighting, etc) “Reality synthesizer!” (Basically an Nvidia Geforce 7800 if that!), the list goes on and on. Sony is king in this and their fanboys eat it up like pudding.
They don’t make bad hardware, don’t get me wrong, and Microsoft also does it (Velocity Architecture also has my alarm bells ringing, but at least they explain it a bit more). They smelled they had the “advantage in price” due to “any drive that is standard will work!” rhetoric and ran with it. Any person putting up question marks (regarding temperatures, throughput and latency being issues) was mercilessly attacked and/or banned.
It really is par the course and it needs to be called out.
This is how Sony works all the way back from their start with the PS1. I’m not trying to say “evil Sony” and try to push some narrative, a lot of companies operate this way. Sony puts out their message in a very deliberate way and lets their fanbase run with it, hyping the console with speculation. The fans know what they are doing. The cautious ones (and Sony) just keep quiet about it and let the speculation run wild. The ones running wild know things might not be as it seems but they want to push the message to sell more consoles. Nobody has any responsibility for misleading people, It’s just fans speculating right? If the message is proven false later, then everyone is all -shrug- whatever.
It’s fine, this is part of the reason I got into the Xbox. When researching the consoles I know every negative thing that could be reasonably known about the Xbox and anything positive is almost definitely true. The lopsided fanbases will definitely make sure of that. The opposite is true of the Playstation though. I can’t believe positives I am reading about and the negatives won’t ever come out until very late in the console’s life cycle if ever.
While I agree with most of it, I do not consider it fine to have people manipulated. These things should be talked about in advance, marketing words are fine, but it should be discussed what it does and how, so that proper questions can be asked. This somehow doesn’t happen with Sony, and while they do talk about it, it is usually far more hidden or even masked in a pleasant voice like with Cerny, a man that knows what he is talking about, so willfully uses small buzzwords to still stoke that base.
It is also us, that do know how to read linear algebra and technical slides, to call this out. We don’t, either we are scared of backlash or something… I don’t know.
It causes people to be fooled and spend money on things they shouldn’t, like these SSD drives, you see the same with some Apple peoducts btw. Which then causes the fooled to propagate the lie as well as nobody wants to admit they have been fooled.
It’s a marketing ploy, not just a scamming technique. It needs to be called out a lot more.
I don’t really blame Sony on this. Sony is just another corporation who is going to talk about the positives of their product and gloss over the missing features or negatives. Why would they be clear about anything if they have a fanbase willing to take the typical marketing speak and spread only the most positive interpretation of it? Sony is just running with the free deceptive marketing their fans give them.
Just to be clear, I don’t think MS would be so transparent if it wasn’t for the fact everything they say and every bit of news around the Xbox is put under a microscope and dissected for any possible negativity so it can be spread around the internet.
Everything has consequences. Sure all of the automatic media/internet positivity around Playstation helps sell consoles, but it hurts the overall product. If the fans were more critical of Sony they would be forced to acknowledge and fix some the the drawbacks to the system. In the case of Xbox all of the negativity forces MS to fix a lot of things like 1st party studios or console power, but sometimes it can lead to bad things like games getting delayed or cancelled when they might not need to.
This is why we need clarity and honesty from both sides about their own choice console and the competitor console. It keeps MS and Sony honest and it also gives them a clear message of what we want from them.
I’m a big apple fan. I’ve been using apple computers since the apple iic but I can’t stand apple fanboys that just apologies for every dumb move they make (like the butterfly keyboard). sony seems to have that type of fanatical fanbase.
Yeah, but they’ve been doing it since forever now though. My first self bought console was the Dreamcast, and even I remember store owners telling me that :“If we stock the Dreamcast, Sony will punish us and give us fewer PS 2’s to sell, sorry!”. Sony’s console marketing always was scummy at best and downright, hive mind intimidation at worst. They sometimes reached Apple fanboyish levels with this kind of stuff.
Nintendo and SEGA usually would launch with real scenario numbers, true both also sometimes were no strangers to scummy practices. But the 3 million polygons of a Dreamcast was an attainable number and some games go WAY past it. The entire system was designed like an Arcade machine with a set performance in mind, if you see how it is designed, it remarkably efficient. Everything is set up to make sure that the Main CPU is not doing the heavy lifting and taking quite a few of the tasks away from it. Rather than to get a gigantically wide Memory buss, a Dreamcast was using a deferred rendering technique that illuminated overdraw (again saving costs)… I can go on for a while with this, the PS2 is not a bad machine, but in some areas it was trailing behind the Dreamcast’s feature set… let alone the Gamecube! GOSH, how did they dare to go “yeah we can draw more polygons!” against that one! It was a blatant lie and they knew it!
And I digress, as someone who works in this field - or any engineer for that matter - I find it irresponsible to do this. It is the same scummy practices GM and FORD do with their buzzwords, practices that have killed people in these cases. And I have a bit of an allergic reaction to it. Let the product do it’s selling! If it’s good it’ll sell!
That said: I was a Microsoft hater for a long time myself, but mostly coming from an Opensource point of view. Microsoft has gotten better in that regard, so I’m not as rabid anymore :P. But there was a time were they were no better than Sony with their practices.
Sorry if I seem a bit incoherent, I’m not in the USA, so it is a bit late for me. I would love to talk more in depth about Dreamcast vs PS 2 with you :P. Just when I’m more rested :P.
Urgh, tell me about it. I love Steve Wozniak (Not Steve Jobs :(, don’t like that man one bit). But Apple fans soured the products for me. The biggest reason was: I had this small convertible from HP, I draw a lot, so it was fantastic. A small little laptop which screen I could twist around and draw on with a Wacom digitizer in it :). So what happens? I’m working at the University, some shitheads with iPads come by going :“Urgh, still a stylus! If you need to use a stylus it is bad design! and look at that thing… it has a keyboard”. No matter how many times I explained to them, that for my use case, an iPad wouldn’t do (back then at least). As I couldn’t draw on it with a pressure sensitive pen… it just kept being thrown back at me with some other Steve Jobs quote. (That and I don’t like how their system is so closed off :(, Don’t like it from Microsoft, so why would I like it from Apple?).
So sorry if I offended with my comparisons with Apple, it is no slight against you, I promise. Use what you like man. It’s more the fanatical fever some fans have, and how Apple is abusing that in the last 10 years. They went from sturdy small plastic laptops to… fashion statements that break down in half a year (Our office Macbook :(. Was used to publish apps on their store. Broke down after a few boot ups :(. Apple wanted more than the price of the machine to repair it ).
Heh, sorry… as you can see a lot of “anger”, again not aimed at you :).
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