Pinned by Moore's Law Is Dead
r s
I think you guys are kind of underestimating the Xbox Series X velocity architecture. If the PS5 only needs to load 1 second ahead of gameplay then the Xbox series X isn't too far behind at 2 seconds. Users won't be able to see the difference. I'm not sold on the PS5 GPU yet on the other hand. Otherwise great show as usual.
1 week ago109
Moore's Law Is Dead
They have already shown State of Decay 2 running on the XSX - it took like ~10 seconds to load, and that's slower than my PC. This isn't up for debate, it's shown:
The PS5 on the other hand can literally load all 16GB of memory in 2 seconds. So at least on paper it shouldn't even be able to take more than 2 seconds, and of course you don't actually need to fill all 16GB in order to load a game (nor will any game use all 16GB due to the OS' needs) .
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/18/21183181/sony-ps5-playstation-5-specs-details-hardware-processor-8k-ray-tracing
It's not a "slight difference" in load times. It's the difference between still having a loading screen for 10 seconds, or possibly having ZERO load screens at all. Again though, I want to see it in action before I come to any final conclusions about how this will pan out. The point is I am not "underestimating" the XBOX architecture at all. I have said good things about it, but there's nothing left to analyze - it's basically a PC, I know how it will perform (Ray Tracing is still somewhat unknown though). On the other hand the PS5 has much more potential based on what I have seen, and what people who have worked on the hardware have told me. It's still "Potential" though, and that's because Sony hasn't shown a single f***ing game yet...
6 days ago8
r s
@Moore's Law Is Dead Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant that for games developed from the ground up for the PS5 or Series X. As Cerny said and you have reiterated, the PS5 can use almost all the 16 GB of RAM to load only 1 second worth of gameplay. We should expect the Series X to do 2 seconds as it can load data into ram at half the speed. This is much better than the PS4 which needed to load at least 30 seconds of gameplay data into RAM. And we haven't even considered Sampler feedback streaming on the Series X. But really users won't be able to tell the difference between the two machines in terms of loading after the initial load screen. If the PS5 can eliminate load times, the Series X can too or may have only a second or two initially in AAA games... For the video you posted, the game wasn't fully utilizing the SSD as it wasn't using the Velocity architecture. The architecture could be an overhead causing the 8.5 second load time (Although it is still much faster than an HDD) Otherwise It will load up much faster than shown in that video, if not instant. Here is the DF video explaining
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcY4nRHapmE&t=243s .
On the other hand, it is possible that without optimization, the same game would take 4.25 seconds to load on the PS5(twice as fast yet not instant). I say this because Cerny was not clear about whether current gen games would need optimizations to get the full speed of the PS5 ssd. He says here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg&t=739s
that developers won't need to even think about whether their data is compressed. But he's not clear about current gen games also! I doubt it's the case. If it's not, then the PS5 SSD has an additional advantage of not needing optimizations on any current gen games. But optimizing current gen games to utilize the Velocity architecture should be a very simple task that even an individual on a team should be able to do.
Thank you. Btw I'm a Sony fan but I find the overall Series X system architecture more impressive. I look forward to finding out more about the PS5 though.
6 days ago2
Moore's Law Is Dead
@r s I am glad you touched on "programming" for SSD's. If you look at the Spiderman Demo Sony did a year ago, you can see the PS5 dev kit (slower than the final product) loaded Spiderman in 0.8s instead of 8s. That's a 10x speed-up in a game "not programmed for SSD's." However that SOD2 XBOX demo only went from ~50s to 10s...a 5x increase. Even with inefficient last-gen games, Sony demonstrated <1s load times a year ago on unfinished hardware. This is because Sony put extra effort into making sure the extra speed in the SSD would be more effectively utilized, and it doesn't require extra programming from developers. Of course devs can "program to the metal" if they want to put in that extra effort (and many will), but Sony wasn't naive - they knew it had to "just work" for devs to really use it.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sony-demos-playstation-5-storage-spider-man,39395.html
Yes, there is of course no doubt game engines in general have neglected to effectively utilize SSD's, and they of course WILL better utilize SSD's once they are built for the next gen consoles. However there are some rather large bottlenecks in SSD's themselves that also prevent games from scaling loading times linearly with GB/s. Sony set out to eliminate these bottlenecks from the inception of the design of the console (as I have covered on my channel from sources for over a year now), and XBOX really didn't. Even when games are built for these consoles you can still expect to see loading screens on the XBOX for 5-10 seconds, and if the PS5 can load Spiderman in 0.8s...I think it is realistic to expect modern games to literally boot entire sections of games from the OS screen in the blink of an eye (Or technically faster than you can blink lol).
Sony didn't just add a decompression block - it has a 12-channel memory controller, 2 hosts for directing data (not one), and a much more advanced tiered loading system than what is in the XBOX. I am not underestimating anything about the "velocity architecture" - I am telling you the fact that Sony put a substantial amount of R&D into how to better utilize faster storage too. Conversely, the XSX was planning on using a 1.2-1.8GB/s drive until they heard how much effort Sony was putting into their own SSD. Both consoles have decompression blocks now, but that's about all you can say.
So I must re-iterate yet again: It is a fact that the PS5's SSD and its supporting I/O controller are leagues ahead of what is in the XBOX. All we can do now is wait for results on how much better, but it isn't going to be "negligible" based on all available information. It is not remotely accurate to compare the XBOX SSD to the PS5's. XBOX is settling for a midrange current gen storage solution, and Sony decided to attempt to entirely skip a generation of storage and go "Next-Next-Gen." That's why the XBOX requires little analysis moving forward: I am confident it will perform like a 2080 Ti + 3700X gaming PC. On the other hand I see the PS5 as potentially performing like something we have never seen before. Again..."Potentially," we will see.
Have you watched Coretek's latest video? He explains more of the actual tech behind what I am talking about.
blog.us.playstation.com
