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[RaySoft]

Yup.

People keep forgetting that The Coalitions branch of Unreal Engine has influenced the main branch of Unreal Engine.
Theres no way they would do optimization work and then Epic looks at that work and just throws it away for the PS5 version.
Beyond Epic themselves TC are king tier Unreal Engine devs especially when you consider Epic trust their work enough to integrate features into the main branch.
I wonder if Netherealm have moved to Unreal Engine 5 yet...I imagine they too have some insane tools and features for the engine.

As for slowest drive that could work with this demo.
Probably anything that can maintain ~400MB/s.

PC is unlikely to get the first section but the open world and fly mode should give us a good indication of how much data the demo actually needs.

The PS5s SSD for Unreal Engine 5 is overkill.....but not every developer is going to use Unreal Engine 5 so it may still yet show off its benefits.

Why are you guys treating this as the pinnacle of acheivement for next-gen? (yeah, we still live in that world) This is just a generic game engine, covering all bases... (yes, really good one at that) What you need to think about is what would targeted code do to each hardware? (i.e 1st party)
MS is somewhat off that wagon since they are multiplat (Series' & PC), but they can still punch way above their weight, console style. If people really thinks that the SSD speed advantage of the PS5 will only result in less waiting time, they will be proven wrong...

 

[Boglin]

Why are you guys treating this as the pinnacle of acheivement for next-gen? (yeah, we still live in that world) This is just a generic game engine, covering all bases... (yes, really good one at that) What you need to think about is what would targeted code do to each hardware? (i.e 1st party)
MS is somewhat off that wagon since they are multiplat (Series' & PC), but they can still punch way above their weight, console style. If people really thinks that the SSD speed advantage of the PS5 will only result in less waiting time, they will be proven wrong...

I will be massively disappointed in Sony if their only goal with their custom silicon was to shorten loading screens.
It seems most people can see the benefits of virtualizing textures and geometry with the use of SFS and Nanite but there is some sort of mental hangup around expanding the general principle to other parts of a game engine.

Edit: I had written mesh shaders instead of Nanite.

 

[nikolino840]

Indirectly helping the enemy competition can be seen as treason.

gretathowdareyou.gif

 

[RaySoft]

I will be massively disappointed in Sony if their only goal with their custom silicon was to shorten loading screens.
It seems most people can see the benefits of virtualizing textures and geometry with the use of SFS and mesh shaders but there is some sort of mental hangup around expanding the scope to other parts of a game engine.

UE5 brings some really good tech to the table, and will spawn some amazing multiplat games, no doubt.
But both Sony and (I hope) MS have some cards up their sleeve. If the speed advantage only ends up as slightly faster loading, I'll loose my respect for all the devs. They should exploit all the strong features of the consoles, that's the whole point of having a console.

 

[Ozriel]

If it's the case you won't learn it in a DF article. But we know this is the actual opinion of real developers.

Haven't seen any real developer claim post release that the Series S is holding back next gen.

If anything, we now have confirmation from real developers and real software that the approach being used is basically going with the flagships as the primary target and then scaling down to work on the Series S. Even this Matrix demo.

 

[Kenpachii]

I will be massively disappointed in Sony if their only goal with their custom silicon was to shorten loading screens.
It seems most people can see the benefits of virtualizing textures and geometry with the use of SFS and Nanite but there is some sort of mental hangup around expanding the general principle to other parts of a game engine.

Edit: I had written mesh shaders instead of Nanite.

Sony designed the SSD for traditional game worlds.

So why fast SSD solutions? less memory needed to store huge chunks of useless data + fast loading shifts to new area's. U need fast SSD's for that.

UE5 however, u will see more like what valheim does, render the entire game in the same world and just shift u from 1 place to the other that is already rendered. Which kinda eliminates the demand for super fast SSD's all together.

However it will be interesting to see how UE5 holds up when u shift assets dramatically or teleport around to complete other enviroments with other assets. Could very well be that there is a good chunk of load time happening at that point which could favor faster SSD's.

 

[Boglin]

Sony designed the SSD for traditional game worlds.

So why fast SSD solutions? less memory needed to store huge chunks of useless data + fast loading shifts to new area's. U need fast SSD's for that.

UE5 however, u will see more like what valheim does, render the entire game in the same world and just shift u from 1 place to the other that is already rendered. Which kinda eliminates the demand for super fast SSD's all together.

I don't think I'm following you. They keep the entire game in memory at all times for valheim?

 

[ABnormal]

Keep in mind that even at 220 MBps, this is something last gen consoles with 20 MBps HDDs could not have done. Insomniac couldnt even target the 50 MBps HDDs in every PS4 console because there was a chance people could replace them with slower 20 MBps HDDs.

But yes, 5.5 GBps seems to be overkill. PS studios better use it for some insane looking games because otherwise its just a gigantic waste of hardware that couldve been used elsewhere to beef up the GPU.

Since every bit of hardware comes at a cost, the final specs are never overkill: they are simply the ones that the creators consider necessary for the game development they are aiming to (and this includes both the final game product and the development process), or the closest to that goal.
In PS5 case, the aim war made clear by Cerny in the first PS5 presentation: to have a data management that would literally be able to stream high quality assets on the fly in the moment you turn camera. That was the threshold that they decided. That doesn't mean that the games will do it continuosly (it's also impossible, unless you have games weighting terabytes of data), but it means that, whatever games structure and level of detail a developer wants to create, it can be done without constraints in vision (aside said total game weight). That's the greatest gift possible, to developers, and I'm sure that once development will totally shift to new gen, we will see gameplay flows and structures that were never possible before (after all, from ps1 to ps4, and of course including all the other consoles, the speed of data streaming from optical disks/HDDs grew more or less proportionally to consoles poligonal and rendering capabilities, while this gen, data management grew ten times more than what CPUs and GPUs grew, so it's possible to have open worlds with theoretically "unlimited" detail. At least in theory, since the total weight has to be kept under some reasonable and practical dimension - we can say that in this gen, the bottleneck, the limiting factor, is the mass storage capability).

 

[Dr Bass]

So about that UE5 demo not running on slower SSDs then....

My condolences to everyone on GAF who was swearing on their life that this was the case.

You still don't understand what they were saying about that demo if that's what you're getting out of this.

It had to do with the amount of data that was being loaded per frame at times. Insomniac talked about this with R&C as well, unloading everything behind the camera, and loading it back into memory as the player turns to look. It had nothing to do with the rendering capability or how Lumen/Nanite can perform on the consoles. It was about loading vast amounts of data needed into memory straight from the SSD.

And that still stands, and was related to how that particular demo was constructed.

Please don't try and start up warring BS with this, especially when you clearly don't even get it.

 

[Kenpachii]

I don't think I'm following you. They keep the entire game in memory at all times for valheim?

Yea the entire world at launch was loaded in, no clue if they ever changed it. I made a simple mod where the animation of teleport from walking in portals was removed and u where instantly teleported to the other side without any loading going on.

After i checked out where i landed up for dungeons i noticed with some adjustments to the game files that u was basically standing in the sky, once i clipped out of the dungeon walls i saw tons of walls around me all from other dungeons, they are like boxes next towards eachother all rendered high up in the sky above the skybox.

This is why performance was even on high end PC's bad. even a 9900k 2080ti ( top end at release of valheim ) couldnt'run the game at 1080p 60 fps stable as result.

 

[Boglin]

Yea the entire world at launch was loaded in, no clue if they ever changed it. I made a simple mod where the animation of teleport from walking in portals was removed and u where instantly teleported to the other side without any loading going on.

I agree in this case that a faster SSD doesn't really do anything outside of the initial loading time. However, this only works for games that are small enough to fit within the memory.

 

[Dust-by-Monday]

I thought it wasn’t so much about the speed, but the latency of the SSD.

 

[Boglin]

I thought it wasn’t so much about the speed, but the latency of the SSD.

It appears you're correct so far because the demos up to this point haven't needed a crazy amount of bandwidth. Low latency and seek times are absolutely crucial because they allow you to actually start grabbing the assets you need quickly. Whether you need the extra bandwidth or not would really depend on what is being streamed in.

 

[twilo99]

If it's the case you won't learn it in a DF article. But we know this is the actual opinion of real developers.

Are the coalition a fake developer?

 

[Ozriel]

You still don't understand what they were saying about that demo if that's what you're getting out of this.

It had to do with the amount of data that was being loaded per frame at times. Insomniac talked about this with R&C as well, unloading everything behind the camera, and loading it back into memory as the player turns to look. It had nothing to do with the rendering capability or how Lumen/Nanite can perform on the consoles. It was about loading vast amounts of data needed into memory straight from the SSD.

And that still stands, and was related to how that particular demo was constructed.

Please don't try and start up warring BS with this, especially when you clearly don't even get it.

I remember those arguments quite vividly, and this just seems like you moving the goalposts. They were largely centered around the claims from Epic that they’d taken advantage of the PS5 SSD, and the arguments that the flying section at the end couldn’t have been done quite as well on slower SSDs.

The demo preceded Insomniac’s R&C reveal, so you’re clearly incorrect.

That said, I don’t believe there’s any merit in dwelling on past warring arguments.

 

[Black_Stride]

Why are you guys treating this as the pinnacle of acheivement for next-gen? (yeah, we still live in that world) This is just a generic game engine, covering all bases... (yes, really good one at that) What you need to think about is what would targeted code do to each hardware? (i.e 1st party)
MS is somewhat off that wagon since they are multiplat (Series' & PC), but they can still punch way above their weight, console style. If people really thinks that the SSD speed advantage of the PS5 will only result in less waiting time, they will be proven wrong...

I agree.
In case you missed my last paragraph.
I stated for Unreal Engine that SSD speed is overkill.
The way Unreal Engine and nanite work it just doesnt need all that speed.

Other engines and technologies will show the benefits of what having an SSD of that speed will have.
Heck some developers might have their own branches of UE5 that need more I/O.

i.e The first parties will show us why the engineers went to deep on the I/O of the PS5.
They obviously consulted with their in house developers what they wanted.
Likely why the PS5 has such high clocks, and why it has such high I/O.

 

[Ozriel]

I have the total bandwidth memorized I checked for the read speed & the article threw me off. It happens

You’ve also said you assumed the 2.4GB/s speeds quoted was a combination of both the read and write speeds.

That’s….incredible logic.

Why are you adding the condition of 5.5 GB/s or 2.4 GB/s of bandwidth throughput needing to be consistent? You only need it when you need it, just like CPU and GPU power.

Lets say there's a game that allows you to summon a dragon out of thin air at the press of a button. If the game is 60fps then 5.5 GB/s of streaming throuhput allows you to load 330MBs the very next frame. That 330MB can include textures, audio, 3d meshes, animations and anything else needed for the summoned dragon.

That's 330MB that you no longer need to keep reserved in memory for those moments the dragon isn't summoned. If you only have a 1 GB/s SSD then the hypothetical dragon can only be 60MBs in size if you want it completely loaded for the next frame.

The promise of robust streaming tech is it helps you to use your memory for rendering what is actually on screen. The Xbox Series X has 9x the the Teraflops of the Xbox One and yet it only has 2x the memory. These consoles can really use any help they can get.

I believe their arguments are that loading the dragon in 1 frame or three frames is not a transformative difference. Same way a 2 second load speed is faster on paper than 4 seconds, but in real world, both are considered very fast load speeds.


It’ll be nice to see if Sony is able to demonstrate the benefits of their ultra-fast I/O in their first party games, down the line.

 

[Ozriel]

UE5 brings some really good tech to the table, and will spawn some amazing multiplat games, no doubt.
But both Sony and (I hope) MS have some cards up their sleeve. If the speed advantage only ends up as slightly faster loading, I'll loose my respect for all the devs. They should exploit all the strong features of the consoles, that's the whole point of having a console.

What you people still fail to realize is that devs are already beginning to exploit the ‘strong’ features of the consoles. The move from HDD to fast SSD is the transformative change, and that’s allowing game design elements to change. It’s an exponential shift to go from a guaranteed 50 MB/s cap to 2+GB/s.
Above that, and you’re likely not seeing anything transformative.

And it’s not just load speeds either. Fast traversal, portals etc. but all these possible on NVME SSDs

MS is somewhat off that wagon since they are multiplat (Series' & PC), but they can still punch way above their weight, console style. If people really thinks that the SSD speed advantage of the PS5 will only result in less waiting time, they will be proven wrong...

You raise a good point about MS and third party devs needing to consider the PC folks storage when making their games. I do think, though, that it’s unlikely we see AAA PS5 exclusives that don’t end up with PC ports down the line, this generation. So it’s hard to definitively say they aren’t working with similar constraints.

 

[sinnergy]

The waking up in the room part is amazing , at first I thought it was from the movie .. it’s so close .

 

[Negotiator101]

Just a bunch of folks swearing there's no way Coalition's work would in any way help the PS5 version of the demo one way or the other.

Which was a bogus claim then, and has been officially rebuked now.

Debunked.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Above that, and you’re likely not seeing anything transformative

I am not sure what is the basis for this beyond some devs not fully exploiting it (first party devs should). Depending on the data optimisation the delta can be 2-3x (Oodle Texture pre-processing).

 

[Edder1]

You still don't understand what they were saying about that demo if that's what you're getting out of this.

It had to do with the amount of data that was being loaded per frame at times. Insomniac talked about this with R&C as well, unloading everything behind the camera, and loading it back into memory as the player turns to look. It had nothing to do with the rendering capability or how Lumen/Nanite can perform on the consoles. It was about loading vast amounts of data needed into memory straight from the SSD.

And that still stands, and was related to how that particular demo was constructed.

Please don't try and start up warring BS with this, especially when you clearly don't even get it.

You mean same Ratchet that was also proven to work just fine on slower SSDs? And what part of what you're saying has anything to do with original UE5 demo and false claims that it wouldn't work on slower SSDs than the one in PS5?

 

[Shmunter]

You mean same Ratchet that was also proven to work on slower SSDs just fine?

We need Ratchet tested with the taped up ssd pronto

 

[Boglin]

I believe their arguments are that loading the dragon in 1 frame or three frames is not a transformative difference. Same way a 2 second load speed is faster on paper than 4 seconds, but in real world, both are considered very fast load speeds.


It’ll be nice to see if Sony is able to demonstrate the benefits of their ultra-fast I/O in their first party games, down the line.

I agree completely. There are diminishing returns just like everything else and moving to SSDs was THE big move.
A 500MB/s SATA SSD can do that job of the 5,500MB/s NVMe SSD and it's subjective if you think loading something in 1 frame vs 11 is a big deal or not.

However, my primary point regarding the whole dragon example was memory utilization.
*IF* a goal is to have an asset ready in a single frame at 60fps, then the 500MB/s SSD is limited to a 8MB asset unless the you keep the rest in memory at all times.
To load the 91MB dragon I mentioned earlier in a single frame, the 500MB/s SSD system would have 83MBs sitting idle in memory and stream in the remaining 8MB, whereas the 5,500MB/s SSD doesn't have to reserve anything in memory.

In other words, for the times when the dragon is not on screen, the 5,500MB/s SSD system can effectively have 83MB more ram vs the 500MB/s SSD system for that single frame.


Edit: Fixed bad math. Thanks SportsFan581

 

[DenchDeckard]

It was always weird with people thinking the 2020 UE5 demo or Rift Apart were "fully tapping" the PS5 I/O; if anything I doubt any game is currently even nearing a quarter of it or the Series' systems' SSD I/O potential.

Like, I'm having a very difficult timing picturing game design-wise what you'd need consistent 5.5 GB/s or even 2.4 GB/s of bandwidth throughput on the SSD for. Racing games? We've already had visually impressive racing games hitting fast speeds without SSDs. Sonic games? Similar case there, and they tend to have a lot of unique assets along the courses. I figure those larger bandwidths could be leveraged for higher-resolution textures but the fundamental capability itself isn't unique to SSDs of those bandwidths being a requirement for them.

I can't picture any immediate benefits to super-fast SSD I/O besides seamless loading of texture data into RAM, I do think that is one area the I/O has already been showing its benefits, and making the most of otherwise limited RAM capacities. But I do think they'll be very useful for system QoL experience.



I guess those "actual developers" must be steaming mad with the Switch and Switch OLED, then.

Exactly, game developers have had to work from the confines of 40/80 mbs read speeds for like 20 to 30 years.

It's going to take tears for them to master having 100 times that speed. We will see touches but I think it will take some time.

 

[cyberheater]

The visuals are pure bonkers. Best I've seen.

 

[adamsapple]

The visuals are pure bonkers. Best I've seen.

Imagine all the poor folk dismissing this just because "it's only 1080p".

 

[ParaSeoul]

Imagine all the poor folk dismissing this just because "it's only 1080p".

The 1080p shots actually make it look more realistic on the character models,if it were 4k you could really tell the skin isn't natural and the 4k shots they released prove that.

 

[Redneckerz]

The 1080p shots actually make it look more realistic on the character models,if it were 4k you could really tell the skin isn't natural and the 4k shots they released prove that.

Yeah the ultra high press shots look less natural because they lack Film Grain and DOF.

The ingame shot on the skin looks very real because of it (and the lower resolution) and this is ironically one of the first instance where a supposed ''press/bullshot'' actually looks worse than the actual product.

But these are new developments. If this is possible in year 1 of the current-gen consoles (Same with Ratchet & Clank) just imagine how things will look like at the end of it.

 

[hlm666]

It had to do with the amount of data that was being loaded per frame at times. Insomniac talked about this with R&C as well, unloading everything behind the camera, and loading it back into memory as the player turns to look. It had nothing to do with the rendering capability or how Lumen/Nanite can perform on the consoles. It was about loading vast amounts of data needed into memory straight from the SSD.

Is this true? do you have a link to where they talk about this? because this would fuck raytraced reflections up. What's going to be able to reflect from outside the camera if they did this?

 

[AMC124c41]

Is this true? do you have a link to where they talk about this? because this would fuck raytraced reflections up. What's going to be able to reflect from outside the camera if they did this?

This would not mess RT reflections as the ray that are traced for that use a BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) structure stored in the video RAM. DF explains this whole process in one of their videos. So, the engine can unload everything behind the camera frustum, which it does for all engines anyway, and the reflections maintain consistency.

 

[Arioco]

I'm a bit surprised that it was precisely Alex, the only one at DF who says he never EVER plays on console, who made this in depth analysis of a demo exclusive to consoles. I thought it'd be John, TBH.

Maybe because all the RT stuff going on there?

 

[Papacheeks]

Alex shooting down at least two common misconceptions in this video. Very good and informative content.

I don’t think we will ever see the ps5s IO get utilised properly this generation. Maybe in 3 to 4 years on an exclusive game but it just goes to show that these forward thinking engines will be so agile when it comes to disk streaming etc.

This is one engine that is a big part of a company portfolio? All internal in-house made engines that majority of Sony studios have all are being built/designed around said hardware config.

 

[DenchDeckard]

This is one engine that is a big part of a company portfolio? All internal in-house made engines that majority of Sony studios have all are being built/designed around said hardware config.

yeah, the internal devs will deffo see some improvements but lets not think they will magically know how to design games around so much bandwidth over night. It will take time and a lot of effort to think out of the box to what can really be achieved with these speeds of SSDs imo.

 

[Papacheeks]

yeah, the internal devs will deffo see some improvements but lets not think they will magically know how to design games around so much bandwidth over night. It will take time and a lot of effort to think out of the box to what can really be achieved with these speeds of SSDs imo.

I can tell you 100% Cory’s new game, bends new IP, LONDON STUDIO, naught dogs second project are all targeting that I/o because of how dense the assets/levels are.

Iv heard Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine are literally using higher quality rendered assets than ratchet rift apart.

 

[hlm666]

This would not mess RT reflections as the ray that are traced for that use a BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) structure stored in the video RAM. DF explains this whole process in one of their videos. So, the engine can unload everything behind the camera frustum, which it does for all engines anyway, and the reflections maintain consistency.

The BVH is a structure of boxes around real objects and sorted to increase hit detection speed, if you hit the box of an object behind the camera you would then do the intersection detection for that object. If those objects have been removed the rays have nothing to hit. If it's done the way you imply you are keeping multiple copies of objects and textures in memory so RT modes should probably be using like double the vram of none RT modes because the BVH is going to have to contain all that data.

 

[Werewolfgrandma]

Is this true? do you have a link to where they talk about this? because this would fuck raytraced reflections up. What's going to be able to reflect from outside the camera if they did this?

They go on to explain that it's loaded in sections and not literally as the camera moves. They even use the example of East bazaar and West bazaar.

 

[winjer]

Keep in mind that even at 220 MBps, this is something last gen consoles with 20 MBps HDDs could not have done. Insomniac couldnt even target the 50 MBps HDDs in every PS4 console because there was a chance people could replace them with slower 20 MBps HDDs.

But yes, 5.5 GBps seems to be overkill. PS studios better use it for some insane looking games because otherwise its just a gigantic waste of hardware that couldve been used elsewhere to beef up the GPU.

This is not correct. The read speed is not of 20MB/s. It's closer to 100MB/s.
The issue is access time. Mostly because of the read head of the HDD, which has fiscally move every time it has to read or write anything.
An engine like UE5 needs to access a lot of small chunks of data, mostly in an unpredictable way.
This means that the HDD can't access the block that contains the data in time to load.
An SSD just accesses a block of flash in an almost instantaneous way, at least when compared to an HDD.
This means an SSD can access all these tiny files in mili seconds, and load them in time.

For some reason people are focusing so much on the read speed of an SSD, without realizing that access time and IOPS are much more important.

 

[rofif]

I agree completely. There are diminishing returns just like everything else and moving to SSDs was THE big move.
A 500MB/s SATA SSD can do that job of the 5,500MB/s NVMe SSD and it's subjective if you think loading something in 1 frame vs 11 is a big deal or not.

However, my primary point regarding the whole dragon example was memory utilization.
*IF* a goal is to have an asset ready in a single frame at 60fps, then the 500MB/s SSD is limited to a 30MB asset unless the you keep the rest in memory at all times.
To load the 330MB dragon I mentioned earlier in a single frame, the 500MB/s SSD system would have 300MBs sitting idle in memory and stream in the remaining 30MB, whereas the 5,500MB/s SSD doesn't have to reserve anything in memory.

In other words, for the times when the dragon is not on screen, the 5,500MB/s SSD system can effectively have 300MB more ram vs the 500MB/s SSD system.

The fact we see 500 sss doing the same job as 7gb nvme is because there is no direct io storage on pc yet

 

[Snake29]

You mean same Ratchet that was also proven to work just fine on slower SSDs? And what part of what you're saying has anything to do with original UE5 demo and false claims that it wouldn't work on slower SSDs than the one in PS5?

So? It means the PS5 I/O and SSD has a lot of headroom for future games. Has Insomniac ever claimed it wasn’t possible on other consoles? They’ve always said that it wasn’t possible on the previous consoles.

They’ve never compared it with other next-gen systems, and never claimed Ratchet is using all the 5.5GB/s.

 

[hlm666]

They go on to explain that it's loaded in sections and not literally as the camera moves. They even use the example of East bazaar and West bazaar.

So it's basically like unreal engine loading the world in cells, it doesn't matter where your looking it's based on your position.

 

[yewles1]

So? It means the PS5 I/O and SSD has a lot of headroom for future games. Has Insomniac ever claimed it wasn’t possible on other consoles? They’ve always said that it wasn’t possible on the previous consoles.

They’ve never compared it with other next-gen systems, and never claimed Ratchet is using all the 5.5GB/s.

Didn't they say they were working with a much slower SSD in mind because they didn't realize what the the actual final speed was going to be?

 

[Honey Bunny]

Help me understand why you guys are so interested in this demo

 

[adamsapple]

Help me understand why you guys are so interested in this demo

Have you played it ? It looks .. pardon the pun .. Unreal.

Also:

 

[Jimmy_liv]

Have they used that slowed down ssd in any other ps5 games to see if it changes much?

I'd like to see how R&C would run when moving through rifts

 

[Werewolfgrandma]

So it's basically like unreal engine loading the world in cells, it doesn't matter where your looking it's based on your position.

Here are the 2 quotes from same interview same person. There is ambiguity so take it however you like

"Spider-Man is an open-world title. We built all of this tech to stream that open world as you go through it. When you’re downtown, there’s not much Midtown in memory. You can see it from a distance, but then as you go farther north, we pull in those areas. No Ratchet game has ever been constructed that way. They’ve always been: here’s a level, load the level, now you’re in that level and you play it. But by switching over the Ratchet world to use that same streaming architecture, we can pack more and more density and content and quality in every corner of a Ratchet & Clank world, because we’re happy to ditch the west side of Nefarious City when you go to the east side, and that type of thing."

"With the SSD, it’s easy to say there are no load times, and look how fast we can load this other area, but it has all sorts of knock-on effects. We don’t need to be as careful with how we package our data. All of the assets for an area don’t need to be collated on the spinning hard drive to get the right streaming speed out of it. It makes the game smaller on your hard drive; it means we can patch it more easily. That’s a nice bonus. We unload the things literally behind you from a camera perspective. If you spun the camera around, we could load them before you see that. That lets us devote all of our system memory to the stuff in front of you right now, that you need to experience in that moment."

 

[MasterCornholio]

Have you played it ? It looks .. pardon the pun .. Unreal.

Also:

Further confirmation that it was done using PS5 dev kits. I've seen speculation recently of the PS5 demo being fake but I haven't seen any proof of that.

Also it's good to hear that Sony didn't pay them for the demo.

 

[Elios83]

Three pages of bullshit console war stuff (with a demo that is the same on both, the two consoles are the same for all practical purposes even with a fully next gen engine) while there isn't even a summary of the interesting things they might have stated in the video.
The quality of these threads is always through the roof

 

[hlm666]

Here are the 2 quotes from same interview same person. There is ambiguity so take it however you like

"Spider-Man is an open-world title. We built all of this tech to stream that open world as you go through it. When you’re downtown, there’s not much Midtown in memory. You can see it from a distance, but then as you go farther north, we pull in those areas. No Ratchet game has ever been constructed that way. They’ve always been: here’s a level, load the level, now you’re in that level and you play it. But by switching over the Ratchet world to use that same streaming architecture, we can pack more and more density and content and quality in every corner of a Ratchet & Clank world, because we’re happy to ditch the west side of Nefarious City when you go to the east side, and that type of thing."

"With the SSD, it’s easy to say there are no load times, and look how fast we can load this other area, but it has all sorts of knock-on effects. We don’t need to be as careful with how we package our data. All of the assets for an area don’t need to be collated on the spinning hard drive to get the right streaming speed out of it. It makes the game smaller on your hard drive; it means we can patch it more easily. That’s a nice bonus. We unload the things literally behind you from a camera perspective. If you spun the camera around, we could load them before you see that. That lets us devote all of our system memory to the stuff in front of you right now, that you need to experience in that moment."

Thanks, it's clearly not loading data as you turn and only keeping whats in fov in memory as the post I questioned implied. The benefits they seem most happy with are actually what winjer was saying above.

 

[SportsFan581]

I agree completely. There are diminishing returns just like everything else and moving to SSDs was THE big move.
A 500MB/s SATA SSD can do that job of the 5,500MB/s NVMe SSD and it's subjective if you think loading something in 1 frame vs 11 is a big deal or not.

However, my primary point regarding the whole dragon example was memory utilization.
*IF* a goal is to have an asset ready in a single frame at 60fps, then the 500MB/s SSD is limited to a 30MB asset unless the you keep the rest in memory at all times.
To load the 330MB dragon I mentioned earlier in a single frame, the 500MB/s SSD system would have 300MBs sitting idle in memory and stream in the remaining 30MB, whereas the 5,500MB/s SSD doesn't have to reserve anything in memory.

In other words, for the times when the dragon is not on screen, the 5,500MB/s SSD system can effectively have 300MB more ram vs the 500MB/s SSD system.

How are you figuring the math here?

I get the following:

500MBps drive = 16.6MB per frame at 30fps and only 8.33MB per frame for 60fps.

5500MBps drive = 183.3MB per frame at 30fps and only 91.6MB per frame at 60fps.

I take it you are figuring in the available compression?