interesting comments here....maybe PS5’s Max SSD speed isn’t required for non-scales down demo after all?
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
you seen this?
Yep
. Basically what a lot of people were assuming the whole time. I mean, wouldn't it have actually been pretty worrying if the demo's asset streaming was only possible on PS5? That would basically mean:
1: PS5's SSD I/O was being pushed near max by a tech demo before the gen even started (that's bad).
2: That level of asset streaming could only be done at 1440p and 30 FPS (again, that's kinda bad).
3: Vast majority of 3rd-party games wouldn't be able to do it since they'd have to be designed for platforms with slower SSDs, meaning you'd only see maybe 5% of all games ever doing what was in that demo (that's again, kinda bad).
What's even kinda funny is, you'll have some people who probably read what I just posted and say "but the engine's scalable, so it doesn't matter if other systems can run it, devs can still optimize for PS5's SSD I/O.". And you know what? That's probably actually correct, but guess what else that sounds eerily similar to? Lockhart and engine/feature scaling between it and XSX. But I'm almost willing to bet some of the same people saying the asset streaming being scalable (thus not a hindrance to optimized throughput on PS5) were some of the same ones insisting Lockhart would hold back XSX because "features don't scale well".
Welp....lol.
That demo definitely benefited from having a SSD drive and Sony's is obviously really solid stuff, but never did I think the reason Epic demoed it on PS5 was out of it being the only platform able to stream that level of asset quality at that rate. There was probably a marketing agreement between Epic and Sony for this to associate it with their brand and I say kudos, because that was a genuinely smart decision on Sony's part.
But probably what's really interesting about that post are the specs it was using on PC to run that version of the demo. Laptop 2080 is (from what I'm hearing) around a 2070 in terms of actual performance? Dunno if 2070 has a Super variant. And the 970 Evo SSD has a 3.4 GB/s sequential read speed; much lower than PS5's 5.5 GB/s, but still higher than XSX's 2.4 GB/s. That said, MS's numbers were always sustained numbers; certain operations can have sequential read speeds higher than 2.4 GB/s,
DrKeo
mentioned it in a post in the Next Gen Speculation thread a long time ago in fact.
And with that said, keep in mind PC SSD I/O has a lot of overhead currently not present with the consoles, so I doubt the demo was fully stressing the 970 Evo drive, either. So basically, there's pretty much nothing in the UE5 demo that couldn't be done on a decent PC, nor on XSX, as many were speculating. I guess it's nice to have some (lowkey) confirmation of that though, for whatever it's worth.
Ah, and they also said something about the demo on the laptop running at 40 FPS? It was uncapped IIRC; the demo on PS5 was 30 but was that capped? The resolution I know for a fact was dynamic in some areas at the very least. I don't think the laptop demo running at same resolution and higher framerate should be too indicative of any particular PS5 performance comparisons; it's an early tech demo, and I think if it were optimized further it could run 60 FPS on PS5 with no problems. But at the very least, it would suggest that:
1: Variable frequency wasn't being utilized on PS5 in the demo (it was running on a devkit and the devkits have "profiles", as Cerny said).
2: Because variable frequency may not've been used, some component of the PS5 devkit (between CPU and GPU) may've been
"lower speced" compared to the advertised numbers (3.5 GHz CPU/ 10.275 TF GPU) since hard profiles may've been used on the devkit (I would think it was the GPU that was "lower speced")
3: If the laptop 2080 is more comparable to a desktop 2070 (2070 Super?) and the 2070/2070 Super is comparable to a 5700XT, then we can probably guess that the PS5's GPU was operating
somewhere around
at least 9.2 TF, but not at its peak 10.275 TF (I'm just talking pure TF numbers here, not what was actually utilized) during the more GPU-intensive loads.
...and I know some are probably going to take that negatively, but it's actually a good sign regarding future PS5 performance. Because for starters, it means for sure the demo was not fully optimized for the hardware (as we know the retail system will not use "profiles" like the devkit systems do), both in terms of GPU and SSD I/O. It also means that, most likely, with optimizations the demo could've likely ran at 60 FPS on PS5 while still maintaining 1440p resolution and the same rate of data asset streaming from the SSD.
That also bodes well for XSX; if the demo were running on that system it wouldn't have any issues with the asset streaming displayed (and likely asset streaming beyond that level, too, if it were optimized well for XSX's specific architecture features), and probably also ran at a higher resolution and slightly better FPS. Regarding the data asset streaming stuff, it doesn't mean that things will stay relatively imperceptible between the two systems towards the end of the generation: I don't picture PS5's SSD I/O delta advantage being as big as the paper specs convey, but I do still expect it to have some kind of overall advantage in that area which later-gen 1st-party games in particular will definitely utilize.
All the same, there's a reason MS have taken a bit more of a hardware-agnostic approach to resolving a lot of SSD I/O issues currently facing PCs; they want to seamlessly bring a lot of that stuff to PCs through DirectStorage, and software features can always be iterated/improved over time at a lower cost than hardware revisions/upgrades. There's be more ways to reach intense levels of data asset streaming later on than what Sony's approach provides, but once again when it comes to XSX it'll probably mainly be 1st-party games that leverage those features at their peak.
Though there's an off-chance that 3rd-party devs will more readily adapt to optimizations for things like DirectStorage (which inherently benefit Velocity Architecture) since it will be present across PC and mobile devices utilizing it and DX12U, whereas Sony's SSD I/O hardware will only be present on PS5.
www.guru3d.com
nvmexpress.org
www.notebookcheck.net
www.techspot.com
, so I'm happy for them.
