• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

[DF] Can the Slowest PS5 SSD Upgrade Run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart?

twilo99

Member
Certainly, the power differential ceded to the Xbox is fairly insignificant in my view, so it's certainly possible that exclusive games will more than make up for it.

Do you think its more significant that the differential between a cheap 3.2gb/s drive and the internal drive of the PS5?
 

Mr Moose

Member
Do you think its more significant that the differential between a cheap 3.2gb/s drive and the internal drive of the PS5?
It's not cheap.
The 1TB SN750 SE is £140, the 1TB SN850 is £144.



(Samsung 980 Pro is £131 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08GS7748F/ ).

The 250GB one used is £56.99, 980 Pro £59.99, there is no point in buying that slower drive.
 
Last edited:

Boglin

Member
I'm going by the assumption that the PS5 engineers included such a fast SSD for tangible and practical reasons because no sane person would spend time and money developing a worthless feature. Especially if it's at the expense of something useful like more CUs and additional storage. I'm also assuming any exclusive games released up until this point started development long before the PS5 hardware was finalized so those games probably aren't designed to take advantage of any unique hardware.

With that said, it doesn't mean that the reasons for the current SSD design will actually be utilized anytime soon or be worth the costs/tradeoffs after all things are said and done. Not only must game engines be designed to take advantage of streaming, but the game designs also have to lend themselves to leverage it by having many repeating assets and/or a massive installation size to draw from.

Imo, the bean counters at Sony won't be helping the situation either because they give absolutely zero shits about taking advantage of new hardware and will gladly kneecap their developers by pushing cross generation games as long as possible. I would say development could potentially be hampered as well by keeping PC compatibility in mind, but with direct storage and RTX IO coming out, I seriously doubt that there will be any issues porting to PCs going forward.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Do we actually have any idea what his role is within the development team? Obviously its a HUGE team of engineers, its not just him.

My guess is that he is a "lead designer/boss" of some sort, and also he probably has multiple roles/positions that he fills.

Your guess is 100% spot on. He's spoken about this before. 100% not just him, but he's the lead designer of it all!

I'm going by the assumption that the PS5 engineers included such a fast SSD for tangible and practical reasons because no sane person would spend time and money developing a worthless feature. Especially if it's at the expense of something useful like more CUs and additional storage. I'm also assuming any exclusive games released up until this point started development long before the PS5 hardware was finalized so those games probably aren't designed to take advantage of any unique hardware.

With that said, it doesn't mean that the reasons for the current SSD design will actually be utilized anytime soon or be worth the costs/tradeoffs after all things are said and done. Not only must game engines be designed to take advantage of streaming, but the game designs also have to lend themselves to leverage it by having many repeating assets and/or a massive installation size to draw from.

Imo, the bean counters at Sony won't be helping the situation either because they give absolutely zero shits about taking advantage of new hardware and will gladly kneecap their developers by pushing cross generation games as long as possible. I would say development could potentially be hampered as well by keeping PC compatibility in mind, but with direct storage and RTX IO coming out, I seriously doubt that there will be any issues porting to PCs going forward.

Your post is perfect until the bolded section. It's obvious that certain teams started development of games on the PS4 and that's where the cross-gen development is coming from. And with Covid hitting the world, it pushed some games back some. Making certain games cross-gen makes sense if they ALL come out in 2020 and 2021. It's games like God of War 2 and Horizon 2 that hurt because they are both 2022 games.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Nobody told me anything because I never believed that it was going do anything more than speed up loading times. All the bullshit after the UE5 reveal was painful to wade throug as well.

That being said, it is obvious that a the gen progress's, 1st party devs will squeeze more out of it than insomniac did with R&C

Why do people NOT understand how technology works? Do you really (I MEAN HONESTLY) believe that Nvidia has spent billions on R&D of their next-gen GPUs to have direct access to SSD data for no reason? You think MS have programmed for Direct Storage, just to speed up load times?

Like.........why are yall like this? Who hurt you?
 

Boglin

Member
Why do people NOT understand how technology works? Do you really (I MEAN HONESTLY) believe that Nvidia has spent billions on R&D of their next-gen GPUs to have direct access to SSD data for no reason? You think MS have programmed for Direct Storage, just to speed up load times?

Like.........why are yall like this? Who hurt you?
This will all be obvious in hindsight and I'm sure certain naysayers will act like they knew the benefits the whole time but it didn't need to be stated.
 

Shmunter

Member
Didn’t Richard caution the slower drive may be in adequate for future software?

It’s like Pac-Man being released and people scoffing at wasted ram, cpu, GPU power…..see you didn’t need all that to run pac-man!!

A system is what it is, potential for developers. How much or how little they use is down to them. If history is anything to go by, things get pushed further and further over time.
 

John Wick

Member
Didn’t Richard caution the slower drive may be in adequate for future software?

It’s like Pac-Man being released and people scoffing at wasted ram, cpu, GPU power…..see you didn’t need all that to run pac-man!!

A system is what it is, potential for developers. How much or how little they use is down to them. If history is anything to go by, things get pushed further and further over time.
It doesn't work like that on gaf. On here they expect it to be fully maxed within the first releases otherwise how could we add more fuel to the console war? Also you have those who want to prove Cerny and Epic wrong at all costs........
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Didn’t Richard caution the slower drive may be in adequate for future software?

It’s like Pac-Man being released and people scoffing at wasted ram, cpu, GPU power…..see you didn’t need all that to run pac-man!!

A system is what it is, potential for developers. How much or how little they use is down to them. If history is anything to go by, things get pushed further and further over time.
Slap Heresy GIF by DrSquatchSoapCo
 

Hunnybun

Member
I replied because I thought your post was interesting. And I haven't seen a PS console not take full advantage on the hardware from their 1st party teams. I'm surprised there are this many people that question it. The biggest issue right now (concerning the SSD) is that there aren't any game engines that can take half or full advantage of the fast SSDs and I\O in either the PS5 or XSX. UE5 will be the first one and it's not going to be ready until the end of this year.

I agree that the likelihood is that excusive games built for the ground up for PS5 will be extremely impressive, significantly more so than Xbox exclusives. To think otherwise basically implies that Cerny et al are just *wrong* about the potential benefits of their SSD & IO system. That seems pretty unlikely to me. We're talking about technical geniuses here.

When they're actually going to arrive is a whole other issue. You'd have thought Sony would've at least wanted to avoid any cross gen period if exclusive games were necessary to sell the system. That part at least just seems weird to me.
 

3liteDragon

Member
I agree that the likelihood is that excusive games built for the ground up for PS5 will be extremely impressive, significantly more so than Xbox exclusives. To think otherwise basically implies that Cerny et al are just *wrong* about the potential benefits of their SSD & IO system. That seems pretty unlikely to me. We're talking about technical geniuses here.

When they're actually going to arrive is a whole other issue. You'd have thought Sony would've at least wanted to avoid any cross gen period if exclusive games were necessary to sell the system. That part at least just seems weird to me.
Hopefully cross-gen’s gone before 2023.
 

Shmunter

Member
I agree that the likelihood is that excusive games built for the ground up for PS5 will be extremely impressive, significantly more so than Xbox exclusives. To think otherwise basically implies that Cerny et al are just *wrong* about the potential benefits of their SSD & IO system. That seems pretty unlikely to me. We're talking about technical geniuses here.

When they're actually going to arrive is a whole other issue. You'd have thought Sony would've at least wanted to avoid any cross gen period if exclusive games were necessary to sell the system. That part at least just seems weird to me.
Needs to be pointed out that post the PS3 architectural disaster, Cerney has designed the systems with developer interests front and centre. It is documented the PS5 is a collaborative effort from engineering and game makers alike.

Sony with their in-house game maker tech prowess in pushing fidelity would have had their wish list. It is also no coincidence Epic has been swooning over the i/o with their experience in film because Now a consumer console is bridging the gap to real-time mass data.
 

Moonjt9

Member
The whole logic here hinges on the premise that Ratchet is using the ps5 I/O to it’s maximum, and thus it was all marketing.

this completely falls apart when you understand that Ratchet isn’t fully utilizing the potential speed of the system.

Console warriors, DF, and everyone pointing and laughing or saying “I told you so” is being ignorant, or even worse, intentionally disingenuous.
 

Shmunter

Member
The whole logic here hinges on the premise that Ratchet is using the ps5 I/O to it’s maximum, and thus it was all marketing.

this completely falls apart when you understand that Ratchet isn’t fully utilizing the potential speed of the system.

Console warriors, DF, and everyone pointing and laughing or saying “I told you so” is being ignorant, or even worse, intentionally disingenuous.
Has Richard verified the slower drive speed on a pc benchmark? It’s odd to not double check the benchmark results the PS5 spits out. Would be hilarious if the drive is over specced on what’s on paper. 🤪
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
The whole logic here hinges on the premise that Ratchet is using the ps5 I/O to it’s maximum, and thus it was all marketing.

this completely falls apart when you understand that Ratchet isn’t fully utilizing the potential speed of the system.

Console warriors, DF, and everyone pointing and laughing or saying “I told you so” is being ignorant, or even worse, intentionally disingenuous.
Of course it's not maxing out PS5's 5.5 gb/s rating if a PC 3.2 gb/s SSD ran the game just as well and with loading times almost the exact same (off by 0.2 seconds).

But what is known is that Sony allows 3.2 gb/s SSDs to work, and never told gamers or through firmware limitations, a 5.5 gb/s or better SSD is 100% required. It's only recommended. They never stated a minimum speed rating where anything below it doesnt work.

So it's up to sites to figure out what works and doesn't and so far the bottom threshold is 3.2 gb/s for an SSD that satisfies the other tech spec requirements.

If Sony really thinks having 5.5 gb/s or better SSDs is that important for gaming, they'd hard lock the minimum at 5.5 gb/s. They didn't.

What's even more curious is how low of a speed rating can a PC SSD go to run R&C fine. 3.2 gb/s works.
 
Last edited:

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
this completely falls apart when you understand that Ratchet isn’t fully utilizing the potential speed of the system.
Why isnt Ratchet utilizing the full potential speed of the system?

Why is a 3.2 GBps drive performing the same as a 5.5 GBps drive and a 2x faster 7 GBps drive? Surely the 2-3 second portal rifts should've been shorter on the faster SSDs, no? Isn't that why Cerny went for the overkill 5.5 GBps?

So clearly, the 5.5 GBps speeds are not the bottleneck. And they are not enhancing the experience in any meaningful way by shortening the portal load times. So where is the bottleneck? The I/O? The RAM? The question needs to be asked if the extra speeds was even necessary if the APU and all that kracken decompression isnt able to full utilize the extra 3.8 GBps of speeds.
 

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
Why isnt Ratchet utilizing the full potential speed of the system?

Why is a 3.2 GBps drive performing the same as a 5.5 GBps drive and a 2x faster 7 GBps drive? Surely the 2-3 second portal rifts should've been shorter on the faster SSDs, no? Isn't that why Cerny went for the overkill 5.5 GBps?

So clearly, the 5.5 GBps speeds are not the bottleneck. And they are not enhancing the experience in any meaningful way by shortening the portal load times. So where is the bottleneck? The I/O? The RAM? The question needs to be asked if the extra speeds was even necessary if the APU and all that kracken decompression isnt able to full utilize the extra 3.8 GBps of speeds.
Because it's not automatic.

As jstevenson said.

it'll probably be slightly faster even by the time you play it in June.


If pop-ins still occur in the final build, then that means there's still room for improvement.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I'm going by the assumption that the PS5 engineers included such a fast SSD for tangible and practical reasons because no sane person would spend time and money developing a worthless feature. Especially if it's at the expense of something useful like more CUs and additional storage. I'm also assuming any exclusive games released up until this point started development long before the PS5 hardware was finalized so those games probably aren't designed to take advantage of any unique hardware.
Well, Cerny was told by developers that they wanted an SSD. So devs wanted it. Now did they want an ultra fast SSD? Probably not. Remember, when the PS5 was first announced in the wired article in April of 2019, Gen 3 SSDs were still relatively new and topped out at 3.5 GBps. The devkits went out immediately after the article and at that time there was no 5.5 GBps ssd on the market or anywhere really. I highly doubt devs expected or wanted anything over 3.5 GBps.
With that said, it doesn't mean that the reasons for the current SSD design will actually be utilized anytime soon or be worth the costs/tradeoffs after all things are said and done. Not only must game engines be designed to take advantage of streaming, but the game designs also have to lend themselves to leverage it by having many repeating assets and/or a massive installation size to draw from.
Precisely. The only devs who have talked about using SSDs to enhance the graphics and gameplay are the Avatar devs. But they are making a third party game that needs to run on the 2.4 GBps XSX SSD. Will they make 2.4 GBps PCIE 4 or even PCIE 3 SSDs required for their big game? I highly doubt that. But in this case, 2.4 GBps is clearly enough. So why go with 5.5 GBps?

Imo, the bean counters at Sony won't be helping the situation either because they give absolutely zero shits about taking advantage of new hardware and will gladly kneecap their developers by pushing cross generation games as long as possible. I would say development could potentially be hampered as well by keeping PC compatibility in mind, but with direct storage and RTX IO coming out, I seriously doubt that there will be any issues porting to PCs going forward.

PCs were never going to be an issue. The I/O is mostly just doing what CPUs have been doing. The dedicated coprocessors are basically doing compression that used to be done on the CPU. So the PC CPUs which are much faster already hitting 5.0 Ghz without any issues should not have any issues mimicking the PS5 IO blocks capabilities. Besides, the need to compress and decompress data that fast is because the PS5 has shared RAM for both the CPU and GPU. PCs have access to slower DDR4 ram AND a dedicated VRAM. DDR4 ram can already hit 25 GBps already so you dont even need the fast I/O. Just transfer half the game to your 16 GB RAM then swap it in and out of the VRAM without even needing to decompress it.

With Sony buying Nixxes to do the porting, I think that leaves their first party studios free to explore the PS5 I/O without needing to worry about if it will run on PCs.

Now cross gen games are a whole different story, and it's disheartening to see SSM, GG, ND and PD spend the first two years making last gen games. What's even more disheartening is that neither is using the PS5 I/O or the SSD to do anything more than loading. If Horizon had faster flying speeds then we could point to that and say hey look SSD In Action! If God of War had used the PS5 SSD and I/O to stream in next gen quality assets to really fill the screen with high quality textures then we could say we got our moneys worth, but it barely looks better than the 2018 game.
 

phil_t98

#SonyToo
Billy Crystal Reaction GIF by MOODMAN


if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if.

Reality check: the PS5 already won most of the comparisons, did win the last 3 also. Might even win CoD, so maybe...just maybe another one for you with BF2042? maybe not..who knows.

You come across as a pathetic little kid who can't take his loss. Or better, who can't handle the fact that the PS5 is performing way better then what you guys had hoped for.



Without RTXI/O? i'm not so sure about the last part of the demo at this time. But for that they should release a side by side:

giphy.gif

so your doubting that a PC with a much better graphics card, better CPU , faster SSD and more memory wouldn’t run the demo better? Am I getting that right?

also don’t forget the PS5 demo was only 1440p
 
Last edited:
Insomniac themselves already claimed a ~15% increase in load times on slower SSDs. I'm not sure what the contention is because these numbers are almost completely in line with that.

It performs exactly the same as the PS5 internal SSD in ratchet and clank during gameplay scenarios. That's a pretty incredible 15% jump from 3.2GB/s all the way up to the required 5.5GB/s spec. They will become increasingly more creative with how they take advantage of the PS5 SSD, but something I've always said that I think has been largely overlooked from the very onset about these consoles and their very fast SSD powered I/O was the amount of physical RAM. Assuming the PS5 has a similar 2.5GB OS Reserve as Series X, that's 13.5GB of RAM for games. But let's assume the OS reserve is smaller at 2GB, then that's 14GB of RAM for games. Seeing what that 3.2GB/s drive achieved, the question needs to be asked : Just how much better during actual gameplay will the faster internal drive of the PS5 be able to load data into 13.5GB-14GB of RAM? Every drive was loading those ratchet saves The difference was literal tenths of a second.

Maybe if the consoles had 20-24GB+ of RAM perhaps then I could see a scenario where the faster PS5 SSD has more space in RAM for that advantage to actually show up in a more obvious fashion. As it currently stands, does anyone think Insomniac somehow did not use all the system RAM available to them in Ratchet and Clank?

You know what I like about that, it is that Velocity Architecture = SSD (and decompressors like BCPACK) + Direct Storage + SFS so when people pull out all three they are double counting by definition ;).

Not true actually, since Sampler Feedback Streaming isn't automatically in use simply because a dev uses direct storage in concert with the decompression hardware. A game has to be designed and built to use Sampler Feedback Streaming. It isn't as simple as "you're now utilizing direct storage, which means you're also using Sampler Feedback Streaming."

I should know a little something about double counting. I was the person who famously double counted the shit out of some figures in another thread on the subject. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Remember the Dirt 5 technical director said the Series X SSD and hardware can achieve 10GB in 2 seconds without even using decompression?


10GB with Sampler Feedback Streaming's 2.5x efficiency drops that memory demand down to 4GB.

4GB divided by 2.4GB/s with no compression = 1.6 seconds.

However, in the SFS demo if people remember, Microsoft confirmed that the absolute guaranteed minimum speed for the Series X SSD when maintenance related stuff is taking place is 2GB/s.

4GB / 2GB/s = exactly 2 seconds. That is an effective 10GB of on screen texture data loaded into RAM in just 2 seconds tops solely by using Sampler Feedback Streaming without ever touching compression hardware. The only thing I applied to the calculation was Sampler Feedback's reported 2.5x memory efficiency. My assumption is this is how he achieved 10GB in 2 seconds. At least it matches perfectly.

Series X would still be left with 9.5GB of RAM in this hypothetical scenario. 6GB at 560GB/s 3.5GB at 336GB/s.



Chances are the way he achieved that in his testing was by using SFS without compression. If Sampler Feedback wasn't at all in play in his tests, that's just insane. That guy, by the way, is now at Playground Games working on Fable! So excited to see what they achieve.
 
Because an equivalent PC costs about 4x as much?

Consoles are there to capture the mass market, and that's really all there is to it.

Btw, I'm not sure why you even replied to me in the first place. I'm not against the focus on the SSD: I just said that the potential flaw in the strategy is pretty obvious. But I also said that we have to wait and see whether the pay off from exclusive games is worth it, because it might well be. Certainly, the power differential ceded to the Xbox is fairly insignificant in my view, so it's certainly possible that exclusive games will more than make up for it.

Both consoles will have stunning exclusive games, but for people thinking the power differential is "insignificant" just wait till later arriving titles start digging more into the advanced feature set of the Series X, particularly SFS. It remains to be seen how viable the machine learning stuff will be, so that's more up in the air and is wait and see category. But if Microsoft can actually pull off meaningfully significant game benefitting enhancements, then Series X has been further underestimated.

Mesh Shaders is another thing that can become pretty significant, but we'll just have to wait and see how games make use of it, if at all. But to me what is the biggest ticket item that will prove the performance gap between PS5 and Series X in a more undeniable way? It's Sampler Feedback Streaming. If I'm wrong much further into the gen, like around 2024-2025 I'll gladly own it. The examples should begin showing up to prove this tech out.
 
so your doubting that a PC with a much better graphics card, better CPU , faster SSD and more memory wouldn’t run the demo better? Am I getting that right?

also don’t forget the PS5 demo was only 1440p

People are insane to ever be doubting this. The PS5 I/O is impressive, but in like a year or two PCs will dispel any doubt that the PS5 is superior in any fashion. The titles just need to take advantage of the tech that's available. They will eventually arrive.
 

Leyasu

Banned
Why do people NOT understand how technology works? Do you really (I MEAN HONESTLY) believe that Nvidia has spent billions on R&D of their next-gen GPUs to have direct access to SSD data for no reason? You think MS have programmed for Direct Storage, just to speed up load times?

Like.........why are yall like this? Who hurt you?
I dont know why you are quoting me?
 

phil_t98

#SonyToo
People are insane to ever be doubting this. The PS5 I/O is impressive, but in like a year or two PCs will dispel any doubt that the PS5 is superior in any fashion. The titles just need to take advantage of the tech that's available. They will eventually arrive.

yeah its like people are now claiming that the I/O of the PS5 can magically make slower SSD's faster. I mean the I/O is impressive don't get me wrong but it aint making slower SSD faster
 
yeah its like people are now claiming that the I/O of the PS5 can magically make slower SSD's faster. I mean the I/O is impressive don't get me wrong but it aint making slower SSD faster

It will certainly benefit the slower SSD, yes, solely due to it opening up the game to better take advantage of the natural advantages of having an SSD as opposed to not having a proper low level API to exploit the hardware of the SSD, so it will indeed help in that way. However, for anyone claiming that this is the reason it's clearly keeping up with and perfectly matching the PS5 internal SSD's performance are kidding themselves. The faster internal drive should still perform notably better.

The reason it isn't is because even the 3.2GB/s drive is clearly overkill for Ratchet and Clank's data streaming demands. I keep saying these consoles ONLY have 16GB of RAM, with at best 13.5-14GB available to games. There may not actually be nearly enough system RAM for the PS5 internal ssd to demonstrate a meaningful advantage over the slower drive. We might have a much different picture if it had north of 20GB of RAM, had 24 or even 32GB. It's almost like having Usain Bolt in his prime race against someone fast, but not as fast, but you're only giving Bolt 10-15 meters as opposed to a full 100 or 200m to demonstrate his speed. You may get an inaccurate picture of where their capabilities truly lie if there isn't more room to run.
 

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
Both consoles will have stunning exclusive games, but for people thinking the power differential is "insignificant" just wait till later arriving titles start digging more into the advanced feature set of the Series X, particularly SFS. It remains to be seen how viable the machine learning stuff will be, so that's more up in the air and is wait and see category. But if Microsoft can actually pull off meaningfully significant game benefitting enhancements, then Series X has been further underestimated.

Mesh Shaders is another thing that can become pretty significant, but we'll just have to wait and see how games make use of it, if at all. But to me what is the biggest ticket item that will prove the performance gap between PS5 and Series X in a more undeniable way? It's Sampler Feedback Streaming. If I'm wrong much further into the gen, like around 2024-2025 I'll gladly own it. The examples should begin showing up to prove this tech out.

You made a thread about this months ago with Microsoft demonstrating SFS without realizing that video game engines use similar techniques already.
 

John Wick

Member
I'm going by the assumption that the PS5 engineers included such a fast SSD for tangible and practical reasons because no sane person would spend time and money developing a worthless feature. Especially if it's at the expense of something useful like more CUs and additional storage. I'm also assuming any exclusive games released up until this point started development long before the PS5 hardware was finalized so those games probably aren't designed to take advantage of any unique hardware.

With that said, it doesn't mean that the reasons for the current SSD design will actually be utilized anytime soon or be worth the costs/tradeoffs after all things are said and done. Not only must game engines be designed to take advantage of streaming, but the game designs also have to lend themselves to leverage it by having many repeating assets and/or a massive installation size to draw from.

Imo, the bean counters at Sony won't be helping the situation either because they give absolutely zero shits about taking advantage of new hardware and will gladly kneecap their developers by pushing cross generation games as long as possible. I would say development could potentially be hampered as well by keeping PC compatibility in mind, but with direct storage and RTX IO coming out, I seriously doubt that there will be any issues porting to PCs going forward.
You hit the nail on the head. The PS5 development is very similar to PS4. That's why Sony were ahead of MS in getting games ready for the PS5. Sony will have to adapt their engines and code to take advantage of PS5 and it's features. Just like MS(wait for the tools).
 

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
Sampler Feedback Streaming - Microsoft/DirectX
  • Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS): Sampler Feedback Streaming is a brand-new innovation built on top of all the other advancements of the Xbox Velocity Architecture. Game textures are optimized at differing levels of detail and resolution, called mipmaps, and can be used during rendering based on how close or far away an object is from the player. As an object moves closer to the player, the resolution of the texture must increase to provide the crisp detail and visuals that gamers expect. However, these larger mipmaps require a significant amount of memory compared to the lower resolution mips that can be used if the object is further away in the scene. Today, developers must load an entire mip level in memory even in cases where they may only sample a very small portion of the overall texture. Through specialized hardware added to the Xbox One X, we were able to analyze texture memory usage by the GPU and we discovered that the GPU often accesses less than 1/3 of the texture data required to be loaded in memory. A single scene often includes thousands of different textures resulting in a significant loss in effective memory and I/O bandwidth utilization due to inefficient usage. With this insight, we were able to create and add new capabilities to the Xbox Series X GPU which enables it to only load the sub portions of a mip level into memory, on demand, just in time for when the GPU requires the data. This innovation results in approximately 2.5x the effective I/O throughput and memory usage above and beyond the raw hardware capabilities on average. SFS provides an effective multiplier on available system memory and I/O bandwidth, resulting in significantly more memory and I/O throughput available to make your game richer and more immersive.
Through the massive increase in I/O throughput, hardware accelerated decompression, DirectStorage, and the significant increases in efficiency provided by Sampler Feedback Streaming, the Xbox Velocity Architecture enables the Xbox Series X to deliver effective performance well beyond the raw hardware specs, providing direct, instant, low level access to more than 100GB of game data stored on the SSD just in time for when the game requires it. These innovations will unlock new gameplay experiences and a level of depth and immersion unlike anything you have previously experienced in gaming.

Streaming Virtual Texturing - Unreal Engine
Streaming Virtual Texturing (SVT) is an alternative way to stream textures in your project from disk. SVT has several advantages—along with some disadvantages—when compared to existing mip-based Texture Streaming in Unreal Engine.

Traditional mip-based texture streaming performs offline analysis of material UV usage and then at runtime decides which mip levels of a texture to load based on object visibility and distance. This process can be limiting because streaming data considered is the full texture mip levels.

When using high-resolution textures, loading a higher mip level of a texture can potentially have significant performance and memory overhead. Also, the CPU makes mip-based texture streaming decisions using CPU-based object visibility and culling.

Visibility is more conservative—meaning your system is more likely than not to load something—to avoid objects popping into view. So, if even a small part of the object is visible, the entire object is considered visible. The object loaded including any associated textures that may be required to stream in.

In contrast, the virtual texturing system only streams in parts of the textures that UE requires for it be visible. It does this by splitting all mip levels into tiles of a small, fixed size. The GPU determines which of the visible tiles are accessed by all visible pixels on the screen. This means that when UE considers an object to be visible, it's communicated to the GPU which loads the required tiles into a GPU memory cache. No matter the size of the texture, the fixed tile size of the SVTs only considers the ones that are visible. Tile GPU computes visibility using standard depth buffers causing SVT requests to only happen for visible parts that affect pixels.


Pretty much the same.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
It performs exactly the same as the PS5 internal SSD in ratchet and clank during gameplay scenarios. That's a pretty incredible 15% jump from 3.2GB/s all the way up to the required 5.5GB/s spec. They will become increasingly more creative with how they take advantage of the PS5 SSD, but something I've always said that I think has been largely overlooked from the very onset about these consoles and their very fast SSD powered I/O was the amount of physical RAM. Assuming the PS5 has a similar 2.5GB OS Reserve as Series X, that's 13.5GB of RAM for games. But let's assume the OS reserve is smaller at 2GB, then that's 14GB of RAM for games. Seeing what that 3.2GB/s drive achieved, the question needs to be asked : Just how much better during actual gameplay will the faster internal drive of the PS5 be able to load data into 13.5GB-14GB of RAM? Every drive was loading those ratchet saves The difference was literal tenths of a second.

Maybe if the consoles had 20-24GB+ of RAM perhaps then I could see a scenario where the faster PS5 SSD has more space in RAM for that advantage to actually show up in a more obvious fashion. As it currently stands, does anyone think Insomniac somehow did not use all the system RAM available to them in Ratchet and Clank?



Not true actually, since Sampler Feedback Streaming isn't automatically in use simply because a dev uses direct storage in concert with the decompression hardware. A game has to be designed and built to use Sampler Feedback Streaming. It isn't as simple as "you're now utilizing direct storage, which means you're also using Sampler Feedback Streaming."

I should know a little something about double counting. I was the person who famously double counted the shit out of some figures in another thread on the subject. :messenger_tears_of_joy:
😂, look I really was not trying to reopen that double counting of the numbers thread I was commenting on the double counting of the features (counting a feature more than once) when listing the unique things XSX has.

MS defined Velocity architecture as follows:
The Xbox Velocity Architecture comprises four major components: our custom NVME SSD, hardware accelerated decompression blocks, a brand new DirectStorage API layer and Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS).

So, if someone listed as XSX having the Velocity Architecture and SFS for example they are counting SFS twice or double counting it :).
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I'm going by the assumption that the PS5 engineers included such a fast SSD for tangible and practical reasons because no sane person would spend time and money developing a worthless feature. Especially if it's at the expense of something useful like more CUs and additional storage. I'm also assuming any exclusive games released up until this point started development long before the PS5 hardware was finalized so those games probably aren't designed to take advantage of any unique hardware.

With that said, it doesn't mean that the reasons for the current SSD design will actually be utilized anytime soon or be worth the costs/tradeoffs after all things are said and done. Not only must game engines be designed to take advantage of streaming, but the game designs also have to lend themselves to leverage it by having many repeating assets and/or a massive installation size to draw from.

Imo, the bean counters at Sony won't be helping the situation either because they give absolutely zero shits about taking advantage of new hardware and will gladly kneecap their developers by pushing cross generation games as long as possible. I would say development could potentially be hampered as well by keeping PC compatibility in mind, but with direct storage and RTX IO coming out, I seriously doubt that there will be any issues porting to PCs going forward.
IMHO, the thing that cost extra CU’s was the clockspeed strategy and most of all the large I/O complex and decision such as Tempest, but that is still not the biggest reason… they wanted a small chip and gets a lot of consoles out of the door and as steady of a supply as possible. It turned out to be a hugely important bet.
 
Sampler Feedback Streaming - Microsoft/DirectX


Streaming Virtual Texturing - Unreal Engine




Pretty much the same.
It's not exactly the same. SFS has a hardware implementation of the residency map and request map. This helps with masking any ugly transitions between mip levels. In application, this means you can be much more aggressive with the transitions without producing any drawbacks like pop-in.
 

Topher

Gold Member
so your doubting that a PC with a much better graphics card, better CPU , faster SSD and more memory wouldn’t run the demo better? Am I getting that right?

also don’t forget the PS5 demo was only 1440p

Whether a PC will run R&C better is speculative. We don't have a way of testing this. PC has known bottlenecks that limit the capability of SSD. So much so that there is little difference between SATA and NVMe in loading times. This is why DirectStorage on PC is necessary. Same for RTX IO. Without them, the SSD bottleneck could cause problems in a game designed around higher SSD speeds.

yeah its like people are now claiming that the I/O of the PS5 can magically make slower SSD's faster. I mean the I/O is impressive don't get me wrong but it aint making slower SSD faster

With the compression in the IO, it is moving data at a higher GB/s. I'm not sure how else to describe that other than "faster".
 
Last edited:

Snake29

RSI Employee of the Year
so your doubting that a PC with a much better graphics card, better CPU , faster SSD and more memory wouldn’t run the demo better? Am I getting that right?

also don’t forget the PS5 demo was only 1440p

You don't get it do you? It's not about CPU, GPU or the SSD chips. It's the I/O complex since every SSD added inside the PS5 need to use the custom controller. PC SSD are not faster without this controller since those same can be added in the PS5.

Who ensures that this is possible. Why not criticize Nvidia for developing RTXI/O if it's not necessary anyway? The custom controller eliminates the need for the CPU to perform these operations. PC SSDs do not have a custom controller with a 12 channel interface.

But continue to ignore what people already have said thousands and thousands of times by now. I have never said a "PC i mean what is a PC...you mean same specced?" can't run the demo, but i am curious if the last part can match the PS5 performance, since that was the crucial part of the demo that shows the fast SSD with custom controller.

My SN850 1TB in my PS5 will perform faster then the same drive in your pc atm all thanks to the custom controller.

Well, Cerny was told by developers that they wanted an SSD. So devs wanted it. Now did they want an ultra fast SSD? Probably not. Remember, when the PS5 was first announced in the wired article in April of 2019, Gen 3 SSDs were still relatively new and topped out at 3.5 GBps. The devkits went out immediately after the article and at that time there was no 5.5 GBps ssd on the market or anywhere really. I highly doubt devs expected or wanted anything over 3.5 GBps.

Precisely. The only devs who have talked about using SSDs to enhance the graphics and gameplay are the Avatar devs. But they are making a third party game that needs to run on the 2.4 GBps XSX SSD. Will they make 2.4 GBps PCIE 4 or even PCIE 3 SSDs required for their big game? I highly doubt that. But in this case, 2.4 GBps is clearly enough. So why go with 5.5 GBps?



PCs were never going to be an issue. The I/O is mostly just doing what CPUs have been doing. The dedicated coprocessors are basically doing compression that used to be done on the CPU. So the PC CPUs which are much faster already hitting 5.0 Ghz without any issues should not have any issues mimicking the PS5 IO blocks capabilities. Besides, the need to compress and decompress data that fast is because the PS5 has shared RAM for both the CPU and GPU. PCs have access to slower DDR4 ram AND a dedicated VRAM. DDR4 ram can already hit 25 GBps already so you dont even need the fast I/O. Just transfer half the game to your 16 GB RAM then swap it in and out of the VRAM without even needing to decompress it.

With Sony buying Nixxes to do the porting, I think that leaves their first party studios free to explore the PS5 I/O without needing to worry about if it will run on PCs.

Now cross gen games are a whole different story, and it's disheartening to see SSM, GG, ND and PD spend the first two years making last gen games. What's even more disheartening is that neither is using the PS5 I/O or the SSD to do anything more than loading. If Horizon had faster flying speeds then we could point to that and say hey look SSD In Action! If God of War had used the PS5 SSD and I/O to stream in next gen quality assets to really fill the screen with high quality textures then we could say we got our moneys worth, but it barely looks better than the 2018 game.

This is the whole freaking point. You don't want to let the CPU do all this work with all the latency on top of it. Why is Nvidia even developing a same kind of tech like what is already inside the PS5? Do you somehow believe that every pc is the same, that everyone has a 3080 or 3090 or something? You even like to believe that everyone has NVMe drives? Most still have SATA SSD's in their pc, so you never ever will can have everyone have the same performance on pc without this dedicated hardware.

You are crazy to think that everyone has a 5.0Ghz CPU lol. There is much more going on in the background on a pc then console.

yeah its like people are now claiming that the I/O of the PS5 can magically make slower SSD's faster. I mean the I/O is impressive don't get me wrong but it aint making slower SSD faster.

The I/O complex helps these drives since both internal and added SSD need to use the controller. The added SSD is not faster but it benefits from the custom controller features.
 
Last edited:

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
It's not exactly the same. SFS has a hardware implementation of the residency map and request map. This helps with masking any ugly transitions between mip levels. In application, this means you can be much more aggressive with the transitions without producing any drawbacks like pop-in.

You're assuming it will have a major impact when used through unreal..

In fact, it was used on the PS5 Unreal Engine demo.



With Nanite, we don't have to bake normal maps from a high-resolution model to a low-resolution game asset; we can import the high-resolution model directly in the engine. Unreal Engine supports Virtual Texturing, which means we can texture our models with many 8K textures without overloading the GPU." Jerome Platteaux, Epic's special projects art director, told Digital Foundry. He says that each asset has 8K texture for base colour, another 8K texture for metalness/roughness and a final 8K texture for the normal map. But this isn't a traditional normal map used to approximate higher detail, but rather a tiling texture for surface details.

"For example, the statue of the warrior that you can see in the temple is made of eight pieces (head, torso, arms, legs, etc). Each piece has a set of three textures (base colour, metalness/roughness, and normal maps for tiny scratches). So, we end up with eight sets of 8K textures, for a total of 24 8K textures for one statue alone," he adds.


Both SVT and RVT are Virtual Texturing system in Unreal Engine.
 

Boglin

Member
With the compression in the IO, it is moving data at a higher GB/s. I'm not sure how else to describe that other than "faster".
People getting hung up on semantics is one of the things that sucks about forum debates/arguments. You may not be using jargon but the intention of your phrasing is easy to infer if only a small amount of thought is expended.
 

John Wick

Member
Why isnt Ratchet utilizing the full potential speed of the system?

Why is a 3.2 GBps drive performing the same as a 5.5 GBps drive and a 2x faster 7 GBps drive? Surely the 2-3 second portal rifts should've been shorter on the faster SSDs, no? Isn't that why Cerny went for the overkill 5.5 GBps?

So clearly, the 5.5 GBps speeds are not the bottleneck. And they are not enhancing the experience in any meaningful way by shortening the portal load times. So where is the bottleneck? The I/O? The RAM? The question needs to be asked if the extra speeds was even necessary if the APU and all that kracken decompression isnt able to full utilize the extra 3.8 GBps of speeds.
Are you still going on about this? The question needs to be asked? Who here is an actual Sony, AMD and Insomniac engineer/programmer to give you that answer? Why do you expect a first year release(I'm amazed at how Insomniac were able to even get this out so polished) game to use the full potential of the PS5/SSD/IO? God of War and TLOU2 which are both benchmark games for PS4 came out 5 years after. Did the first year PS4 games max out the PS4?
Or did you expect Cerny to design the system so that it's maxed day one? Sometimes I think people leave behind common sense in game design. It's been explained multiple times that the developers need to shift to making games that take advantage of SSD as a base. Engines have to be adapted and then developers will learn new tricks etc.
 

Snake29

RSI Employee of the Year
Are you still going on about this? The question needs to be asked? Who here is an actual Sony, AMD and Insomniac engineer/programmer to give you that answer? Why do you expect a first year release(I'm amazed at how Insomniac were able to even get this out so polished) game to use the full potential of the PS5/SSD/IO? God of War and TLOU2 which are both benchmark games for PS4 came out 5 years after. Did the first year PS4 games max out the PS4?
Or did you expect Cerny to design the system so that it's maxed day one? Sometimes I think people leave behind common sense in game design. It's been explained multiple times that the developers need to shift to making games that take advantage of SSD as a base. Engines have to be adapted and then developers will learn new tricks etc.

It is indeed starting to get very tiresome by now with certain figures here in the thread. I almost get the idea that they deliberately don't want to admit it, hear it or just filter it out.

I mean how many times do people need to explain the whole crucial point around these SSD's is the custom I/O complex with 12 channel interface. The latter ensures that all of these things are possible. Why don't they ask themselves that question why Nvidia is also suddenly coming out with RTXI/O?
 
😂, look I really was not trying to reopen that double counting of the numbers thread I was commenting on the double counting of the features (counting a feature more than once) when listing the unique things XSX has.

MS defined Velocity architecture as follows:


So, if someone listed as XSX having the Velocity Architecture and SFS for example they are counting SFS twice or double counting it :).

I see what you're saying. If someone says Xbox has Xbox Velocity Architecture + SFS that would be an inaccurate statement since Velocity Architecture includes Sampler Feedback Streaming. That said, according to Microsoft's definition of what Xbox Velocity Architecture is, no current gaming is fully utilizing all of its features.


Xbox Velocity Architecture is comprised of four components:

The SSD
Hardware Accelerated Decompression (LZ Decompressor and BCPack decompressor)
DirectStorage API
Sampler Feedback Streaming

Of all 4 of these things, 3 of them are relatively easy to utilize and implement in a game without a major ground up redesign. The 4th one, however is another beast altogether. In order for SFS to be used the game's texture streaming system must be rebuilt around this feature. So as of right now there isn't yet a single title to show up on Series X that fully utilizes Velocity Architecture. Hopefully Halo Infinite is the one, but it's hard to know for sure. Yes, it would have to mean both last gen consoles and Series X have two entirely different streaming systems. We will see.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom