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The PlayStation 5 SSD Will Not Change Open World Games Dramatically

But don't mistake for a moment when I correct you that it's ONLY my opinion.

I hope your comment about hellblade 2 gameplay, which seemed to imply it would not live up to the trailer was just an opinion, and the gameplay does live up to the trailer.
If that statement has some truth to it, I would have been told it. I haven't. All I've heard is that the SSD is really fast and that there wasn't any current PC hardware like it - yet. I did NOT hear that it would stop releases of exclusives on the PC. I specifically asked about development on a console first and then on PC and that claim was quickly shot down with PC first then console. ALL the studios that have exclusives, not just some studios. That put a whole new light on the topic as I believed (like everyone else) that the development machines were just the devkits. I now know that's not the case and preached it over and over and over again. I got ignored and flamed for speaking such heresey.
For all we know they have a custom pcie ssd card with all the ps5 i/o logic in it. Sooner or later if they're going to take advantage of the ssd, if they want to know the real world performance, they'll need to run it on ps5 h/w or a custom pcie ssd card.

The example I gave is pretty simple 10GB for indoor assets, 10GB for outdoor assets. That can easily be loaded in the time you open a door. Otherwise you need to have 20GB in ram cached as the person can easily go from indoor to outdoor or vice versa. Yes we could have 20~minute load time with an hdd, and yes that might be 2-5 times faster with an ssd. But still that's 4~minutes load, vs instantaneous. What's more convenient for developers?

Again I don't know how much of the limitations of pc ssd loading are due to lack of optimization and how much are due to the bottlenecks Cerny mentioned. In theory they could have a 16 core ryzen with custom software use all cores for a few seconds to emulate the custom i/o. Or they could have the custom i/o in a custom pcie nvme ssd card. There are ways around it.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I trust you. I'm not going to dig into trying to calculate that, but since you seem to be a hardware enthusiast could you calculate the actual ROP. I'm curious as to if the 2080Ti (clocked nowhere near the consoles frequency) compares to the next-gen consoles with regards to clocks. I know the 2080Ti has 96 ROPS.

From the AMD white paper on RDNA1 ( https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/rdna-whitepaper.pdf ), they seem to have 4 RB’s per Shader Array and thus 16 RB‘s total. Looking at the data they provided on the RDNA1 GPU example in that white paper (the RX 5700XT) and what I could find out reading other sources, each RB is able to process up to 4 pixels/s. So you could say 16 RB’s are equivalent to 64 ROPS.

I need to read up a bit more on RDNA2 when it comes out, but I would guess the number of ROPS should still scale mainly with the number Shader Arrays (maybe they can tweak it and have more per shader arrays but still homogenously... meaning 5-6 RB’s per Shader Array).

Radeon RX 5700 XT includes four shader arrays, each one including a primitive
unit, a rasterizer, four RBs, five dual compute units, and a graphics L1 cache.
Wm1dq8Y.jpg


You could see 32 - 64 ROPS in a console... unless the number of pixels per RB or the number of RB’s per Shader array increased it would still be 64 equivalent ROPS (big Navi may scale to 128 ROPS).
PS4 Pro has more ROPS than Xbox One X for example, but it did not really flex this advantage much perhaps as bandwidth limitations kicked in before: I think Cerny mentioned how they went overboard with that as it came for free when they duplicated the equivalent shader array cluster of Polaris/pre-Vega.
 
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Three

Member
I am describing streaming. There is nothing wrong with streaming. All I'm saying is that you can buffer a lot of data into PC RAM thereby mitigating the need to have a faster I/O bandwidth.
And where would your buffering bottleneck be? What would limit how much data you can stream per second and how much would you need to store in ram to overcome a 100x difference in speed?

Answer these with some calculations and you would see.
 

Robin5102

Neo Member
I'm not downplaying the exclusives for their role is bringing value to Sony. I'm just saying that not every exclusive is a blockbuster and wouldn't make financial sense to release them all to the PC. Tell ERA I said hello and that I was right all along. :messenger_sunglasses:

Do you think all major PS5 Exclusive will come to pc ; like Spiderman , God of war , Last of us , Gost of tushima
 

Paasei

Member
We are going to get a lot of SSD memes now replacing the PS4's stability ones.... I'm sad but also ready for the new generation.
 

Ogbert

Member
The only thing that will *really* change game design is the amount of money developers are prepared to pay for coders and artists.
 
How ridiculous. I can already think of a perfect example of how having the ssd can significantly impact the game experience (PS5 or XSX) Spiderman PS4 is this example. I always felt like Spidey’s top speed felt slow. I felt when I had momentum I wanted to move faster but there was this limit that stopped us going faster.

Originally I thought it was a ‘poor player‘ block where they made it easier for crappy players who might go out of control if spiderman is moving too fast while swinging. Yet it turns out that the speed limit was artificially created by the streaming speed of the HDD. The engine is already built around streaming and I seriously wonder if the top swinging speed will increase when playing this same game on ps5. Probably not but I can already tell that having higher top speeds for characters moving through worlds can have a significant impact on player experience even with exactly the same level design.

If I can think of this off the top of my head for a thread on the internet what can the master game designers who actually know what they’re doing think of? Honestly I could think of many more examples if I really tried.

Lets give it a try huh?

Proper Avengers game where iron man can free roam a city going faster and faster and then up into the sky. Multiple options for finishing levels depending on which character you choose. Hulk can brute force his way through and smash through the environment while Iron Man flys and uses gadgets while Thor is somewhere in between.

Portal. I can already see some incredible ideas in my head using hugely open world environments and a Portal gun with multiple connections jumping from here to there to there and there in seconds doing all sorts of cool stuff across lots of different scenes very quickly. Perhaps they can use this technology for a Doctor Strange game now that’s saucy.

What about Just Cause 5 they turn it on it’s head and have Rico be abducted by aliens and have to do his mayhem thing on in space based environment moving in and out of vacuum and atmosphere all while having completely destructible environments. Wanna kill everyone? Let’s vent the habitat. Momentum moving fro structures our in zero g and then into the inside of a big habitat cylinder or whatever in a matter of moments or vica versa. This has serious potential to be a wicked idea IMO.

What about an open world game that combines ideas from gravity rush and Mario Galaxy but with larger planetoids where some serious gravity slingshotting can be done between different areas using orbits to build up more and more momentum and being able to move between environments so much faster than we’ve ever seen before.

What about grand theft auto where you can perhaps actually leave the atmosphere, perform a heist on the ISS and then free fall back to earth hit terminal velocity and then parachute to a safe landing.

These comments show a lack of imagination but maybe they’re taken out of context or something I barely looked into what was actually said.

This Gen change has me excited I really hope I don’t get disappointed.
 
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D.Final

Banned
Playstation-5-logo.jpg


The PlayStation 5 SSD is among the console's most exciting features, but it will not change open-world games dramatically, at least by itself.

In a recent post on the ResetEra forums, Digital Foundry Content Producer Alexander Battaglia commented on the console's SSD, highlighting how open-world games will not allow different looking open-world games, as the data pulled from the SSD would be static data, and open-world games increase details and variety through procedural methods.


On a related note, Alexander Battaglia also commented on the Xbox Series X GPU, highlighting how it is simply better than the PlayStation 5's.



The development will make the true difference.
The SSD is just a good upgrade for both the consoles
 

Ascend

Member
How ridiculous. I can already think of a perfect example of how having the ssd can significantly impact the game experience (PS5 or XSX) Spiderman PS4 is this example. I always felt like Spidey’s top speed felt slow. I felt when I had momentum I wanted to move faster but there was this limit that stopped us going faster.

Originally I thought it was a ‘poor player‘ block where they made it easier for crappy players who might go out of control if spiderman is moving too fast while swinging. Yet it turns out that the speed limit was artificially created by the streaming speed of the HDD. The engine is already built around streaming and I seriously wonder if the top swinging speed will increase when playing this same game on ps5. Probably not but I can already tell that having higher top speeds for characters moving through worlds can have a significant impact on player experience even with exactly the same level design.

If I can think of this off the top of my head for a thread on the internet what can the master game designers who actually know what they’re doing think of? Honestly I could think of many more examples if I really tried.

Lets give it a try huh?

Proper Avengers game where iron man can free roam a city going faster and faster and then up into the sky. Multiple options for finishing levels depending on which character you choose. Hulk can brute force his way through and smash through the environment while Iron Man flys and uses gadgets while Thor is somewhere in between.

Portal. I can already see some incredible ideas in my head using hugely open world environments and a Portal gun with multiple connections jumping from here to there to there and there in seconds doing all sorts of cool stuff across lots of different scenes very quickly. Perhaps they can use this technology for a Doctor Strange game now that’s saucy.

What about Just Cause 5 they turn it on it’s head and have Rico be abducted by aliens and have to do his mayhem thing on in space based environment moving in and out of vacuum and atmosphere all while having completely destructible environments. Wanna kill everyone? Let’s vent the habitat. Momentum moving fro structures our in zero g and then into the inside of a big habitat cylinder or whatever in a matter of moments or vica versa. This has serious potential to be a wicked idea IMO.

What about an open world game that combines ideas from gravity rush and Mario Galaxy but with larger planetoids where some serious gravity slingshotting can be done between different areas using orbits to build up more and more momentum and being able to move between environments so much faster than we’ve ever seen before.

What about grand theft auto where you can perhaps actually leave the atmosphere, perform a heist on the ISS and then free fall back to earth hit terminal velocity and then parachute to a safe landing.

These comments show a lack of imagination but maybe they’re taken out of context or something I barely looked into what was actually said.

This Gen change has me excited I really hope I don’t get disappointed.
I want Mirror's Edge to be done properly, now that the tech is fast enough for it.
 

yurinka

Member
I think the first open world games we'll see will be cross gen like AC Valhalla and the MS ones, so these games will need to be ready to run in last gen too, which means they won't be able to take advantage of the next gen horsepower and SSD streaming speed as default/minimum common denominator.

But beyond that, once they leave behind crossgen in second gen games once devs also had enough time to test final hardware, adapt their tools and engines to next gen and get experienced with next gen stuff, I think we'll notice big changes. And before that, we may get some of it in some next gen exclusive open world games we may see before. Probably 1st party Sony games (maybe Horizon 2/GoW2/Spiderman 2?), since in theory they had more time working on next gen only games knowing before anyone else how next gen stuff was going to be.

I assume that the combination of having insane horsepower and super fast loading will mean to see global illumination and super detailed 3D assets, textures and shaders in addition to save work in other areas we saw listed in the UE5 demo interviews. Which I assume it means more time spent on doing super detailed 3D assets and textures, so having more diversity of them.

Considering stuff like the insane streaming, I also think it's very likely to see them combined in a procedural way to get even more diversity. Having more RAM and CPU may also mean that they will be more dense and populated. And in addition to that, more potential for -when designers consider it makes sense-seeing more destructible environments.

Bigger speed loading stuff not only can mean more diversity of NPCs in terms of visuals, combined with extra RAM and CPU is also very likely we'll see more diversity in terms of AI/activities that they will do or systems that will affect their behaviour.

I think SSD will be a game changer, like also will be the extra CPU+GPU horsepower and extra RAM. But the leap from HDD to SSD way more than the speed difference between PS4 and Series X. That may have some impact, but will be a way smaller impact than the one seen versus the HDD (2X faster vs 100X faster).
 
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leo-j

Member
Digital foundry has been on Xbox’s u know what since the one x. They super downplayed the ps5 UE 5 demo and not once did they mention the SSD, despite Epic games saying the SSD was essential and pushing PC tech.
 

Ascend

Member
Do you wish for a second Reboot for Mirrors Edge?
Yes. But DICE needs to ditch their woke BS first. But the technology is no longer a problem to create the game to the potential it had. Hardware was simply holding it back back then.
 

Md Ray

Member
Digital foundry has been on Xbox’s u know what since the one x. They super downplayed the ps5 UE 5 demo and not once did they mention the SSD, despite Epic games saying the SSD was essential and pushing PC tech.
Downplayed the demo? How?
 
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