PS5 and Xbox Series X's effect on PC gaming

[DeagleMaster]

With both the upcoming consoles having fast NVMe storage, how will this effect PC gaming. During playstation's PS5 stream they put a lot of weight on how developers can utilize the speed of NVMe. If future games are optimized for fast storage how will this effect people still using HDD's. 

[Darkseth]

I don't think you can optimize for storage.
I mean, there is a certain amount of Data you have to "read", to load into Ram/Vram, so the CPU/GPU can work with this Data.

And the faster this is, the slower loading times are.

 

 

Easy solution: People still using HDDs can just invest into a SSD, since they have become very cheap and affordable.

<100 bucks for a 1TB SSD, or 50-60 bucks for a 500gb..
Should be plenty for a good bunch of Games. ^^

[ShredBird]

This is a good question. During the Digital Foundry deep dive on Xbox Series X they talked about using the SSD as another level of cache for the game, this enables some truly amazing things:

Consider this, in a lot of current games, when a level is loaded, as many assets as are needed are loaded into VRAM for that level. Let's say you have an 8 GB graphics card. The level assets might fill up all 8 GB of that. But when you're in a single room or portion of the level, to render what's in front of you might be using less than 20% of what's stored in memory. By having a fast SSD act as another cache, a developer could potentially use the entire 8 GB of VRAM on a single room of the level knowing they can stream in new assets fast enough to not interrupt the flow of the game.

Asset streaming is not new, in fact it was pioneered with Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation 1 to overcome the memory limitations there. Huge open world games like GTA V make major use of it, but take into account that people will be using HDDs and that speeds may be slow. Because of this assets are slowly streamed out of a major pool of assets representative of a large portion of the game.

With SSDs a full 8GB of VRAM could be swapped in and out in a matter of seconds loading new assets for the corner you just turned in the game. The amount of detail you can achieve on a per scene basis without increasing the VRAM requirement is staggering.

With the Senua's Sword trailer, Digital Foundry questioned how the game footage seemed to be rendering such high fidelity textures and models per scene. SSD caching may be what's enabling this and it may be a requirement for certain next gen experiences.
 

I think DX12 Ultimate that Microsoft announced is going to make it so that the advanced graphics features and perhaps storage features can be realized on PC. The question is how much effort will developer put in to adapt their game engines to PCs that are not on the bleeding edge.

Another thing to consider, is, given the highly backwards compatible nature of the new consoles, developers will probably still want to reach those markets too and will have to adapt their engines to run on less powerful hardware anyway.

A lot to digest, but I am excited. Usually console technology holds back what developers are willing to invest money on and this generation really stands out from the last as actually being cutting edge.

[Ertman]

If they truly want to develop for PC, And it’s hardware, I could see games being developed for streaming in game data on consoles increasing system and video memory requirements for PC.

[TheProf]

I think this would be a positive impact on PC gaming. Like ShredBird mentioned, it will allow the developers to do a lot more.