PS5 SSD Wan Show Coverage

[3rrant]

It was pretty depressing to see all the techlinks, the talk and the wan show discussing the "PS5 SSD" without anyone at LMG actually spending the five minutes needed to watch Cerny's talk about the architecture and bashing it for being "a PCI-E ssd".

 

Going as far as citing Epic's boss Tim without even reading about the context of this whole thing is really bad journalism.

What Tim was referring to is that the SSD COMPLEX of PS5 is absolutely different than anything you can find on any PC, because it's not made up of just controller + memory + storage + pci-e link but it includes a LOT of other "custom hardware" processing units and links to other components, something that simply does not exist on PC. It does have a dedicated decompression-compression unit equivalent to several Ryzen cores (which is why Linus talk about storage being limited by CPU doesn't make any sense for the PS5 talk, only for PC) it does have direct access to system RAM and it does have direct-ish access to the GPU vram plus dedicated custom scrubbers for this job. Plus 12 channels instead of the usual 3 lanes of PCI-E ssds and 6 levels of priority for data streaming instead of 2, which makes it more similiar to a RAM-registry than a normal storage solution.

 

Probably it's just me, but watching all these videos about an argument when the presenters (that I've followed for many many years at this point, Linus in particular) did not do ANY research about except for a quick "bandwidth google search" is really hitting me. It's not good practice.

[atm0706]

I'd have to agree with you, but really, when was the last time you saw LMG really care about console stuff? 

[Senzelian]

Woudln't be the first time he didn't do any research and won't be the last time.
I wouldn't treat him differently than any other person tho. He makes just as many mistakes as anyone else and its up to each individual person to do their research. 

 

I've talked bullsh*t on this forum before and I tried to correct my mistakes, but simply didn't do that at all times.

But it's also up to each person to not just trust the bullsh*t that I talk from time to time.

 

However it is certainly a good thing that you tried to clear it up for everyone!

 

Edit:
I should also say, that the WAN show has never been a reputable source for information. At its core its a show about two people reacting to news.

[jasonj2232]

I created a LTT forum account after watching the latest WAN show just to talk about how embarrassing Linus' coverage of the PS5 SSD is and I'm not surprised to see someone else beat me to the punch.

 

I knew Linus was not taking this seriously or that he didn't watch the Cerny presentation when he said 'Console gamers welcome to 2010' (whether it was in jest or not, it was a pretty fucking stupid statement to make because you'd have to forget about the absurd pricing of SSDs then or how the tech was still in its infancy to believe in what you said) but after watching the latest WAN show it is disappointing to see Linus go full r/PCMR on this because quite frankly, that's not what I or most other people who have been watching his content for years come to his channel for. The reason I and so many others watch the channel is to get unbiased, objective reviews and information about interesting tech (which the PS5's SSD clearly is) but its clear that is all being thrown out of the window when it comes to this topic.

 

Anyways, I'm not gonna bother to go in-depth about why Linus is wrong about the SSD or why exactly the SSD is special because Linus or anyone from LTT won't even bother to watch a 10-15 minute segment of a hour long, technical and detailed presentation that would be interesting to anyone even remotely interested in consumer technology or how video games are designed and made. I will however link Tim Sweeney's tweets that give more context to his statements because apparently Luke or Linus can't even bother to take the 2 minutes it does to go to his twitter account. Here you go:

 

Explanation of why they used a console and not a PC

 

Thread that explains what exactly he meant when he said the SSD architecture is ahead of what PCs have rn

 

Thread explaining why speed on PC SSDs rn don't tell the whole story

 

For the record, no one is saying that the SSD somehow makes the PS5 better at gaming than PCs or Xbox because that would be idiotic fanboyism but PC fanboyism is exactly what Linus and co are doing when they start talking about consoles or any tech that is related to consoles. I hope someone from LTT reads this thread but I feel like even if they do they're gonna dismiss it and think they know better, even though they won't bother to do some research about what exactly they think they know better than us.

[3rrant]

26 minutes ago, atm0706 said:

I'd have to agree with you, but really, when was the last time you saw LMG really care about console stuff? 

Personally I think it's totally ok to "don't care" about something, but if you're making content on it you need to do some research. Talking without knowledge of the argument just spreads misinformation, which is a poison.

27 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

cut

I surely don't mean to bash Linus or anyone for that. I simply realized how uninformed their opinion was (Luke was the only one that seemed to care to at least dig a bit, but live on WAN show isn't really easy to do so). But also Riley did not have a clue when talking about it on techlink. If I'm listening to you to get my daily tech news dose, I need to trust the source. If the source does not dig but only read the headlines of r/pcmasterrace, what can I trust?

17 minutes ago, jasonj2232 said:

cut

Too much toned up, but that's what I meant. It doesn't take much time to search for the informations before you start talking S# about it.

[Master Disaster]

44 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

It was pretty depressing to see all the techlinks, the talk and the wan show discussing the "PS5 SSD" without anyone at LMG actually spending the five minutes needed to watch Cerny's talk about the architecture and bashing it for being "a PCI-E ssd".

 

Going as far as citing Epic's boss Tim without even reading about the context of this whole thing is really bad journalism.

What Tim was referring to is that the SSD COMPLEX of PS5 is absolutely different than anything you can find on any PC, because it's not made up of just controller + memory + storage + pci-e link but it includes a LOT of other "custom hardware" processing units and links to other components, something that simply does not exist on PC. It does have a dedicated decompression-compression unit equivalent to several Ryzen cores (which is why Linus talk about storage being limited by CPU doesn't make any sense for the PS5 talk, only for PC) it does have direct access to system RAM and it does have direct-ish access to the GPU vram plus dedicated custom scrubbers for this job. Plus 12 channels instead of the usual 3 lanes of PCI-E ssds and 6 levels of priority for data streaming instead of 2, which makes it more similiar to a RAM-registry than a normal storage solution.

 

Probably it's just me, but watching all these videos about an argument when the presenters (that I've followed for many many years at this point, Linus in particular) did not do ANY research about except for a quick "bandwidth google search" is really hitting me. It's not good practice.

What's interesting is those things are not exactly desirable unless you're in a very gated garden. Allowing the SSD direct access to memory and GPU registers actually seems like a very bad idea TBH. Its like Sony gave up some system security in the pursuit of pushing more triangles more quicker.

[Senzelian]

6 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

 

I surely don't mean to bash Linus or anyone for that. I simply realized how uninformed their opinion was (Luke was the only one that seemed to care to at least dig a bit, but live on WAN show isn't really easy to do so). But also Riley did not have a clue when talking about it on techlink. If I'm listening to you to get my daily tech news dose, I need to trust the source. If the source does not dig but only read the headlines of r/pcmasterrace, what can I trust?

The actual source, that's who you trust.

News are never the source. They just spread the word of the source, but not always accurately.

 

I like to read PCPerspective. 

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, 3rrant said:

it does have direct access to system RAM and it does have direct-ish access to the GPU vram plus dedicated custom scrubbers for this job. Plus 12 channels instead of the usual 3 lanes of PCI-E ssds and 6 levels of priority for data streaming instead of 2, which makes it more similiar to a RAM-registry than a normal storage solution.

it does have direct access to system RAM and it does have direct-ish access to the GPU vram   - all m.2 ssds do ... it's called DMA and it's a thing with PCI-E ... and was a thing since Firewire and ancient stuff. Nothing new. 

 

Direct access to gpu vram ... more like ps5 using a unified system ram + gpu vram thing so it's a side effect of this ... it's not something super special

 

12 channels and all that.. you're confusing things.  channels is different than pci-e bandwidth

SSD controllers use multiple channels .. that's how you get high read/write speeds by spreading the reads and writes across channels, like with dual channel ram, quad channel (threadripper, intel hedt etc)

 

Budget SSD controller chips usually have 4 channels, onto which you attach flash memory chips... could be one chip or more chips per channel ... nowadays there's lots of flash chips which are stacked, up to 96-128 layers of flash memory, and they're often organized in multiple channels on a single chip

 

Higher end SSD controller chips usually have 8 channels.

 

So PS5 says they have 12 channels of which only 6 are optimized for gaming, whatever that means... the capacity is 825 GB ... so most likely they're using shitty QLC flash memory instead of more expensive TLC or MLC memory ... I guess it's cheaper to pay a few million dollars on a custom ssd controller chip to samsung, and save at least a  couple of dollars per console on the flash memory, going from tlc to qlc

825 GB across 12 channels is around 68 GB per channel .. so my guess is they're using 96-128 GB chips x 12 or something like that, and they're using a bigger portion of the QLC memory in pseudo-SLC mode to cover it up, to get the fast speeds. 

Basically, like Intel uses 10-20 GB per 128 GB of QLC in SLC mode (so you have up to 80-100 GB of fast slc mode memory on a 1 TB drive), they're probably always locking 100 GB or so of memory in slc mode ...

 

They're advertising 5.5 GB/s raw ... that's what I would expect from QLC ( ~ 2 - 2.5 GB/s for a cheap 4 channel qlc drive, now scale to 12 channels and you get your 5.5 GB/s) ... the controller gets 4 pci-e 4.0 lanes, so it has up to around 8 x 970 MB/s = ~ 7.5 GB/s maximum theoretical bandwidth

 

So it's NOT a technical achievement in any way... They could have achieved this 5.5 GB/s with a regular 8 channel ssd controller and MLC/TLC flash memory. My guess is they chose to make their own custom thing for marketing, and for restricting you to their "licensed" / "certified" ps5 compatible drives, to make a few dollars from fees on those things.

 

As for the hardware compression ... it's proprietary from RAD Tools (the company that made Bink video) : http://www.radgametools.com/oodlekraken.htm

 

It's not the best compression, 7zip (lzma, lzma2) will compress better for example.. but I suppose it's an algorithm optimized for fast decompression ... and there's loads of such algorithms which are open source and available. 

 

My guess... they went with this again for the same reasons, money... making a few more money through licensing it to game companies which in turn are gonna raise the retail game prices ... they're probably gonna force companies to compress their games with kraken, or they're gonna charge a higher licensing fee if the game is released uncompressed (using more disk space on the player's ssd)

 

It sucks because it will make emulating these games harder in the future, and who knows how exploitable or how buggy this compression algorithm is... it's proprietary after all.

 

[3rrant]

6 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

What's interesting is those things are not exactly desirable unless you're in a very gated garden. Allowing the SSD direct access to memory and GPU registers actually seems like a very bad idea TBH. Its like Sony gave up some system security in the pursuit of pushing more triangles more quicker.

It's less secure if the platform is open, but since PS OS is very very proprietary it shouldn't be a problem.

Also there might also be a security chip on board which we don't know of since they did not show the actual PCB yet.

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

it does have direct access to system RAM and it does have direct-ish access to the GPU vram   - it's called DMA and it's a thing with PCI-E ... and was a thing since Firewire and ancient stuff. Nothing new. 

Direct access to gpu vram ... more like ps5 using a unified system ram + gpu vram thing so it's a side effect of this ... it's not something super special

There are no GPU scrubbers on PC. The RAM-Storage link on PC is not direct, it's CPU-based.

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

12 channels and all that.. you're confusing things.  channels is different than pci-e bandwidth

SSD controllers use multiple channels .. that's how you get high read/write speeds by spreading the reads and writes across channels, like with dual channel ram, quad channel (threadripper, intel hedt etc)

 

Budget SSD controller chips usually have 4 channels, onto which you attach flash memory chips... could be one chip or more chips per channel ... nowadays there's lots of flash chips which are stacked, up to 96-128 layers of flash memory, and they're often organized in multiple channels on a single chip

 

Higher end SSD controller chips usually have 8 channels.

 

So PS5 says they have 12 channels of which only 6 are optimized for gaming, whatever that means... the capacity is 825 GB ... so most likely they're using shitty QLC flash memory instead of more expensive TLC or MLC memory ... I guess it's cheaper to pay a few million dollars on a custom ssd controller chip to samsung, and save at least a  couple of dollars per console on the flash memory, going from tlc to qlc

825 GB across 12 channels is around 68 GB per channel .. so my guess is they're using 96-128 GB chips x 12 or something like that, and they're using a bigger portion of the QLC memory in pseudo-SLC mode to cover it up, to get the fast speeds. 

"Whatever that means" but you try to talk like you know what they are doing. That's ridicolous. What they mean is simple: if in a scene there is enough bandwitdh headroom, every asset is loaded at full quality. If there is not, the higher priority assets gets passed first at highest quality, the others get passed in order of priority in lower quality. Having 4 lanes at super high bandwidth does a good job when there is a HUGE file passing on each. If you load them up with thousands of small pieces, they get clogged up like a speedway with a few lanes. Having twelve makes this small-pieces job extremely more performant, which is why Nanite has been pushed out by Epic games for next generation and not the one before even if they specified that "this can be DOWNSCALED to higher end PCs and other platforms".

8 minutes ago, mariushm said:

They're advertising 5.5 GB/s raw ... that's what I would expect from QLC ( ~ 2.5 GB/s for a cheap 4 channel qlc drive, now scale to 12 channels and you get your 5.5 GB/s) ... the controller gets 4 pci-e 4.0 lanes, so it has up to around 8 x 970 MB/s = ~ 7.5 GB/s maximum theoretical bandwidth

 

So it's NOT a technical achievement in any way... They could have achieved this 5.5 GB/s with a regular 8 channel ssd controller and MLC/TLC flash memory. My guess is they chose to make their own custom thing for marketing, and for restricting you to their "licensed" / "certified" ps5 compatible drives, to make a few dollars from fees on those things.

This also is a classic complex calculation. Again, you are forcefully not taking notice of what ELSE is on the complex made by Sony this time.

9 minutes ago, mariushm said:

As for the hardware compression ... it's proprietary from RAD Tools (the company that made Bink video) : http://www.radgametools.com/oodlekraken.htm

 

It's not the best compression, 7zip (lzma, lzma2) will compress better for example.. but I suppose it's an algorithm optimized for fast decompression ... and there's loads of such algorithms which are open source and available. 

 

My guess... they went with this again for the same reasons, money... making a few more money through licensing it to game companies which in turn are gonna raise the retail game prices ... they're probably gonna force companies to compress their games with kraken, or they're gonna charge a higher licensing fee if the game is released uncompressed (using more disk space on the player's ssd)

 

It sucks because it will make emulating these games harder in the future, and who knows how exploitable or how buggy this compression algorithm is... it's proprietary after all.

Nonsense. Kraken compression is generally on par with other methods of compression with the difference of being MUCH more performant when it comes to decompressing small chunks in real time.

[jasonj2232]

42 minutes ago, mariushm said:

My guess is they chose to make their own custom thing for marketing, and for restricting you to their "licensed" / "certified" ps5 compatible drives, to make a few dollars from fees on those things.

What an absurd thing to say. How does it help Sony's marketing if they spend a huge amount of money doing their own custom thing? Yes, we are talking about it but we are a minority of a minority. Most people who will buy a console won't even know that it has an SSD or even know what a SSD is. At most, you're gonna see marketing that says 'now games load in an instant' but Sony isn't gonna market this thing by plastering billboards all over the world with 'Hey we made our own custom SSD, plis buy our new console'. Consoles will be marketed like they always have been, using games.

 

Oh and if they wanted to make money off of selling expandable storage they wouldn't have made it so you can stick in PCIE Gen 4.0 SSDs in it. They would've made the storage expansion proprietary.

 

42 minutes ago, mariushm said:

As for the hardware compression ... it's proprietary from RAD Tools (the company that made Bink video) : http://www.radgametools.com/oodlekraken.htm

 

It's not the best compression, 7zip (lzma, lzma2) will compress better for example.. but I suppose it's an algorithm optimized for fast decompression ... and there's loads of such algorithms which are open source and available. 

 

My guess... they went with this again for the same reasons, money... making a few more money through licensing it to game companies which in turn are gonna raise the retail game prices ... they're probably gonna force companies to compress their games with kraken, or they're gonna charge a higher licensing fee if the game is released uncompressed (using more disk space on the player's ssd)

Again, what an absolutely absurd thing to say. The reason they're using Kraken is because it is made specifically for video game development i.e RAD tools made a tool that'll work properly with other tools and software that devs use, will slot into their workflow without causing any issues and will have everything they need. Why do you think many devs still use zlib even though its decades old? It's because they already have all the tools and software they need to work with it and it integrates with their workflow.

 

Sony could've bulti their own compression software based on the open source lz4 standard (which like you said, is marginally better than Kraken and probably would've been cheaper than licensing Kraken from RAD tools) but it would've been useless because they can't just force devs to use their software. The reason they chose Kraken was because devs are already using it.

42 minutes ago, mariushm said:

My guess... they went with this again for the same reasons, money... making a few more money through licensing it to game companies which in turn are gonna raise the retail game prices ... they're probably gonna force companies to compress their games with kraken, or they're gonna charge a higher licensing fee if the game is released uncompressed (using more disk space on the player's ssd)

 

I find this section of your comment to be the most absurd, which is saying something. First off, how would Sony make money off of this when it is RAD tools that owns the license? Secondly, how can Sony force devs to use Kraken? They have a hardware decompressor for zlib as well and AFAIK Sony doesn't own the license to zlib, so if devs didn't want to use kraken they'd just use zlib. 

Edited May 16, 2020 by jasonj2232
Formatting

[Master Disaster]

26 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

"Whatever that means" but you try to talk like you know what they are doing. That's ridicolous. What they mean is simple: if in a scene there is enough bandwitdh headroom, every asset is loaded at full quality. If there is not, the higher priority assets gets passed first at highest quality, the others get passed in order of priority in lower quality. Having 4 lanes at super high bandwidth does a good job when there is a HUGE file passing on each. If you load them up with thousands of small pieces, they get clogged up like a speedway with a few lanes. Having twelve makes this small-pieces job extremely more performant, which is why Nanite has been pushed out by Epic games for next generation and not the one before even if they specified that "this can be DOWNSCALED to higher end PCs and other platforms".

Sounds a lot like LOD (Level Of Detail) to me?

[3rrant]

28 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Sounds a lot like LOD (Level Of Detail) to me?

Yes. The idea is generally the same but LODs need to be done by hand and by actually creating them using both a low and high polygon model. Also for non-important elements like backgrounds you generally don't have much time to spend on creating LODs so you only use a very low quality asset which is almost featureless and a high quality one for that job, also because in any case the system could only load one of the two. If you have six priorities, you could automatically generate 4 intermediate textures between min and max and load the best you can in any given moment automatically. 

[Theolendras]

10 hours ago, 3rrant said:

It was pretty depressing to see all the techlinks, the talk and the wan show discussing the "PS5 SSD" without anyone at LMG actually spending the five minutes needed to watch Cerny's talk about the architecture and bashing it for being "a PCI-E ssd".

 

Going as far as citing Epic's boss Tim without even reading about the context of this whole thing is really bad journalism.

What Tim was referring to is that the SSD COMPLEX of PS5 is absolutely different than anything you can find on any PC, because it's not made up of just controller + memory + storage + pci-e link but it includes a LOT of other "custom hardware" processing units and links to other components, something that simply does not exist on PC. It does have a dedicated decompression-compression unit equivalent to several Ryzen cores (which is why Linus talk about storage being limited by CPU doesn't make any sense for the PS5 talk, only for PC) it does have direct access to system RAM 

I tought about the same thing, also, Sweeney seems to imply it will be much shorter path to access the SSD than anything out there, I makes me wonder if it might be directly interfaced via Infinity Fabric or something. I'm not in any position to make claim, but if I had to speculate to something more closely integrated, it might be a memory coherency between the APU/CPU making the SSD "almost directly" acccessoble by the GPU in the memory pool without being copied over and over. That's something the PC problably won't emulate for most people before availability of CXL over PCIe 5, might be able to brute force around it since it's after all a PC, but effciency matter to me as it does to most people, to me a if it takes a 3500$+ PC to outpace a 500$ console I know which one I would choose. Eventuallly I'm looking for those feature on the PC when a few games I care about also makes use of it.

 

I'm looking forward for the SSD dedicated for the GPU or CXL compatible to be a nice point in time to upgrade if I'm anywhere close to the reality with those speculations.

 

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, Theolendras said:

That's something the PC problably won't emulate for most people before availability of CXL over PCIe 5, might be able to brute force around it since it's after all a PC, but effciency matter to me as it does to most people, to me a if it takes a 3500$+ PC to outpace a 500$ console I know which one I would choose. Eventuallly I'm looking for those feature on the PC when a few games I care about also makes use of it.

No need for 3500$, less than 1000$ is enough....

 

You can buy 128 GB of DDR4 for around 450$ ... example: G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 128GB (4 x 32GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2666 (PC4 21300) Desktop Memory Model F4-2666C18Q-128GVK - Newegg.com

DDR5 memory will be even cheaper, not to mention it will be available in odd size sticks like 24 GB or 48 GB sticks . At some point, you'll probably be able to buy 128 GB DDR5 for around 300$

 

It's enough to literally cache a whole game, whatever game you choose, completely into RAM ... that's 40-60 GB/s of read/write speeds.

I think you could live with taking 5-10 seconds to load the whole game into ram at speeds of 3-6 GB/s and then run whole game from ram, getting much better performance than consoles.

 

For example a QLC based Sabrent Rocket 2 TB is 240$ and does 3.2 GB/s reads : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0829DZH2W

HP EX950 with 3.5 GB/s read speeds is 280$ :  https://www.newegg.com/hp-ex950-2tb/p/N82E16820326181

 

Consoles have to mess around with these SSD as ram and lots of tricks because they're limited by the soldered gddr6 memory, fixed to a low amount to keep the console price down and the chip as easy to manufacture (and save on power consumption, because extra ddr controllers would add heat and power consumption).

 

[Theolendras]

47 minutes ago, mariushm said:

No need for 3500$, less than 1000$ is enough....

 

You can buy 128 GB of DDR4 for around 450$ ... example: G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 128GB (4 x 32GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2666 (PC4 21300) Desktop Memory Model F4-2666C18Q-128GVK - Newegg.com

DDR5 memory will be even cheaper, not to mention it will be available in odd size sticks like 24 GB or 48 GB sticks . At some point, you'll probably be able to buy 128 GB DDR5 for around 300$

 

It's enough to literally cache a whole game, whatever game you choose, completely into RAM ... that's 40-60 GB/s of read/write speeds.

I think you could live with taking 5-10 seconds to load the whole game into ram at speeds of 3-6 GB/s and then run whole game from ram, getting much better performance than consoles.

 

For example a QLC based Sabrent Rocket 2 TB is 240$ and does 3.2 GB/s reads : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0829DZH2W

HP EX950 with 3.5 GB/s read speeds is 280$ :  https://www.newegg.com/hp-ex950-2tb/p/N82E16820326181

 

Consoles have to mess around with these SSD as ram and lots of tricks because they're limited by the soldered gddr6 memory, fixed to a low amount to keep the console price down and the chip as easy to manufacture (and save on power consumption, because extra ddr controllers would add heat and power consumption).

 

That's pretty much the brute force approach... This might be one way forward, it's hard to see a game developper go that route yet, it would takes somes balls business wise... Having the streaming ssd tech already baked in the most popular engine on the planet might tip the scale in it's favor. Time will tell.

 

Well since i use canadian rupee the 3500 was not US dollars out of my head... Still best of luck building a 128 GB RAM balanced gaming PC for under 1000$ by the end of the year. Also to build a PS5 superior machine taking into account Tempest engine and port sluggyness you may end up needing 12 to 16 core to actually beat it on CPU intensive loads. Tough no doubt you can find a GPU that goes around it next fall !!

 

Personnaly I love interleaving my purchase, console, then PC etc... I feel like i get the best of both.

[3rrant]

8 hours ago, mariushm said:

Cut

 

This is BS. Do you even understand how ram works? You cannot cache a full game into ran it doesn't matter how much ram you have it just does not work that way wtf. 

 

You clearly have zero experience programming, your idea is just in the air: it cannot be deployed.

 

Plus, the thread was about how the whole thing was covered by LMG in their videos not how you could do something that might work as the SSD in question.

[Theolendras]

5 hours ago, 3rrant said:

This is BS. Do you even understand how ram works? You cannot cache a full game into ran it doesn't matter how much ram you have it just does not work that way wtf. 

 

You clearly have zero experience programming, your idea is just in the air: it cannot be deployed.

 

Plus, the thread was about how the whole thing was covered by LMG in their videos not how you could do something that might work as the SSD in question.

While I agree with you it's a solution seeking for problems and that it is inelegant, the fact is it could technilly work, but it would still make loading an issue loading the game first an the business entry with a game that takes that route would be a hard sell. You have 64GB/s on PCIe 4X altough most would be limited on a pratical level to around 50GB/s to transfert memory between CPU and GPU'. While doable technically I doubt developper will takes multiples code path around that issue, as either a fast SSD or loads of RAM, and fast SSD brings fast loading a every other task you do, while loads of RAM benefits just a handful of loads for consumer devices. When it comes to value, consumer are use to have to choose between a GPU and a console for around the same price, this time for many it will also be a new CPU that cost almost the price of the console and RAM that would also cost 350$+ or a 250$+ ssd for and equivalent experience... Ok die hard enthusiast might, but you don't develop a game for ten thousand people, you want to sell millions of them.

We'll get there at some point, but fanboys with multiple thousands dollars config toys just can't stand not having the best experience at all time, and well it does happen from time to time and by experience I not just talking on the technical level, but the whole experience as well, how many time have I saw a game running like pig on the PC while I have technically multiple time the power of the console it was developped on originally. There is value to me not having to bother with the settings. There are many games you fiddle with the settings first, then in another map you need to reconsider etc... or you go for a lot of buffer and have video settings that are no more a real upgrade over a console anyway... it's ok for some type of games, but others it just ruins the tempo and immersion.

[mariushm]

6 hours ago, 3rrant said:

This is BS. Do you even understand how ram works? You cannot cache a full game into ran it doesn't matter how much ram you have it just does not work that way wtf. 

 

Yeah you can.

Look into ram drives. I personally use ImDisk toolkit, and often create temporary 10-12 GB ram drives when I'm doing io intensive stuff (batch conversion of images, web crawling etc)

Also, the operating system will automatically cache stuff into unused portions of your memory ... just open task manager, then open Resource monitor and see how your ram is used at this moment. The OS is just dumber at the moment ... for example, a game like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption could have a big 20 GB file with textures which are streamed as needed (as you move on the map, game engine reads chunk of that file, decompressed, converts to the texture format card needs etc).. and the os isn't smart enough to cache the whole 20 GB file in ram, not to mention most people don't have that much installed.

 

Game developers are smart enough to detect how much ram a computer has. The game itself can easily detect  how much free ram is available and basically reserve 50-80 GB out of that 128 GB (or whatever) and copy its files to that portion of the ram right when you start the game.

Steam could also add a feature saying something like "Create a virtual hard drive / Steam folder in RAM that can use up to 75% of your total ram" and copy any game I launch into that steam folder then remove it when i quit the game"  ... from the game's point of view, it's launched from a drive, only it's 100% in ram.

 

I've programmed stuff since I was around 12-13 years old, started on 286 pcs using Turbo Pascal and Borland C, so believe me I'm familiar with lots of things.

 

It doesn't even have to take a few seconds for this "copy game to ram" feature to work.

Your pci-e 4.0 x4 M.2 connector is limited to 4 x 2 x 970 MB/s or ~ 7.5 GB/s max - a game can be made smart enough that as soon as it's launched it copies the minimum needed (let's say 1 GB) to show some logos or game menu and while those intro movies or whatever are shown on the screen (the "please don't turn off your computer while this icon is shown on screen" for example) the game can load itself to ram ... or can load 10-20 GB out of 50-80 GB .. then as you play the game can continue to read the whole folder from ssd into ram at 2-3 GB/s

 

Consoles aren't about most performance, like I said, they're about compromises ... squeeze as much performance while staying within a power budget and keeping in mind how much cheaper can the design be in the future ... use gddr6 that will continue to decrease in price, use qlc memory and custom controller that will probably be easy to adjust to support even shittier cheaper whatever's after QLC memory

 

I stand by what i said, they went with the custom controller because they wanted to save money on flash memory and to have something proprietary that would require them to "certify" drives and get some money out of that. Look at the video about ps5 storage where they say hold off on buying m.2 drives until we can tell which ones will be certified .. i guess they'll have a whitelist or something and those ps5 certified m.2 drives will be like 10-20$ more expensive. As far as I know the Xbox ones will have a custom connector, so again forcing you to buy their "certified" ssds. 

Yeah there's some fancy stuff there like the Kraken decompression in hardware, but the games could just use no compression and use more disk space (download the game compressed and decompress it in background as it downloads or whatever)

 

Quote

You have 64GB/s on PCIe 4X altough most would be limited on a pratical level to around 50GB/s to transfert memory between CPU and GPU'.

 

pci-e x16 4.0 is  16 x 2 x 970 MB/s = ~ 30 GB/s

pci-e x4 4.0  is 4 x 2 x 970 MB/s = 7.6 GB/s

 

RAM bandwidth = 2 x 64 bit x 3600 Mhz  = 128 x 3600000000 = 57,600,000,000 bytes/s = ~55 GB/s

[RejZoR]

Only reason why PS5 SSD can make a big difference is because every single PS5 console is expected to have it and game developers can specifically code the game to use it. They can use it to fetch resources on the fly and it'll work guaranteed for every single owner of PS5. On PC however, they cannot afford such approach. I remember Need for Speed 2015 having problems where people's cars were falling through the road into nothingness under the city because they were using slow HDD's and the game apparently failed to load road surface fast enough and cars just fell through because it was coded in such a way that cars physically interacted with the road. And if it didn't load fast enough they just fell through because they couldn't physically interact with the road at the right time (road loaded when car already fell through). At that time I was using HDD with SSD caching and I never experienced this problem. Neither were those who used SSD exclusively. You can partially blame EA for crappy coding without expecting people to have "too slow" storage. Devs and players will never have such issue on PS5. It'll work guaranteed on every single PS5. Expecting even 25% of PC's having those 3000€ 15GB/s SSD's even in next 5 years is almost mission impossible when even today people run HDD's only. So, yeah I kinda understand Sweeney's bragging. PS5 will have it there and it'll have it there guaranteed and devs will be able to use it from day one for everyone, not just for few rich bastards as a fancy optional setting/feature. Maybe he worded it badly but I understand his point.

[Theolendras]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Only reason why PS5 SSD can make a big difference is because every single PS5 console is expected to have it and game developers can specifically code the game to use it. They can use it to fetch resources on the fly and it'll work guaranteed for every single owner of PS5. On PC however, they cannot afford such approach. I remember Need for Speed 2015 having problems where people's cars were falling through the road into nothingness under the city because they were using slow HDD's and the game apparently failed to load road surface fast enough and cars just fell through because it was coded in such a way that cars physically interacted with the road. And if it didn't load fast enough they just fell through because they couldn't physically interact with the road at the right time (road loaded when car already fell through). At that time I was using HDD with SSD caching and I never experienced this problem. Neither were those who used SSD exclusively. You can partially blame EA for crappy coding without expecting people to have "too slow" storage. Devs and players will never have such issue on PS5. It'll work guaranteed on every single PS5. Expecting even 25% of PC's having those 3000€ 15GB/s SSD's even in next 5 years is almost mission impossible when even today people run HDD's only. So, yeah I kinda understand Sweeney's bragging. PS5 will have it there and it'll have it there guaranteed and devs will be able to use it from day one for everyone, not just for few rich bastards as a fancy optional setting/feature. Maybe he worded it badly but I understand his point.

This is sensible, but since Sweeney himself mentionned something about latency of that access, I suspect there is a bit more to it, if the SoC is memory coherent between the CPU and GPU this can make a heck of difference when the goal is to stream geometry and texture to the GPU. As said before nothing that could be addressed on the PC, but too many people think because it's possible PC to be done on PC, it will be (in a timely fashion)... Sadly to many people how many bad port do we need to see just beyond specs software developpement and optimisation is just as important I don't care how much better a hardware is if the software can't take advantage of it and most people bottom line will decide at which price it makes sense.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, Theolendras said:

This is sensible, but since Sweeney himself mentionned something about latency of that access, I suspect there is a bit more to it, if the SoC is memory coherent between the CPU and GPU this can make a heck of difference when the goal is to stream geometry and texture to the GPU. As said before nothing that could be addressed on the PC, but too many people think because it's possible PC to be done on PC, it will be (in a timely fashion)... Sadly to many people how many bad port do we need to see just beyond specs software developpement and optimisation is just as important I don't care how much better a hardware is if the software can't take advantage of it and most people bottom line will decide at which price it makes sense.

Well, during PS5 tech presentation they mentioned field of view based assets streaming so that's where permanent storage behaving closer to RAM comes into play. If your SSD behaves almost like RAM, you can use it to fetch things on the fly at such speed that you won't have any stuttering or otherwise latency related issues while streaming assets. And knowing the exact same configuration will be in every single PS5.

[3rrant]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Only reason why PS5 SSD can make a big difference is because every single PS5 console is expected to have it and game developers can specifically code the game to use it. They can use it to fetch resources on the fly and it'll work guaranteed for every single owner of PS5. On PC however, they cannot afford such approach. I remember Need for Speed 2015 having problems where people's cars were falling through the road into nothingness under the city because they were using slow HDD's and the game apparently failed to load road surface fast enough and cars just fell through because it was coded in such a way that cars physically interacted with the road. And if it didn't load fast enough they just fell through because they couldn't physically interact with the road at the right time (road loaded when car already fell through). At that time I was using HDD with SSD caching and I never experienced this problem. Neither were those who used SSD exclusively. You can partially blame EA for crappy coding without expecting people to have "too slow" storage. Devs and players will never have such issue on PS5. It'll work guaranteed on every single PS5. Expecting even 25% of PC's having those 3000€ 15GB/s SSD's even in next 5 years is almost mission impossible when even today people run HDD's only. So, yeah I kinda understand Sweeney's bragging. PS5 will have it there and it'll have it there guaranteed and devs will be able to use it from day one for everyone, not just for few rich bastards as a fancy optional setting/feature. Maybe he worded it badly but I understand his point.

He was very clear with his point and also re-iterated on it multiple times: the PS5 SSD architecture is like nothing else on the market for any price. He's not talking about raw speed, but actual real usable performance.

 

Even Tech Jesus quoting Tim has been VERY CLEAR that people should wait and listen to him, he's not a random billionaire talking.

 

If you want to go theoretical, the PS5 SSD has a over 22.5gb/s theorical speed for "very well compressed data", again this was said by Cerny in his talk (which is almost like RAM speed we had with PS3).