Linus finally seems to be taking the PS5's SSD (and SSDs on next -gen consoles) seriously

[jasonj2232]

 Something that has been annoying me, and other viewers as of late, was how non-chalantly Linus dismissed the SSDs in the next-gen consoles without, and this is the part that has been bugging me the most, actually watching the Cerny presentation or reading in detail about the SSD tech. Like someone else in the forum said, it doesn't matter if Linus doesn't care about consoles but then he shouldn't be dismissing them or saying anything really without reading about them.

 

Linus seems to have heard the 10s of voices that spoke up because today he tweeted this at Tim Sweeney. So he's either making a video about it or at the very least just reading up on it, and that is great to see. Thanks Linus!

 

I don't expect him to get anything out of Sony or Epic or Tim Sweeney because of how tight-lipped these companies are about everything and that is a shame because I really wanted to know everything about this but the Cerny presentation and tweets by Tim and other game developers  (1, 2, 3, 4) made most things clear. If anyone from LTT Team is reading this post or if Linus is reading this post and you're actually making a video about this, one thing I would love to know about is how Windows handles storage and how storage drives in a PC interact with System and video ram and what exactly are the various bottlenecks, overhead and disadvantages that Tim keeps talking about are (and also, if time permits, how the new DirectStorage API can change things for PCs).  

 

To be clear, this was never about 'Canadian man bad cause he no talk about my fav brand of black box' or 'PCs suck consoles rule' BS. It was always about how there is an interesting piece of tech in a major, mass market consumer product and Linus didn't even care to read about it before dismissing it as 'nothing new, PCs have had SSDs for 10 years now so it doesn't matter'.

[SansVarnic]

Here this may help you catch Linus' eye.

@LinusTech

[iBabySlapper]

Honestly, I don't blame Linus. When I heard the PS5 had an SSD, I didn't really care either, it sounded like a gimmick (esp. with how much it was hyped). The only opinion I had was Shit, the price of NAND might rise again, oh great.

[jasonj2232]

6 minutes ago, Not Wills said:

too long sort have read. A ssd is a ssd when it comes to games, its faster to a harddrive in a nutshell, I have been installing ssds in all my consoles until i built my first computer. The fastest ssd you can get will save max 30 secs over a sata ssd. A hardrive will be much much slower by up to even 20 mins. I have seen fast m.2 sdds load big games in about 1min 15 sec and a sata ssd in about 1min 30sec but a hardrives have taken about 6-18min to load similar games so do you see my point. 

Loading times are the most obvious advantage, sure, but that faster loading time and low latency has big implications for game and level design. I can't really explain it better than Cerny did during his presentation so I'd suggest watching it, just for the part about the SSD. 

 

It's kinda tough to guage the changes a SSD will bring because so far no game I know of, apart from Star Citizen, is actually designed around a SSD. Games set consoles as a baseline and the base PS4 has a 5400 RPM drive. Once we start seeing true next gen games though, especially exclusives, I think the benefits a SSD will bring will become more obvious. 

 

I will concur though that unless we see games that can't be possible on a HDD, this is sort of just speculation (sort of because you have game devs and platform holder saying that it'll make a difference), so I suppose we'll have to wait and see. 

[iBabySlapper]

7 minutes ago, Not Wills said:

a ssd for games is a ssd for games no matter how fast it is, itll shave minutes off a hardrive. but only a few sec from a fast ssd to a normal sata ssd (not counting d-ramless ones) so i doubt to many people will care about the ps5 ssd in the pc community.

It depends on game really, I have multiple SSDs in my system, and one of them is for games. Some games halve their load times, others are around 15x faster to load in (Post Scriptum probably shows the biggest difference in my library). In some rare cases games even get performance boosts from being on a NVME SSD, like in Insurgency:Sandstorm if you didn't put the game on a NVME SSD (when the game was early access) you'd get a big performance penalty.

[jasonj2232]

1 minute ago, Not Wills said:

if you put it head to head with your regular sata ssd its be maximum 30 sec. A 5400rpm hdd is to slow, I had my games on a 7200rpm drive and games loaded so slow that i had to put them back on a ssd. In my opinion the ps4 should have come with a ssd in the first place.

I don't understand your first sentence. You also ignored pretty much everything I said. 

 

As for a SSD in the PS4, the console's final spec would've been finalised by 2012 at the latest. Flash prices at the time were still very high, there's no way they could've included a 500 GB SSD and still sold it at the price that they did without seriously compromising other aspects of the system or taking a big loss on each console sold. 

[3rrant]

20 minutes ago, iBabySlapper said:

Honestly, I don't blame Linus. When I heard the PS5 had an SSD, I didn't really care either, it sounded like a gimmick (esp. with how much it was hyped). The only opinion I had was Shit, the price of NAND might rise again, oh great.

What you should look for is not "the ssd" but the "ssd complex" which has a lot of other parts to it including asic-style dedicated compression/decompression unit (equal to 9 zen cores), gpu direct memory scrubbers (not found anywhere else) and much else which is very long to summarize here.

I tried to open a thread when the first WAN show showed up to summon @LinusTech at least to acknoledge that whoever reported the news about "the PS5 HAS A SSD! HURRAY!" was talking out of context.

 

The SSD is not the curious thing in that build, it's what "around it" that makes it a revolutionary idea (is it real? who knows. we'll see). People also misquoted Tim Sweeney about what he meant by saying that the PS5 was years ahead of anything. He was not talking about bandwidth but overhead-less operations between storage and memory.

[The Torrent]

i have a 1tb with 800gb free which i have never loaded a single game onto.

 

and never will bother.

because i just cant see it worth it hdd loading times give me enough time to grab a drink ssd really not big deal 

[jasonj2232]

1 minute ago, Not Wills said:

they could have done a thing like intel optaine until the ps4 pro or slim when ssd werent a million pounds

Now I can't tell if you're trolling or are being genuine. 3D Xpoint wasn't a thing until 2015 and like I said, Flash was expensive. You'd have to include a (then) significant size to make a difference.

 

They instead made the right decision to spend most of their budget on 8Gb of GDDR5 RAM. The Xbox team went for DDR3 plus must faster ESRAM and that crippled them early in the gen.

[jasonj2232]

8 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

What you should look for is not "the ssd" but the "ssd complex" which has a lot of other parts to it including asic-style dedicated compression/decompression unit (equal to 9 zen cores), gpu direct memory scrubbers (not found anywhere else) and much else which is very long to summarize here.

I tried to open a thread when the first WAN show showed up to summon @LinusTech at least to acknoledge that whoever reported the news about "the PS5 HAS A SSD! HURRAY!" was talking out of context.

 

The SSD is not the curious thing in that build, it's what "around it" that makes it a revolutionary idea (is it real? who knows. we'll see). People also misquoted Tim Sweeney about what he meant by saying that the PS5 was years ahead of anything. He was not talking about bandwidth but overhead-less operations between storage and memory.

Yeah you're right. While the RAW bandwidth of the SSD is quite impressive at the moment it's the custom hardware around it, the 'storage architecture' that Sweeney talks about, that's the most impressive part about it. 

[GDRRiley]

without any really proof it changes anything I get why it was dismissed. DLSS was an overhyped item and it took till 2.0 for it to make sense.

Until I see games changed by it I don't care what special stuff it is suppose to do

[igormp]

49 minutes ago, jasonj2232 said:

To be clear, this was never about 'Canadian man bad cause he no talk about my fav brand of black box' or 'PCs suck consoles rule' BS. It was always about how there is an interesting piece of tech in a major, mass market consumer product and Linus didn't even care to read about it before dismissing it as 'nothing new, PCs have had SSDs for 10 years now so it doesn't matter'.

To be fair, it isn't that interesting. It's a fast PCIe SSD with some extra hardware that allows it to do easy DMA and hardware-based compression. DMA is already possible with current NVMes since, well, that's part of PCIe (here's a project that allows one to access your NVMe through your GPU without needing the CPU at all).

 

Most of the things people are claiming about is just because marketing, or they're some 1st party dev, in which case having the guarantee of a nice bandwidth while not having to worry about other scenarios (because you're making an exclusive game after all) is pretty cool. For other devs it won't matter since they'll still need to account for other systems with regular HDDs.

[iBabySlapper]

18 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

What you should look for is not "the ssd" but the "ssd complex" which has a lot of other parts to it including asic-style dedicated compression/decompression unit (equal to 9 zen cores), gpu direct memory scrubbers (not found anywhere else) and much else which is very long to summarize here.

I tried to open a thread when the first WAN show showed up to summon @LinusTech at least to acknoledge that whoever reported the news about "the PS5 HAS A SSD! HURRAY!" was talking out of context.

 

The SSD is not the curious thing in that build, it's what "around it" that makes it a revolutionary idea (is it real? who knows. we'll see). People also misquoted Tim Sweeney about what he meant by saying that the PS5 was years ahead of anything. He was not talking about bandwidth but overhead-less operations between storage and memory.

You know, I think the devs being ignored by a lot of people when they have (allegedly) revolutionary tech on their hands, is at minimum partially self-inflicted. The whole industry (I know most industries do this, not just tech and gaming) tries desperately to hype some new thing and most of the time it falls flat on it's face, eats shit, dies in an open sewer, and is forgotten before too long.

 

We'll just have to wait and see if this advanced storage technology is actually worth the silicon it's made of.

[The Torrent]

16 minutes ago, Not Wills said:

if me and my friends are going from game to game one of us might get a drink (30 sec or so) but we have to wait for it to load and if 1 of them has a hdd it going to take a while waiting doing nothing for them to get in the game.

i mean i load rainbow with my hard drive in about 15 seconds so i just cant understand getting a hard drive.

modern warfare is about the same.

 

The division 2 takes aaaaaaaages hdd or ssd so that doesnt really matter

[The Torrent]

Just now, Not Wills said:

a game like gta takes ages on a hdd but not to long on a ssd, theres tons of videos doing gaming speed on hdds, sata ssds and nvme ones. and we can proberly say the nvme ssd is like the ps5 as we can see why the ps5 people are so excited.

i guess so but i cba to use up tbw cycles for games i hardly play.

 

i do need to use the ssd more tho

[Disintegrated]

Hello everyone! Greetings from the UK! First time poster. Long time LTT fan! I've watched Linus since he was in his garage with Luke and his oil PC. Then fast forward to him becoming the massive figure he is today in the world of technology. Never posted on the forum though in all that time. But it is about time I joined, to have some intellectual discussions with some like minded people!

 

The PS5 storage and its local communication technology, is something that really has fascinated me. It really is something ground breaking and game changing. I should also say that this is my opinion. But based on what I know about computer science. I will try to explain my opinion. But please correct me if you feel something is different.

 

I will specifically use general PS5 architecture here as a use case example for simplicity, but to a certain and lesser extent, the same rules apply to PC.

 

So as we strive to get faster and faster GPUs and CPUs, a great thing by the way. The big elephant in the room for developers over the last few years has been the issue of being able to feed the ferocious appetite for data that the CPU and GPU can handle. We have a bandwidth of about 175GB per sec between the PS4 Pro RAM and the integrated APU. Massive speed yes. But that 175GB of data will pretty much consist of the same 7GB of useable game data that can sit in the PS4 ram at any one time. Just re pulled and pulled from the RAM to the APU. 

 

Now a 5200 RPM hard drive, on average, can send about 1GB of data to the RAM every 20 seconds. Yet the RAM can pull 175GB of data off the RAM in the same time. So you can  immediately see the problem. Games are very limited by what is loaded in into the RAM at that time. Then if new data is needed. The game had to eloquently figure out a way to load the very slow read speed of data from the HDD into the RAM without disruption to the user. Believe me, it's a huge headache. Especially as game scope and asset quality has ballooned in size. Essentially you have 7GB of game data and assets you can assume is there immediately. In a modern game, 7GB is not much in 2020. You have to then figure out a way to bring the rest in, slowly, as you have no choice. Streaming engines and that sort of thing. 

 

With this new PS5. The same 1GB of data that took 20 seconds to bring in from the HDD can now be done in less than a second. This means that you can be much more dynamic and rich in the experience and gaming quality you can bring to the user. Yes, you still only have 16GB of shared system RAM, but the speed you can load data from the SSD is almost on par with DDR3. A lot more freedom, alot more room to be able to create rich and detailed gaming worlds without having to worry about the time unique data takes to get loaded. As game assets, environments and the plethora of post FX and whatever else increases. This is a huge thing. Really game changing. Having whatever data you would need from the game, accessible almost instantly, makes for much greater and more rich game worlds. Working around the consideration of having to wait for data to get loaded into RAM has been reduced by a few massive factors. 

 

PC's do have SSDs on par with the PS5 yes. However, the freedom of customisation on a PC is also its biggest limiting factor in this case (but only for now). Developers making games for PC need to consider all those people without super fast NVME drives, people with  SATA interfaced drives for example. They have to make games to the lowest common denominator. Else they will alienate a big portion of their market (atleast how things are now). This would make no financial sense, selling a game only a small portion can use. 

 

Now I am not saying the PS will have better graphics. But games designed purely for that system, where the horrendously fast memory subsystem can be taken advantage of, will not be seen on other systems for a time. Because as it looks to stand. That is the only system where developers can guarantee, every single person with that system can guarantee that every user has a memory system with that bandwidth. 

 

This is not saying that PS5 will have better graphics or FPS than PC. Just the type of game worlds potentially achievable will be massively different. For now. 

 

Love it or hate it. It is a truly great thing for gamers on any platform. Because the bar has been raised in a different aspect than usual. But eventually it will pay dividends for gamers on any platform. This stuff is possible on PC, yes. But developers can't assume thay everyone has these super fast SSDs. Because for the most part they dont. So they need to cater for that. 

 

This is also not saying we will not see massive leaps on the new Xbox and PC going forward. We totally will. But this memory system has changed the game. Give it time and you will see. 

 

What a time to be alive. For gamers and developers on any platform. We really are about to enter a new age. With bigger implications than things like raytracing. It is a revolution! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[LostElric]

Linus should really check out the Cerny talk. But also this guy did a great break down of it and explains it in pretty simple terms and from a game developers perspective. Also i think i'm blind and don't see how to embed a youtube video so link below.

The Cherno.

[Curious Pineapple]

45GB RAM-disk VS cheap SATA3 SSD (3 GBytes/sec vs maybe 300 MBps in the right situation). Difference was not worth bothering with. The only point it made a difference in game was hit and miss anyway as more VRAM fixed that issue.

 

A literal 1024x speed increase made hardly any difference to game loading times. Most SSD's could fill the RAM of your average gaming machine within a minute.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, jasonj2232 said:

Loading times are the most obvious advantage, sure, but that faster loading time and low latency has big implications for game and level design. I can't really explain it better than Cerny did during his presentation so I'd suggest watching it, just for the part about the SSD. 

 

It's kinda tough to guage the changes a SSD will bring because so far no game I know of, apart from Star Citizen, is actually designed around a SSD. Games set consoles as a baseline and the base PS4 has a 5400 RPM drive. Once we start seeing true next gen games though, especially exclusives, I think the benefits a SSD will bring will become more obvious. 

 

I will concur though that unless we see games that can't be possible on a HDD, this is sort of just speculation (sort of because you have game devs and platform holder saying that it'll make a difference), so I suppose we'll have to wait and see. 

 

See the problem is that most games will still be designed to work on the Switch and PS4/Xbox1 with a PC as an after-thought, and since the Switch has the fastest "disk" speed of the two without after-market changes, we are likely to see all the games that can still run on the Switch to not have any noticeable difference.

 

On the flipside of that. Many games have opted not do things we learned back in the 90's. 3D games have 3D worlds inside cubes with defined exits instead of seamless macro-tiled worlds. FFXIV version 1.0 back in 2010 had long "loading tunnels" to make it seamless, but it was so incredibly obvious when you were in a loading tunnel. No SSD's back then. The only games that have seamless worlds right now, surprise, surprise, have their own versions of loading tunnels (FFXV, Fallout 4) This is because their game engines are designed to have them. Designing seamless worlds is antithesis to how Unreal Engine 4.x and Unity work. FFXIV 2.0 kinda switched the seamless world for just world-walls, however the game on a SSD loads fast enough even in the worst maps, and if you're running it off a mechanical drive, you're looking at maybe two minutes of load time instead of 15 seconds.

 

So my hope is that UE5 has figured out how to sectorize a larger "map" automatically to allow a completely seamless world.

 

 

[Disintegrated]

@LostElricYou are not wrong but are somewhat missing the point I made. Game loading times are somewhat irrelevant to my point. 

 

An SSD will indeed fill RAM in less than a minute. But in a game world with massively detailed assets and rich content. The sort that has tried to push through over the last few years and is still pushing. Is not fast enough. No where close. 

 

The key is, the RAM being able to replenish itself with fresh and new data, fast enough, to load massively detailed worlds and gameplay with out a hiccup to the end user. Almost as if RAM was a level one cache and the SSD level 2. RAM can send data to a CPU in orders of magnitudes faster than it can read it off the SSD. Which results in, for most of the time the pulling repeat data from the RAM, occasionally pulling fresh data. This massively limits game design. It is pretty clear to see the bottlenecks from communication in modern systems from this. 

 

Of course you are going to see small returns in gain from massively boosting your SSD on a PC. Not only are most PC games catering for the lowest common denominator. They also have not been fundamentally designed from the ground up with massive bandwidth non volatile storage in mind. 

 

 

 

 

[Bombastinator]

The problem with all the Xbox/ps5 releases is the same as with a lot of political discourse the claimed target of the statement being made is frequently not the intended one.  I get the impression that while Microsoft and Sony are doing official statements and “leaks” the listener they care about is not the public it’s the other company.  As such how much truth there is in them is questionable. 
 

I always got the impression it wasn’t about caring or lack of it but a shortage of hard data.

[AntiTrust]

Quote

The upcoming game console will have:

• An AMD eight-core custom made Zen 2 processor that will be clocked at 3.5 GHz variable frequency.
• A custom made AMD RDNA 2 GPU capable of 10.28 TFLOPs with 36 CUs at 2.23 GHz.
• Will come with 16GB GDDR6 256-bit memory that has a bandwidth of 448GB/s.
• An internal custom design 825GB SSD with an IO Throughput of 5.5GB/s.

So the new console is going to cost like $600 

 

edit: at that price point just build a PC.. could be a boon for PC gaming

[AntiTrust]

3 hours ago, Disintegrated said:

 

hey welcome to the forum and thanks for your post, 

 

kind of surprised they didnt just add more ram so you could load more resources onto the ram instead of jumping up directly to SSD storage. Seeing as 16gb or RAM is becoming very standard and cheaper, wouldn't it make sense to make more ram hungry games instead of relying on supplying ram faster? 

[jasonj2232]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

The problem with all the Xbox/ps5 releases is the same as with a lot of political discourse the claimed target of the statement being made is frequently not the intended one.  I get the impression that while Microsoft and Sony are doing official statements and “leaks” the listener they care about is not the public it’s the other company.  As such how much truth there is in them is questionable. 
 

I always got the impression it wasn’t about caring or lack of it but a shortage of hard data.

What? None of what you said made any sense. 

[jasonj2232]

1 hour ago, AntiTrust said:

So the new console is going to cost like $600 

 

edit: at that price point just build a PC.. could be a boon for PC gaming

I can guarantee that the PS5 won't be more than 500 freedom bucks. Even if it is, good luck building a PC as capable as it at 600 USD. You can't, consoles cannot be beaten when it comes to price.