Asking for opinions: Realistically, can the XSX SSD keep up with the PS5 as the 9th gen moves on.

[aesn1394]

I own both consoles and to me it seems that PS5 loads games around 4 seconds faster than XSX. As the 9th gen moves on, will the SSD and loading speeds on the XSX be able to keep up? 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

yea

The ps5 games probably make better use of directstorage (or whatever the api is for ps5) than xbox games.

[Chris Pratt]

We'll see, but it looks like for the moment, PCIe 3.0-like speeds are sufficient for what games will be doing with storage. The Series X|S uses PCIe 4.0 x2, which is roughly equivalent to the speeds you'd expect with a traditional PCIe 3.0 x4 drive in a PC, and while the PS5 can utilize drives with speeds up to 7000MBps, Digital Foundry tested it with the slowest "PCIe 4.0” drive available, the WD SN750 SE and found no performance difference between that and even a 980 Pro. Microsoft has also confirmed that DirectStorage on PC will work with PCIe 3.0 drives, so it seems anything faster is just not necessary.

[SkilledRebuilds]

My Unpopular opinion.. it doesn't matter personally.

I'd answer different if it was like a huge delta (20-40s each death, each quickload) between them at similar specs...

They should rename "Loading..." to "Building Worlds....." so it makes people feel better.

It wasn't too long ago the norm was much much longer, RDR2 on a HDD for example up to some minutes for trashed drives. Now people care about 4-10seconds? Bewilders me sometimes.

Spoiler

Budget/Time aside.....Game devs can optimise streaming assets and variables used for the hardware of each system.

 

But...the Unpopular opinion part..

Does 4-8 extra seconds of load time really detract anything from your life or the console/games you play, as soon as the level loads and you start, do you care about 4 seconds then? If that bothers you then that's something you would have to work on yourself.

 

That 4-8 seconds gain with a new drive could just as easily be wasted in an elevator/stairs bumping into someone outside on the same day...
It's just a few seconds to wait, and without actually comparing them side by side, would you really mentally notice 5 seconds extra over typical loading times...if it was the games norm.
Again.. sorry if this makes anyone feel slightly heated if they care that much... but IMO (10s or less) its quite a small issue to have an opinion on, but you are valid to yours as I am to mine, so I'll just put this in a spoiler so people can skip if they want.

 

[Colty]

Multi platform games will continue to work on everything. From a 6TB games HDD in someone's PC to a PS5, to a future PCIE 5.0 SSD. The PS5 will probably show better and more uses in exclusive titles, but I wouldn't expect a long list of games that flat out need it for a game mechanic to function. 

EDIT: That being said, I would expect the load times to get better on both. Eventually, yeah the PS5 will probably show an even stronger lead over the XS load times, but nothing that would make it feel unplayable on the XS. 

[aDoomGuy]

On 10/17/2021 at 7:42 AM, SkilledRebuilds said:

It wasn't too long ago the norm was much much longer, RDR2 on a HDD for example up to some minutes for trashed drives. Now people care about 4-10seconds? Bewilders me sometimes.

Yeah man. Remember GTA Online? Read half a book during loading.

 

Well... I'm not gonna sit with a stopwatch while the games load... That's the only time I think you'll notice any difference between different SSD.

[Stahlmann]

17 minutes ago, aDoomGuy said:

Yeah man. Remember GTA Online? Read half a book during loading.

GTA5 online has just had bad code. Even with a PCIe Gen4 drive i could wait minutes while it loaded. It was a problem with the game's software, not a hardware limit from storage drives. Recently a modder found a way to significantly decrease loading times just using a bit of code. Rockstar even gave the guy a lot of money for finding this.

 

Realistically, currently none of the newer consoles use their direct storage capabilities. They use their SSD's just like a PC does. And there is no noticeable difference between a basic SATA SSD (~500MB/s read/write) and a latest gen PCIe 4.0 drive (7GB/s read / 5GB/s write).

 

DIrect storage was a marketing gimmick that has not yet been used in any way. Just like RTX/DLSS 1.0 with the launch of the RTX 2000 series of GPUs. Nowadays Windows also has the same feature, but again, no software (and especially no game) i know of that utilizes it.