it's a resolution difference even DF will have a hard time to show you probably.
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Devs react to PS5 specs - Twitter edition
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it's a resolution difference even DF will have a hard time to show you probably.
We haven't had consoles lead the way for a long time (probably since the N64/PS1 era of early 3D graphics rendering in '95). Some PC gamers always feel threatened at the start of a new console gen for some strange reason but the sheer power of these new consoles along with the paradigm shifting power of having SSD's as standard for development (like PS5 will have) is causing some insane meltdowns and playing down of the specs online. A lot of them really didn't want to believe that lowly consoles would be doing real time ray tracing this side of 2030 either as that was their thing.
Personally as someone who owns every platform I want the most powerful consoles possible. Having Jaguars and a 1.3tflop GPU as a development base has been frustrating especially for the past few years.
A massive CPU compute increase along with SSD's are going to make games so much better across the board. I can't wait to see some of the physics, NPC count, AI and simulation improvements we're going to see on top of the usual graphical leap.
That's a wildly inaccurate summary of where we stand. No, we don't have examples of what next-generation games are going to do with the streaming performance, but that will definitely come in time and nobody is being asked to put down money today or commit one way or another. That's because what we've seen is primarily developer focused communication, and it has been quite specific and detailed - not in terms of secrets, prophecy, or mysticism, but in terms of architectural details.
We know the raw storage I/O across twelve dedicated channels to flash memory is capable of 5.5GB/s. We know that the I/O controller communicates with dedicated decompression logic using Kraken as a compression scheme. We know that decompression is capable of producing 22GB/s in ideal cases, and is expected to produce 8-9GB/s in typical cases. We know that dedicated DMA to memory eliminates the need for CPU time to be spent on I/O tasks including decompression. We know that I/O uses a prioritized queuing scheme with six distinct priority levels. We know that the API developers use allows them to think in terms of pre-compression addressing, and that everything behind that is transparent. We know that even at the raw level this would more than saturate PCIe 3.0, and because decompression is a transparent characteristic of reading from storage, that typical resulting I/O speeds are even greater than PC solutions using PCIe 4.0 which tops out at 7GB/s.
It's hard not to be impressed and eager to see what it means in practice, unless you're actively trying to downplay it all.
From my understanding, framerate, RT and resolution will be slightly better and more consistent on SX for 3rd party titles.
But personally, my eyes can't tell the difference between 4k and 1080 unless I sit close to my TV. But stable framerate is king imo. So hopefully devs really push that next gen over resolution.
RT does look really nice and is more noticeable but how much will that affect resolution is the big question here for me at least.
Reading Maximov's tweet again... I think it finally dawned on me (no pun intended, see the GIF below) how the PS5 will, visually, benefit from its ultra-fast SSD.
Look at this HZD GIF:
You see everything that is being rendered outside of the field of view? From my understanding, essentially none of that has to be rendered anymore thanks to the SSD, which in turn free's up GPU resources. You can allocate all of those GPU resources to pack your field of view with a lot more detail, instead of having to render anything outside of it (because of the incredibly slow HDD's in today's consoles).
But then again, there'll always be a limit to how much detail can be packed inside of said FOV, and those limits are dictated, I'd imagine, by how powerful the GPU is.
Will said freed up extra GPU resources and higher clock frequencies of the PS5 help bridge the GPU gap?
I'm more than certain that the Series X will get to enjoy much of these same advancements in visual fidelity thanks to it's SSD. So who has the better balanced console?
What's your take on this, Dictator? I know we still don't have all of the details on the PS5, but isn't this essentially the gist of what Cerny was trying to get at?
Maybe Sony's SSD solution is overkill and MS's solution is more than enough? I don't know. I'd really like your take, because you're certainly more knowledgeable.
Look at this HZD GIF:
You see everything that is being rendered outside of the field of view? From my understanding, essentially none of that has to be rendered anymore thanks to the SSD, which in turn free's up GPU resources. You can allocate all of those GPU resources to pack your field of view with a lot more detail, instead of having to render anything outside of it (because of the incredibly slow HDD's in today's consoles).
But then again, there'll always be a limit to how much detail can be packed inside of said FOV, and those limits are dictated, I'd imagine, by how powerful the GPU is.
Will said freed up extra GPU resources and higher clock frequencies of the PS5 help bridge the GPU gap?
I'm more than certain that the Series X will get to enjoy much of these same advancements in visual fidelity thanks to it's SSD. So who has the better balanced console?
What's your take on this, Dictator? I know we still don't have all of the details on the PS5, but isn't this essentially the gist of what Cerny was trying to get at?
Maybe Sony's SSD solution is overkill and MS's solution is more than enough? I don't know. I'd really like your take, because you're certainly more knowledgeable.
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Funny how some developer comments matters when it comes to assessing these consoles and not others. Just a few days ago I saw a flurry of comments about how Sony devs and devs that talked to Jason Schierer either "didn't count" or must be met with extreme suspicion, even though what they were saying is entirely reasonable and not fanboy wanking at all.
Not for all 3 at the same time.
True is i don't expect frame rate to get effect at all since devs will use CB or DR to stop it from dropping .
As for RT if the XSX version has higher res it won't have the RT advantage from what i understand .
Reading Maximov's tweet again... I think it finally dawned on me (no pun intended, see the GIF below) how the PS5 will, visually, benefit from its ultra-fast SSD.
Look at this HZD GIF:
You see everything that is being rendered outside of the field of view? From my understanding, essentially none of that has to be rendered anymore thanks to the SSD, which in turn free's up GPU resources. You can allocate all of those GPU resources to pack your field of view with a lot more detail, instead of having to render anything outside of it (because of the incredibly slow HDD's in today's consoles).
But then again, there'll always be a limit to how much detail can be packed inside of said FOV, and those limits are dictated, I'd imagine, by how powerful the GPU is.
Will said freed up extra GPU resources and higher clock frequencies of the PS5 help bridge the GPU gap?
I'm more than certain that the Series X will get to enjoy much of these same advancements in visual fidelity thanks to it's SSD. So who has the better balanced console?
What's your take on this, Dictator? I know we still don't have all of the details on the PS5, but isn't this essentially the gist of what Cerny was trying to get at?
No, frustrum culling has nothing to do with load speeds. Things being rendered offscreen depends on other things, like where is an efficient place to chop the world segments up, etc.
Reading Maximov's tweet again... I think it finally dawned on me (no pun intended, see the GIF below) how the PS5 will, visually, benefit from its ultra-fast SSD.
Look at this HZD GIF:
You see everything that is being rendered outside of the field of view? From my understanding, essentially none of that has to be rendered anymore thanks to the SSD, which in turn free's up GPU resources. You can allocate all of those GPU resources to pack your field of view with a lot more detail, instead of having to render anything outside of it (because of the incredibly slow HDD's in today's consoles).
But then again, there'll always be a limit to how much detail can be packed inside of said FOV, and those limits are dictated, I'd imagine, by how powerful the GPU is.
Will said freed up extra GPU resources and higher clock frequencies of the PS5 help bridge the GPU gap?
I'm more than certain that the Series X will get to enjoy much of these same advancements in visual fidelity thanks to it's SSD. So who has the better balanced console?
What's your take on this, Dictator? I know we still don't have all of the details on the PS5, but isn't this essentially the gist of what Cerny was trying to get at?
Maybe Sony's SSD solution is overkill and MS's solution is more than enough? I don't know. I'd really like your take, because you're certainly more knowledgeable.
That won't help bridge the gpu gap .
What the faster SSD allow them to do is move data in and out of ram faster and have better ram management .
There is a quote in the first post from a dev that give some idea what it will help with and what it can mean for looks of the game.
Also this https://twitter.com/_ArtIsAVerb/status/1240390141232939012/photo/1 if you read the whole thing .
Is it overkill we won't know until we see the games which will be hopeful soon .
As a fresh PC gamer, I am pretty stoked about these consoles as they will push PC hardware so much further than if Nvidia and Intel were the only "innovator" in the field. Let's be real, PC hardware is brutally overpriced. I have a 300€ 1TB Samsung NVME SSD that looks like a joke compared to what the PS5 is packing. This can only mean good things as I can't imagine this being an acceptable price to ask from consumers in a year or so. The other thing is RAM. It is absolutely unacceptable to have current cards that have less than 8GB of GDDR6 that cost probably as much as a PS5. Things are about to get really interesting because as Cerny said: "A rising tide lifts all the boats" and the rising tide is the consoles. In that sense I absolutely cannot understand anyone who wants console to suck and aims to downplay their achievements. Next gen will be awesome for everyone. And thinks to a new baseline, this 300€ SSD of mine will finally find some use in gaming.
This is probably the most informative video thus far on the true nature of what both MS and Sony are going for with their architectural design choices. This guy also seems legit in terms of his contacts within the industry. Both are going to be competent consoles and both are going to have unique strengths to play to. Everyone really should be happy.
If not, all of his developer friends probably stopped talking to him. So yeah, good point.
Hmm...
So I'd essentially completely misunderstood this part then? So he's just talking about high-res textures?
"That guy" asked a question exactly because he didn't jump to conclusions lol.
Those are all lovely tech specs, but no one is able to actually translate those specs into a relatable real life performance scenario. Any logical person would assume that such a highly center console part would have ample examples to showcase its superiority compared to current SSD's as you are making a huge bet on it by Cerny the system engineer, yet we got blanks and are left to our own imagination to guess the difference between the SSD's in real life situations.
How can you call something revolutionary and when people ask you to showcase it compared to what we have now in the market, you just go nah.
There'll be opportunities for more granular culling but that's more a function of new GPU features and CPU.
The SSD impact is in a different place - look at that gif again - the entire runtime of it - all the content shown in the animation sits in memory on a PS4 the whole time. On PS5 - memory usage can be as low as what's within view on any 'one' of the frames.
I absolutely agree. What the presentation for this has made me realize, is that a console with an SSD is a bigger deal than a PC with an SSD. Or, at least for first party software. Games loading from SSD today on PC are doing loading like games have always been doing loading. It's faster, but the game is still made so it can be run with a HDD. The way PS5 is gearing up to load assets that you are about to look at could mean extraordinary things for the games running on the console.
Reading Maximov's tweet again... I think it finally dawned on me (no pun intended, see the GIF below) how the PS5 will, visually, benefit from its ultra-fast SSD.
Look at this HZD GIF:
You see everything that is being rendered outside of the field of view? From my understanding, essentially none of that has to be rendered anymore thanks to the SSD, which in turn free's up GPU resources. You can allocate all of those GPU resources to pack your field of view with a lot more detail, instead of having to render anything outside of it (because of the incredibly slow HDD's in today's consoles).
But then again, there'll always be a limit to how much detail can be packed inside of said FOV, and those limits are dictated, I'd imagine, by how powerful the GPU is.
Will said freed up extra GPU resources and higher clock frequencies of the PS5 help bridge the GPU gap?
I'm more than certain that the Series X will get to enjoy much of these same advancements in visual fidelity thanks to it's SSD. So who has the better balanced console?
What's your take on this, Dictator? I know we still don't have all of the details on the PS5, but isn't this essentially the gist of what Cerny was trying to get at?
Maybe Sony's SSD solution is overkill and MS's solution is more than enough? I don't know. I'd really like your take, because you're certainly more knowledgeable.
Developers are mocking a Kotaku post about game development, and it’s…
archived 18 Apr 2017 16:20:55 UTC
archive.is
To be fair, PC has a ton of bottlenecks that make loading data this fast much more difficult. That's what makes the consoles (and especially PS5 due to a wider array of custom I/O hardware) really exciting when it comes to SSD's, they should be able to actually sustain much higher speeds than PC while using less CPU resources.
I remember how someone at Kotaku was awed by this then got mocked hard by developers.Developers are mocking a Kotaku post about game development, and it’s…
archived 18 Apr 2017 16:20:55 UTC
I think it was a bit harsh for devs to mock, but I can sorta kinda see why. This is just standard frustum culling. It's used all over the place and is considered pretty standard/basic at times. Still, I think if players will be inquisitive and open minded then developers should educate without mockery.
Usually you're not going to be unloading things out of the frustum because, as Mark fairly eloquently pointed out - you've classically needed stuff in RAM that you're going to need in the next 30 seconds (and that's being incredibly conservative. For some elements you just keep it resident for the entire span of the game just in case). However, in theory, with this ultra fast drive you could conceivably unload stuff directly behind the player if you knew it took them, say, 1 second to turn around. As the player is turning around you could fetch from this drive as needed. This is just mind boggling for most game developers, as we've never been able to think like this before and it sounds like crazy talk.
I think that specific thought experiment might not be super practical, but similar ones might be. Maybe you could have a game like Portal with a map bigger and more detailed than Grand Theft Auto 5. You and your friends could open up portals all around a massive map and be in (or see) multiple places at any time. You can stare through them and warp through them without a single hitch. The game could be fetching all assets from several areas of the map at the same time so that you could open up these portals in the blink of an eye. So one friend in each corner of the map and you just walk through 4 portals in a row that are in completely different places. This would be nearly impossible before without enormous sacrifice (Rockstar, with some of the best streaming tech in the business, was able to almost gracefully pull off a single character switch across map after some time). With a blazing fast drive you might be able to make this happen.
It's probably worth pointing out that even I am still uncertain of the possibilities, because it's still kind of new to be able to think without that constraint. It's been fun letting my imagination go wild since the talk.
Sound great .
Really looking forward to see what devs come up with now that they can let there minds go wild.
Might take a wild for them to go really crazy with how big the jump is and tricks they will learn along the way.
That's the technical demo I am still waiting to see. Give me Doctor Strange you coward :)
But going from Peter Parker to Miles Morales in a second could be great too. What GTA 5 tried to do with the 3 characters didn't worked well, and I don't know how it will be for Watch Dogs, but there is something to do with that.
This is great insight so thank you for sharing.
Would you be able to share how the scenario you described might play out on XSX vs PS5 and their respective SSD I/O throughput differences?
Cerny doesn't seemed confident about full Ray Tracing.
But remember this is still a new thing and it will be optimised throught time and being done smarter.
No clue, but as I've been saying a number of times:
- The SSDs are the game changer this generation.
- A fast drive is the thing I'd want more than anything. I'd give up GPU power for a faster drive any day.
- The faster the better.
The Xbox drive seems fast! Not sure if it's really fast enough to just start dreaming wildly? But the PS5 drive (and framework/infrastructure around it) sound so fast that I just start dreaming of design with 0 drive bottlenecks.
Personally I love it when new hardware can make me dream big and think of new frontiers. I'm personally not as enthused by crazy high resolutions and 15% more powerful GPUs at the moment (even though I've had a ton of fun working on shaders and tough challenges in rendering and the like). I like when hardware and software allows new ways of thinking. Personal thing, and more power to you if that is a thing you like working with!
So i take it this will also make ram management easier this time around .
Still how much would that effect things be it development or how the games look.
I understand the frustration it can be. When you see the tech behind Star Citizen or technical gameplay demo of Beyond Good and Evil 2, we need those new consoles.
The jump from actual gen, I think a lot of people still can't see it. Not entirely their fault, we still haven't seen any gameplay.
This sounds freaking amazing. I can only begin to imagine the possibilities. Maybe a Dragon Ball Game with large scale environments and tons of variety in them where the characters can quickly fly back and forth between them in seconds. Or perhaps a dynasty warrior like game where you do battle across a real to scale virtual ancient city with different areas like buildings, forests, caves, rivers, etc and allowing you to swap between characters instantaneously even if they're in an entirely different part of a city.
As a player, you telling I can have one this two version of Spider Man :
- Same roaming and free fall speed but way prettier
- Same graphics but real life gravity and can build "infinite" momentum. Can switch between two characters at different locations in 1 second.
Again, this is another thing that is hard to imagine. I've only worked on consoles as far back as PS3/360 generation up to current boxes, and all of them have been so incredibly slow to fill your RAM that you are designing around the streaming and loading bottlenecks. When Mark was talking about having a drive so fast that you could just clear your RAM and in a blink of an eye and load a whole 10+ GB of assets in there my mind was racing. His example of "no need for a giant canyon corridor to load the next vista" is entirely appropriate. It's one of those things that may not even be obvious to the player the way a load screen comparison would be. World and game design will just change in a qualitative way that is not easily measurable.
I wish more companies could create their games solely with PC in mind. It sucks how consoles end up limiting some games as you get farther into the generations.
When you say PC in mind you mean high end only ?
Games getting limited is more of budget problem since they need all the sales they can get .
Plus the high end market is way to small for companies to only target that .
That's a good article, it really shows why TF isn't the only thing that will determine final performance of these consoles.
Thanks for this. Very informative read. Makes sense too. Can't wait to see the actual games. They will be great either way.
You will get option 2 plus much, much, much prettier graphics
As a layman who watched the presentation, the only thing that stood out as something tangible was Cerny saying designers have spent nearly 20 years using a similar philosophy to Jak 2 of winding corridors and blocking sight lines to make games work, and that could end with this gen's SSD development.
He's kind of ignoring open world games. I mean, yeah, I'm sure that there are compromises, but we've had some spectacular ones recently. It'll be interesting to see if things change.
If anything i expect the Open world games will have the biggest changes \jump.
The SSD will allow them to use there ram much better add it the more powerful CPU and GPU and i think we will see a huge jump in them.
Not only in GFX but also interactivity \destruction etc etc .
Thanks, we all appreciate you going into detail on these kinds of crazy advancements. I do think the general gaming populace is going to need real video and gameplay demonstrations of the benefits, though. While most people do seem to finally understand how SSDs in general will be literal gamechangers for consoles, a lot are still super skeptical about the PS5 SSD and if it's worth it. The best comparison I can think of is that they feel that if the current console HDD speeds are like 30fps, then the XSX's 2.4GB/s is like 360fps and the PS5's 5.5GB/s is like 720fps - technically twice as good but a total waste of time that no one will notice.
And to think people thought the fighting would stop after the PS5 reveal 😂
I thought the two castles example was an open-world version of the "Jak 2 design method".
The designers made two amazing castles let's bang them in our map. Oh wait now we have to spend time calculating so that no player can see both castles at the same time on the map. And they build a mountain pass so part of each castle is always out of sight.
Reading Maximov's tweet again... I think it finally dawned on me (no pun intended, see the GIF below) how the PS5 will, visually, benefit from its ultra-fast SSD.
Look at this HZD GIF:
You see everything that is being rendered outside of the field of view? From my understanding, essentially none of that has to be rendered anymore thanks to the SSD, which in turn free's up GPU resources. You can allocate all of those GPU resources to pack your field of view with a lot more detail, instead of having to render anything outside of it (because of the incredibly slow HDD's in today's consoles).
But then again, there'll always be a limit to how much detail can be packed inside of said FOV, and those limits are dictated, I'd imagine, by how powerful the GPU is.
Will said freed up extra GPU resources and higher clock frequencies of the PS5 help bridge the GPU gap?
I'm more than certain that the Series X will get to enjoy much of these same advancements in visual fidelity thanks to it's SSD. So who has the better balanced console?
What's your take on this, Dictator? I know we still don't have all of the details on the PS5, but isn't this essentially the gist of what Cerny was trying to get at?
Maybe Sony's SSD solution is overkill and MS's solution is more than enough? I don't know. I'd really like your take, because you're certainly more knowledgeable.
So, here's my take on it (and someone better versed in tech can correct me if or when I am in error):
As part of rendering pipeline calculations are made as to which objects, their textures, Level of Detail (LoD as determined by the distance of camera i.e. player from an object), lighting info, shadow maps and animations, are visible to a player at any given moment- This forms the basis of the viewing frustrum and anything outside of it is culled at an early stage when the aforementioned detection of visibility is going so as not oversaturate the GPU and tank the performance.
This process has been part of the 3D graphics rendering pipeiline for a very long time now.
How the SSD, according to Mark Cerny is said to alter things:
- Before we get into this, look at the how far the the viewing frustum (gif) reaches into the distance.
- Now imagine for one moment that the player/camera is standing still and only rotating (this is to simplify things further by leaving out concepts of LoD transitions and streaming)
- Everything both in and outside the viewing frustum, while culled still resides in RAM so that then the player rotates to look elsewhere > the game pulls rest of the data immediately > determines what is yet again visble and invisible > The invisible portions are culled > The visible portion is rendered for the player to see on screen.
- This will not fully change with the next generation because:
- The response/seek time for RAM is generally in single or low double digit nanoseconds and NVMe SSDs operate in double digit microsecond (μs) tier. For reference 1000ns = 1μs and
- The bandwidth between RAM and GPU (for PS5) - 448GB/s and between NVMe SSD and RAM (for PS5)- 8-9GB/s (generally). The delta in performance is vast.
- However, and this is where things get complicated:
- Cerny said if it takes 0.5 seconds for a player to turn around, it should allow for 4GB (remember that SSD to RAM transfer rate is 8-9GB/s) of data to be streamed in. Now, I take this to mean that unlike current gen:
- Information pertaining to the whole surrounding of a given player in a given place will no longer need to be fully stored into the RAM. Some amount of and certain types data (Cerny alluded to Textures) that were previously invisible to the player at a given place and time can be discard- Think of it a pizza with with 12 slices with 1 unique topic for each slice. At any given moment, due to your field of view, you can only ever see 4 pieces simultaneously. Previously, you had to remember what and where the other slices were in relation to the ones you could see. Now, however, out of 12, you only need to remember the toppings and position and topping of 6 (3 on each side visible portions) more slices instead of all remaining 8. It is because by the time you turn around 180 degrees, those two additional pieces will be made available to you in their proper position with the proper topping like the guiding hand of the providence aka streaming
- Cerny said if it takes 0.5 seconds for a player to turn around, it should allow for 4GB (remember that SSD to RAM transfer rate is 8-9GB/s) of data to be streamed in. Now, I take this to mean that unlike current gen:
- Streaming is where SSDs will come to their own and make far better use of RAM due to the reduction of 'speculative loading'. Here is another much more learned poster's take:
Outside of console-only games, will PC HDD hold back some games that come to PC and console, since not all PCs have SSDs yet? You almost have to design two different games that take advantage of SSD and another that works around the limit so of HHD.
Could we get to a time when new PC games are only playable if you have an SSD?
Could we get to a time when new PC games are only playable if you have an SSD?
Yeah, I can see how really visually demanding games with good raytracing effects could be either 1080 or 1440 on Ana. Really curious to see how those games would perform on a Lock.
That's because it is crazy talk. Don't you see? This is how Cerny gets you. Lures you in with his sweet talk of revolutionary SSDs when we know what he says and what he means are two entirely different things. This forum has several members who're experts at combing through Cerny's lies. Don't worry, they'll pop up in this thread to tell you exactly why you're wrong about the PS5's SSD.