BC will definitely help the transition. Devs don't have to try as hard to make two different versions like last gen.
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Official PlayStation Next-Gen plans (2020, Wired Exclusive Article) [ Ray Tracing, BC, SSD, & more]
- Thread starter Wollan
- Start date
Are you saying the the SSD tech built into PS5 should primarily focus on loading in the data of games that are booted up instead of just storing a ton of games? I can see this based off of what Cerny was describing in the demo. Almost sounds like we are talking about RAM. I'm just excited that one of the focuses here is something I've been complaining about for nearly 2 generations.
But would that not mean loading time for games to start would be still long, because you would srart from hdd and the system would copy from hdd to ssd. Seems logical for cost reasons to have just a small ssd storage, but system/game performance would take some time and would counter act the aim of fast loading at the start.
i imagine that regarding the SSD it will be just a boot/cache drive and won't be the entire storage. i think they will use the drive to install the OS and cache the most used files/games
in traditional hybrid drives the SSD part is only about 8-16GB which of course is simply nowhere big enough to store a game these days (unless it's some 2d indie title). if they want to store some games on it then it'll need to be 250GB minimum.
even if they put a 1TB drive in there that isn't good enough. it might do for a while but they will definitely need to release a higher capacity model at some point or let us add in our own drives.
in traditional hybrid drives the SSD part is only about 8-16GB which of course is simply nowhere big enough to store a game these days (unless it's some 2d indie title). if they want to store some games on it then it'll need to be 250GB minimum.
even if they put a 1TB drive in there that isn't good enough. it might do for a while but they will definitely need to release a higher capacity model at some point or let us add in our own drives.
This is why BC is a huge deal. PS4 is far from dead and Sony knows it, but at the same time they aren't being complacent and recognize that the time is right for some new technology.
It would massively improve the usual bottleneck between storage and RAM yeah. The dream would be that the SSD holds everything, but at this point, considering the evolution of storage needs for the big consoles, that would mean like 2TB, and that would come with a prohibitive cost. A large enough all-flash design with no expandable solution will eventually be the reality, I just think that will happen only by PS6 the earliest.
I still expect the onboard storage to be able to stand alone for users with not that many games, and to hold at least a number of retail games. It wouldn't install them every time, just if you haven't played them in a while. And installs could and should be much faster than the speed we associate with installs nowadays.
Mind that this kind of hybrid solution isn't completely new in the computer world. Not only there are hybrid SSDs that do this on their own but sometimes even at a operating system level 2 different drives, one faster, one larger, are combined and seen as one, and the system takes care of sending to the fast one the more often accessed data.
Apparently 16GB DDR4.
Stuff that is technically possible, unfortunately from what we know the availability of HBM chips at this point is rather limited.
Here's the rumor fwiw. It requires a lot of things to happen.
What I expect too, there'll be the standard 1-2 years of mostly 1cross-gen anyway, but I can see it lasting longer, especially if devs want Switch versions and stuff or if MS keep to their no gens no more waffling from a couple years ago (which I expect they won't for too long).
MS will probably force their hand I think, it's very unlikely they'll charge for next gen versions of games you own.
just watched this week's easy allies podcast. they totally need to use that track when they official reveal ps5 lol
So hyped about PS5.
But i really hope this is the last home console.
Imagine when we get a streaming console instead.
Then the hardwear in it could always be the latest most powerful to make our games look and perform perfectly on the highest graphics setting there is and 60fps.
But i really hope this is the last home console.
Imagine when we get a streaming console instead.
Then the hardwear in it could always be the latest most powerful to make our games look and perform perfectly on the highest graphics setting there is and 60fps.
Yeah I could totally see them fizzle out the current gen consoles. Let's be honest the ps4 and pro x are going to have a better time, but I feel for one s owners. That will be rough.
I could see a nice transition period of one to two years then games stop running on the older machines. They will work out some way to message this.
I think so. It sounds fast enough to effectively be extended ram cache. Helps mitigate lower increase in ram, while giving devs access to their entire set of assets. It could significantly change design and remove several bottlenecks.
I'm guessing it wouldn't be a storage drive - due to the speed and likely cost it'll be more likely a cache. Something like this:
It's something that I think BC will help greatly with. Even if you stay behind when you eventually move on you'll have all your games still. I fully expect both consoles will be fully compatible with their predecessors too, so you'll still be able to talk and play with your friends, giving it a very smooth transition, would be very good way to get people thinking about moving on if their friends are playing the next gen only stuff while in a party chat with you.
Damn, oh well. Looks like the bandwidth won't take that much of a hit if they go this route. I already felt GDDR6 wasn't in the cards.
I think so. It sounds fast enough to effectively be extended ram cache. Helps mitigate lower increase in ram, while giving devs access to their entire set of assets. It could significantly change design and remove several bottlenecks.
I'm guessing it wouldn't be a storage drive - due to the speed and likely cost it'll be more likely a cache. Something like this:
Can someone explain 8GB HBM2 here?
Also I'm confident enough that the efficiency presented here will offset any of the RAM bottlenecks. This is helping me picture it better, I cannot wait to see how the storage solutions in the console work together here.
Streaming has a lot more negative long term implications than positive.
I dont care about having the absolute best, and nobody on console is aiming at that to begin with. If you want the latest and best tech, you go to PC
HBM High Bandwidth Memory. Sits literally on the APU so you get very high bandwidth. Downside is price and up to now has been impractical to use in lower priced hardware like a console. Rumour is Sony using it along with 16GB of slower regular DDR4 ram, perhaps betting on volume helping to drive prices down more than GDDR6 would drop over the lifecycle of the PS5
Key would be how well integrated into the system. MS had embedded ram for high bandwidth combined with slower ram. But they had much less of it.
I think so. It sounds fast enough to effectively be extended ram cache. Helps mitigate lower increase in ram, while giving devs access to their entire set of assets. It could significantly change design and remove several bottlenecks.
I'm guessing it wouldn't be a storage drive - due to the speed and likely cost it'll be more likely a cache. Something like this:
A lot of people keep saying this, but I think the article and Cerny's presentation, and emphasis on how transformative a switch to SSD can be for game design, rules out any mechanical drive. It was THE feature he highlighted in his entire spiel about the PS5 wanting to be a leap forward and not just another upgrade.
The benefits Cerny talked about were purely in the context of a running game. So that could sit entirely within the cache drive. I thought SSD would be too expensive fro enough storage for games previously, but if they're going for v.fast SSD then I just can't see that as the primary storage too. Both from a cost perspective, but also from an upgradable one - how will end users expand storage?
You know there are other price ranges then just 399 and 499 right?
Why not 459 or 449? which is psychologically not hurting to mainstream as 500$ but still more than 400$
Don't be so hyped! It's a rumor from a Reddit throwaway account.
Right. The Xbox One model is closer to the suggestion here - than say, PS3 style NUMA - as long as the cpu and gpu are in a APU, or chiplets on a package.
Except imagine if the Xbox One had, say, 4GB of memory stacked on the chip to go along with it's 8GB of ddr3, instead of the 32mb of ESRAM. Scaling back to the capacities and bandwidths of the current gen, that would be kind of what it would be like.
All these possible memory options seems horrifically expensive though. Maybe it's unavoidable.
Yeah. We're talking a lot about this, but for the sake of the casual reader, this is just a reddit post rumour.
The idea that AMD might make a APU for the PC space with a much smaller amount of stacked HBM (1GB or 2GB) has been speculated and rumoured before. As a way to get around bandwidth limitations of DDR based APUs. It hasn't happened yet. I say that to say, it would be easy enough for someone to take that concept and extrapolate out from it for a PS5 rumour on Reddit ;)
Would this be unified memory? I remember that was the #1 request from devs for ps4.
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That HBM + DDR4 rumour is absurd. 8GB high speed memory + 12GB low speed memory is basically the XB1 memory architecture 2.0. It won't happen. What devs are going to do with 12GB at only 100 GB/s ? Even less with the share taken by the OS.
With 2 such different bandwidth speeds this claim is ridiculous. They'll have to deal with 2 very different pools of memory.
Fully unifed memory of fast memory (PS4, Pro and copied by MS with XBX) is here to stay. XB1 memory architecture cost MS maybe billion of dollars in the end if we account for the lost market share vs XB360.
With 2 such different bandwidth speeds this claim is ridiculous. They'll have to deal with 2 very different pools of memory.
Fully unifed memory of fast memory (PS4, Pro and copied by MS with XBX) is here to stay. XB1 memory architecture cost MS maybe billion of dollars in the end if we account for the lost market share vs XB360.
The rumour states that the ram would be presented as unified (20GB [8gb hbm, 12gb ddr4]) to devs with them having the option of micro managing it if they want.
All still a rumour though. Now what's interesting is the same rumour mentions a new revision of the PS4 on 7nm being launched later in the year. If they end up being correct about that then that would give the HBM rumour strong legs.
If that were true all PC games would have disastrous performance. They obviously don't. There is an exponential different between having your only fast memory be 32mb is size versus have 16GB of memory as fast as that ESRAM was, PLUS 8GB that is way faster than that.
But that's modern PC Set up isn't it? GDDR6+DDR4. it works better than console anyway, at least my pc does.
It definitely isn't the XB1 memory architecture 2.0.
100 GB/s for next gen games will be much slower than what the XB1 had with DDR3 (68GB/s). And that was still too slow in many games.
Unified memory architecture was and still is the most valuable feature in a console for developers. Developers now take that for granted. You want to take fully unified memory back ? Good luck with that. Developers are going to be soooo happy.
PC is not a closed console. Game development is different on PC than on a console.
The reddit post floated an idea where there would be 12 excluding the OS. 16 total.
It would be like the XB1 memory setup, if the XB1 had die memory that was 128 times bigger than we got (if we apply the same ratios in this rumour back to the XB1 design, and put 4GB stacked on the die instead).
The eSRAM's problem were that it was really only big enough for framebuffer use, and even at that, it wasn't really big enough to be comfortable at 1080p with the shift to multiple buffer rendering.
And because it was too small for anything else, on the input side to the GPU it was entirely dependent on the DDR3 and its bandwidth. So effectively you were squeezed for capacity on one end, and for bandwidth on the other. (Side note: the DDR3 was otherwise fine for the CPU. Indeed a nicer fit for the CPU in terms of latency than GDDR. It was a problem wrt the GPU's dependence on it.)
If the eSRAM had been 4GB stacked ram along with the 8GB DRR3 I don't think we'd be talking about that setup as a problem point. It would have had some advantages even (at least against an alternative of 8GB total).
Some would, some wouldn't. AMD has new-ish tech for this already. OS's are well used to exposing multiple layers of memory as one address space. This would work the same way, exposing the on die memory as basically a giant cache. In a console with a fixed API you could make the cache smarter also (e.g. obviously you'd pin your framebuffers to your hbm)
Some games might want to bypass that and get down to the nitty gritty if it didn't like how the system was managing the memory. And then you might be in territory where you'd have preferred one pool of memory of the same type.
But it definitely is possible nowadays to have one address space mapping to two memory pools.
I suppose the question is though, what kind of one pool of memory is alternatively possible? If you could 'only' have 16GB of a unified pool, 12GB ex OS, vs 20GB ex OS under another regime, it's not so easy a choice. I agree though, if you could instead pop 24GB into a single pool of memory without any other tradeoffs, that would make the most sense.
These are interesting what ifs. TBH though, I think right now the idea of ddr4+hbm2 would actually be at least as expensive as the same amount of ggdr6. Unless a company seeing a very different longer term cost curve or are cutting much better deals than public wholesale numbers suggest.
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8K video and upscaling. Sony is not going to make any attempt at 8k games at all. I doubt any devs will on console.
100% accurate remains to be seen. The "leak" talks about an HDD with a flash nand. We have no infos on GPU.
What it was right about was vague as hell stuff that people have been predicted here already:
- 8 c
Except Xbox One was like 8GB of slow memory + 32Mo of a faster memory but not as fast as GDDR5.
This time you have 8GB of super fast video memory + 12GB of fast enough memory for the CPU, that is, if it's true.
You wouldn't run in such bottleneck.
It is nothing like the XB1 / X360 set up. In both of those, there was a relatively small portion of fast VRam to be used as the frame buffer. The rumours here point to a unique set up where the HBM & DDR4 are treated as a unified memory pool, which is either controlled by software or manually by the developer, if they choose.
And where that gets even more interesting is that the potential energy savings of using HMB2 would allow the GPU itself to be more powerful. So the next area to think about is how would a '16gb DDR4 & 8gb HMB2 & GPU+' system stack up against a '24gb GGDR6 & GPU' system?
Now, before anyone can answer that, you have to dig into bandwidth, power consumption and have an idea of what the GPU can do.
This is slightly misleading, because you're not thinking about how much ram can be accessed within a frame. 12GB of ram at 100GB/s would allow you access to 3.33..gb of ram per frame @ 30fps, or 1.66...gb of ram per frame @ 60fps, ignoring cache. The OS portion isn't a big issue if you can empty and fill up non-OS and not currently used ram quickly.
It's worth remembering that machines are rarely able to access all of their ram within a single frame, especially if you're got lots of memory in a PC or you're dealing with a console title running at 60fps. So some form of solid state drive will really help here.
Bah, I want the original Ridge Racer at 8k@120fps using all the original assets!
I hope not. Streaming sucks for pristine visual quality and forget about owning games, mods, anything. Thay future will suck. The world won't be ready for that any time soon though(more than a console generation) either in terms of connection speeds. You are free to use Stadia now though. I doubt you will like it better than the current setup.
I'm curious about this SSD cache idea
So say they have a 256gb SSD and a 2tb HDD
My most played game and the OS go on the SSD. But what if I suddenly jump to an older game stored on my HDD? Will the system take a few minutes to transfer it to my SSD and move the other one over? Or will it do that in the background as I'm playing and maybe just have longer load times till the transfer is done? Like how does that work in as dumbed down terms as you can put it in lol
So say they have a 256gb SSD and a 2tb HDD
My most played game and the OS go on the SSD. But what if I suddenly jump to an older game stored on my HDD? Will the system take a few minutes to transfer it to my SSD and move the other one over? Or will it do that in the background as I'm playing and maybe just have longer load times till the transfer is done? Like how does that work in as dumbed down terms as you can put it in lol
Possibly down to the dev
Worst case if the entire game absolutely had to be on SSD to function then you wait a couple minutes. Not the end of the world? Ideally though you'd be able to boot up and it'd be loading in to SSD in the background while you're signing in, picking a save game, starting playing a level
Yeah I always prefer local stuff that I really own rather than streaming. Sure I have Netflix but if I have a movie I love I have it on steelbook because I don't want to not be able to see it because of server maintenance or it suddenly jumping down in quality because of the WiFi hitting a hiccup. Gaming is way more demanding so I definitely will always want to just have it there rather than relying on good connections and that I wanna do it at the right time
When was the last time Sony or Microsoft launched their console at $x49?
Interesting. So I'm guessing SSD can erase and load games on to it much faster than HDD right?
Tbh I wouldn't mind this solution but I'd rather they just put a 1TB SSD and I can manage games. Make it replaceable like now but of course inform people it has to be an SSD that you replace it with. I usually only keep one or two games on there right now and I have a 1TB which is always about half full. I realize next gen games will be bigger so I may be closer to capacity but then by a year in they could be selling a 2tb version
The vita of course!!! Nothing could have deterred them from that more lol
It has to be a better solution that. Having to wait for games to transfer from a slow drive to the SSD would be way too clunky and not fast at all. The SSD really needs to be 1TB to to keep the transfering from becoming annoying.
How dumb would it be to get a ps4 right now? Games will be compatible so no problem there. I guess I only have to consider any imminent price drops and how much enjoyment I'll get out of it in the next 1.5 years. Do it or wait and just buy older games on the cheap?
I'm seriously considering selling of my ps4, saving up for a ps5, buying cheap all great ps4 games that will come out in the next 2 years and clean up my backlog in the mine time.
The advantage that Sony and MS have over PC in this regard is that they have a "ready to start" system in place for playing games while they are still downloading from the store.
My expectation would be that there would be a priority for transfer. It would start booting off the slow drive, anything loaded from the slow drive would be copied out to the fast drive, then anything from the "ready to start", then anything else. I bet you could get a good amount of the important files copied to the fast drive before a game gets to its title screen.