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Sony's New Patent for PS5 Could Eliminate Loading Screens Altogether
- Thread starter RevengeTaken
- Start date
If you've only gamed on consoles (like a PS4 Pro with aged tech) and never experienced an SSD, then yes it would be groundbreaking. This stuff has been around for years on PC.
Jak and Daxter released in 2001 ps2 open world game no loading screens 60fps ahead of its time!
Monster Hunter World on an SSD on PC is wonderful. Start mission -> loading screen appears for 1s -> Mission start
Not really no. What you are talking about has also been available on ps4 since it's release...
What are we supposed to be comparing this to?
I'd like to make a claim right now, it won't be.
Wirth's Law pretty much makes makes eliminating loading times impossible - software becomes slower (eg. bulkier, more performance heavy) as hardware becomes faster, cancelling out any gains. That was something noted back in 1995 and is still the case today - Photoshop and other programs still take seconds to load, just as they did a decade ago despite the orders of magnitude more faster hard drives and processor speeds we have nowadays, and that will probably still be the case a decade from now.
Super-fast SSDs will probably just mean devs can load even more data then they can before, eventually to the point of necessitating the use of loading screens regardless (or loading animations, as is the case for many modern games).
Also known as Andy and Bill's law - "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." With Andy being former Intel CEO Andy Grove, and Bill being Bill Gates.
Super-fast SSDs will probably just mean devs can load even more data then they can before, eventually to the point of necessitating the use of loading screens regardless (or loading animations, as is the case for many modern games).
Also known as Andy and Bill's law - "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." With Andy being former Intel CEO Andy Grove, and Bill being Bill Gates.
I don't think Sony is using a standard off-the-shelf SSD drive. It's a propietary tech. You don't see big open worlds, like Spiderman, loading under a second on PC. I just bought a NVMe drive, which is 6 times faster than a SSD (sata), but the loading times in games is almost identical. Go figure.
It depends on the game, but on average a big open world game takes 10-12 seconds to load on a SSD and NVMe. Very far from Sony's almost instant times.
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Most probably is just some NVMe storage thingy with some optimizations to maybe improve some small things.
That's what HZD does (and most modern open world games too I'd assume), you shoot a big cone in the direction you are looking, everything outside the view cone isn't fully loaded. I think it's just as much for performance as it is for removing unnecessary load screens.
I have no reason to believe this headline. They already showed us what loading on the PS5 is like. But minimal loading will be nice to have in The Witcher 3, those load screens are about 2 years long.
Nothing specific so far but it's very likely an NVMe under pcie4. This is all we know do so far:
"Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. That's not all. "The raw read speed is important," Cerny says, "but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster." As opposed to 19 times faster for the next-gen console, judging from the fast-travel demo."
The article has very little to do with the patent (filed in 2012 as a continuation of a filling from 2001).
Here's the actual patented invention:
This is the standard area/asset streaming that we all are now familiar with. There's nothing new here for 2019 (legally, everything here would have to be from 2012 at best, but it's all from 2001).
Here's the actual patented invention:
This is the standard area/asset streaming that we all are now familiar with. There's nothing new here for 2019 (legally, everything here would have to be from 2012 at best, but it's all from 2001).
That's rendering culling, something else entirely, the assets are already loaded and in memory, just not being rendered for performance optimization
You'd love the shit out of destiny 2 on ps4 then. Its infuriating.
The tech is limited by physics, no matter how proprietary it is. What certainly can be wholly different is the software layer on top of what is essentially a standard tech. Games which are made for slow HDDs won't show that much user experience change when being ran off even the fastest SSD out there but if you code the game for the capabilities of this SSD and you use it not just as a pure storage media then sure, you may get a lot of things which seems impossible right now.
And the loading isn't really limited by SSD speeds these days so you won't see many benefits from NVMe in loading speeds.
So yeah, they are comparing it to SSD's, which are much slower than NVMe's. Not false advertising, but no new tech either.
BTW, that demo isn't only to demonstrate the load times, but also how much faster spiderman could travel. In their Post-mortem GDC video about Spider-man the developer mentioned the world was divided in a grid and a specific amount of adjacent tiles in that grid could be loaded around spider-man's position. Because Spider-man moves so fast they had a specific budget (think of x amount of MB/s per tile) and the speed of how fast you could travel throughout the world was limited by that budget. Now this budget was made by testing how fast you could load in the data from the disk/hdd and process and render that within their target frame time. But it wasn't only that. They also had to do nifty tricks such as duplicating textures across the structure of their game s.t they would have a consistent seek time and that you wouldn't have to wait on the disk, which also increased the game size. (I'm typing this all from memory, so I could have made some mistakes). (gdc_talk), which also resembles what the patent is talking about.
With the advancement of the hardware for the PS5, where the SSD would primarily have an influence on how fast you could load data, I can see how they could possibly eliminate load times, which is an impressive achievement on consoles and maybe even have smaller games (The last part is my own speculation.)
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Which you know is going to happen at least on first party titles.
The SSD is kinda pointless in the vanilla PS4 because it's only SATA 2. i brought an SSD for my PS4 & found out shortly after how limited it was, just put it in my PC instead lol.
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Compare any of the new PCIe 4 enabled NVMe drives to the shitty HDD in the PS4 and you'll see "groundbreaking" results. We don't know if Cerny and Co. did anything beyond that, so maybe stop acting like a boot-licking fanboy.
No sure if this is a joke or sarcasm, because I love loading screens, too. I love them so much that I even wait 5 seconds before turning a page in a book so that I have simulated loading screens while I read. I even changed my laptops SSD with a slow HDD to have more loading times when opening word documents.
Uh no. What ps4 did has nothing to do with it. And neither talk of loading time at the time.
It's not just SSD magic that's giving PS5 such an improvement, it's also the fact that the PS4's CPU is a piece of shit (PC games on regular HDDs load considerably faster than PS4 games). It's still a crazy differecen though.
Most games could not possibly make it work because if how they operate. In all honesty, it's a massive gimmick. Now we will have to see what happens with this miraculous SSD solution of theirs.
And PS4 uses some proprietary USB storage controller, everything has to go though it. That's why sticking an SSD into PS4 does not unlock its full potential.
In practice though you will see a huge difference between HDD and SATA SSD due to a several orders of magnitude faster random pattern reads and you won't see almost any difference between SATA and NVMe SSDs unless you do the sequential read of dummy data test which is essentially a purely synthetic benchmark which you will only be able to see in real world when copying large amounts of data between two NVMe drives. And random reads on any SSDs aren't really limited by SATA speeds right now.SATA-2 -> 3 Gbps transfer rate ---- 300MB/s throughput
PCie-4 -> 15.8 Gbps transfer rate ---- at x4 lanes = 7.8GB/s throughput
Doesn't matter if you put SSD, if it goes throuh SATA it's gonna be slow still. NVMe throuh pcie-4 is where's at.
You k what? If this happens, I may miss loading screens (not loading times). I mean some loading screens are funny in games, some are funny videos like in spider-Man, some are interactive ones that can click on buttons to modiofy them like in DBZ games or Silent Hill 4 or others, there are even loading screens you collct for some games and are hard to unlock like in Fortnite and some are even animated. What will happen to those if they get elimintaed ?
I mean I saw what happened to Spider-Man and I don't like it at all because it toally eliminated a fun part of the game where loading are long funny videos.
They need to give us an option to eitehr keep them or completely delete them like how they gave us an option to improve PS1 games on PS2 and even running them ffastly which resulted in some winded dialogues like in Silent Hill which made the game unplayable. Some unexpected errors may happen so they don't need to fully eliminate them.
Too good can result in bad.
I mean I saw what happened to Spider-Man and I don't like it at all because it toally eliminated a fun part of the game where loading are long funny videos.
They need to give us an option to eitehr keep them or completely delete them like how they gave us an option to improve PS1 games on PS2 and even running them ffastly which resulted in some winded dialogues like in Silent Hill which made the game unplayable. Some unexpected errors may happen so they don't need to fully eliminate them.
Too good can result in bad.
While I agree with you in principle, phones tend to have pretty slow storage.
SATA-2 -> 3 Gbps transfer rate ---- 300MB/s throughput
PCie-4 -> 15.8 Gbps transfer rate ---- at x4 lanes = 7.8GB/s throughput
Doesn't matter if you put SSD, if it goes throuh SATA it's gonna be slow still. NVMe throuh pcie-4 is where's at.
There's no way the NAND used in the next Playstation is going to come close to saturating four PCIe 4.0 lanes.
And TBH,if they did whats in that patent they would have to make a custom SSD (probably soldered to the board), and with PCIe4, you can already hit a max of 7.something GB/s (current drives are are cresting 5) with off the shelf parts.
I mean it may still happen, but they can probably achieve similar results without resorting to making their own silicon.
And to top it off, the current console systems cap a lot of expected IO to the lowest common denominator, which is probably random-reads on a 2.5in HD, and somewhere like 30MB/s right now.SATA-2 -> 3 Gbps transfer rate ---- 300MB/s throughput
PCie-4 -> 15.8 Gbps transfer rate ---- at x4 lanes = 7.8GB/s throughput
Doesn't matter if you put SSD, if it goes throuh SATA it's gonna be slow still. NVMe throuh pcie-4 is where's at.
I still can't understand why couldn't they adopt PCIe 5.0 instead of PCie 4.0. PCIe 5.0 is already here and by the time of the release of the consoles PCIe 6.0 will be nearing release.
5 and 6 are YEARS off from being in systems. Look at when 4.0 was announced to basically next month when you can buy it.
Lmao the thing isn't even out yet and people acting like Cerny miraculously delivered some unprecedented tech that has never before existed in the entire universe in a $400 box.
Huh. dunno what you are talking about: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1455...-again-pcie-60-announced-spec-to-land-in-2021
- PCIe 4.0 : 2017
- PCIe 5.0 : 2019
- PCIe 6.0 : 2021