VG24/7: Developers making Xbox Series X games will learn to address PS5’s SSD advantage, says ex-Xbox lead

[Calabi]

The speed advantage of PS5 is factor 2, isn't it? If the next area can be loaded in a time that one cannot feel on PS5, then XSX should take twice that time, so an elevator would be quite a lot to compensate. A longer hallway is probably a more reasonable solution.

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Its not its faster than that, as Cerny said in his talk you cant take advantage of the higher bandwidth speeds because of the antiquated and non efficient IO systems. As far as we know and according to developers that are praising Sony's IO speed Microsoft does not have all the IO systems that Sony does. Which means it will be more than a 2 factor. It might just be 2 seconds vs 5 or 6 seconds or maybe longer.

 

[RogerL]

Just because you've head the PS5's SSD features detailed does not mean that the Xbox doesn't have similar features.

And some of the things you're saying don't make any sense. And it's full of random speculation.

"The 2.5gbs speed on the Xbox series X means it can fill the memory roughly that fast but doesn't mean it can use it immediately." No. If it is in memory, it can be used immediately.

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It is not clear how data is uncompressed...

Is it uncompressed as it loads from SSD (decompress during load: 1 SSD Read, 1 RAM Write, like PS5)
or is it first stored compressed in memory
then uncompressed by Decompressor HW to other memory location (load: 1 SSD Read, 1 RAM Write - CPU GDDR6, decompress: 1 RAM Read - CPU GDDR6, 1 RAM Write GPU DDR6)

EDIT: What about priorities? Are CPU deciding what to load what to decompress on XSX, but hardware scheduled on PS5. Can the PS5 IO-subsystem be on demand from GPU?

I tried to find XSX block schemes yesterday to determine this but failed, anyone?

 

[Dr Guildo]

PS5 has to take the stairs
/jk

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I would be shocked if most third party developers would not just develop their games for the lowest common denominator. I mean, there's literally 0 chance that levels will get changed just because the PS5 can load them faster, simply because it's way too expensive and work intensive to do that.

The super fast PS5 SSD is nice for first party, but it won't make any economical sense to heavily adjust your games to suit one particular platform. On PCs and the Xbox, you'll have to work with what's there. So it's 2 platforms against 1. The scenario pointed out in the OP is highly unlikely.

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In fact, it is quite easy for a third dev making the XsX to keep up super fast PS5's SSD speed by dividing by two the assets' size.

 

[Dr Guildo]

At lower res and lower ray tracing than Series X

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For the res, what if I told you DF is no more able to count the pixels as it was the case for the UE5 demo ?
Native 4K is a waste of ressources since even DF can't tell the diff.

 

[Dr Guildo]

Its not its faster than that, as Cerny said in his talk you cant take advantage of the higher bandwidth speeds because of the antiquated and non efficient IO systems. As far as we know and according to developers that are praising Sony's IO speed Microsoft does not have all the IO systems that Sony does. Which means it will be more than a 2 factor. It might just be 2 seconds vs 5 or 6 seconds or maybe longer.

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This is pretty much that. IO complex in PS5 is as important as the SSD. SSD without IO complex means shit.

 

[Dee Harp]

3rd Parties will not be the studios that push either hardware. For a 3rd parties simply consistently streaming data at 100 mb/s is a huge jump up. What we need so see the true capabilities of these system is 1st party support. If Sony show something that looking amazing on Thursday that take advantage of the technology then no one is going to care about theoretical performance.

 

[panda-zebra]

Is it uncompressed as it loads from SSD (decompress during load: 1 SSD Read, 1 RAM Write, like PS5)

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yes

or is it first stored compressed in memory then uncompressed by Decompressor HW to other memory location (load: 1 SSD Read, 1 RAM Write - CPU GDDR6, decompress: 1 RAM Read - CPU GDDR6, 1 RAM Write GPU DDR6)

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no, otherwise they would not be able to claim 4.8mbps compressed vs 2.4mbps raw.

 

[Dr Pears]

The wondrous thing here is that we've seen this exact same thing in the past, but people are still building castle in the sky ideas about what'll happen this time around. The PS3 on paper was quite a bit more powerful than the X360 - IF you chose to fully indulge in their hardware choices, use all the SPUs, etc. But there was a lot of cost and development time involved with that. So what did Third Party's do? They completely ignored the extra potential power the PS3 might have had and instead opted for developing the same game across multiple platforms: PC, X360, PS3 at the time.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love for the SSD speeds the PS5 will apparently have to be the standard for all devices, but that just won't be the case. So my guess is that we'll see the PS5 winning in terms of loading times and the X1SX usually featuring higher resolutions and / or better framerates. And then it's up to gamers to decide what's more important to them. But will third party devs significantly alter their games to fully make use of one particular hardware config? No, of course not. It's hard enough to design great levels as it is, the last thing you want as a developer is to now having to change content just because potentially on some hardware you could stream things in instead of showing a loading screen. The more realistic thing to have happen here is that most third party devs will still opt to show the loading screen, but it'll take 5 seconds for X1SX to load the next batch of content, whereas the PS5 only needs 3 seconds. That's it.

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But one huge difference is that the PS3 Cell/SPU Architecture was notoriously difficult to develop and take advantage of and was released late in comparison to its competitor right? Whereas the PS5 seem to be designed with developers ease of use in mind and releasing with already one of the biggest 3rd Party Engine taking advantage of the IO architecture, Unreal Engine 5, so I'd imagine third parties will have an easier time taking advantage of the SSD and making it their lead platform.

 

[BAD]

For the res, what if I told you DF is no more able to count the pixels as it was the case for the UE5 demo ?
Native 4K is a waste of ressources since even DF can't tell the diff.

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ok... there are plenty of cases where they can spot the difference between which game isn't native and which is when they get to see both so a PS5 exclusive demo is not grounds to dismiss differences in projects we will see on both systems eventually... and there are still other things beyond resolution that Series X is better positioned for, like ray tracing as mentioned.

and frankly, we still have no reason to think devs have plans for systems and assets that will hit a wall on Series X in the foreseeable future that they wouldn't hit on PS5 due to SSD. PS5 has great potential, but we also almost certainly know it will hardly be a factor in Multiplatform when games are coming to PC where even Series X has too fast of an SSD to use retail models you'd find for PC.

I'd be happy if devs were even used to hitting the limits of retail speed SSDs as the gen starts, but we aren't there at all and to talk like they need even more than the higher speed Series X SSD is not using actual context. We don't know that we'll see Series X fall short using its beyond standard SSD speed, yet people are desperate to act like they've seen it make a difference and that they just know devs won't end up with two drives that are so fast they instantaneously accomplish the best speed on every asset they worked on.

 

[thomasmahler]

But one huge difference is that the PS3 Cell/SPU Architecture was notoriously difficult to develop and take advantage of and was released late in comparison to its competitor right? Whereas the PS5 seem to be designed with developers ease of use in mind and releasing with already one of the biggest 3rd Party Engine taking advantage of the IO architecture, Unreal Engine 5, so I'd imagine third parties will have an easier time taking advantage of the SSD and making it their lead platform.

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Everyone will take advantage of it, sure, why wouldn't you? It's the same as on PCs. You have a nice and fast SSD in X1SX and then you have a crazy fast SSD with some other stuff that allows you to shuffle data into RAM even faster on PS5. So that's awesome for the PS5 and I don't in any way want to downplay how awesome that is. My example before of 5s loads vs. 3s loads might've also downplayed that - but now scale that by 10. 50s loads vs. 30s loads would immediately make a game much more enjoyable on PS5. That said, with these super fast SSDs, I sure as shit hope that nobody will build stuff that takes THIS long to load anymore, but time will tell.

Now, let's say that the average load time with those SSDs on next-gen will be 10 seconds. And let's be generous and say that the PS5 SSD and throughput is twice as fast as X1SX - At that point you'd have 10s load times vs. 5s load times (keep in mind that loading often is more than just shuffling data around, so this isn't in any way accurate). I don't know if I'd care that much about 5 seconds saved every time I load if what I give up for that is framerate or resolution. And I guess that's the bet that Microsoft made here - more raw power rather than faster data transfer.

Now, it's clear that the Sony First Party devs will design their games around the crazy SSD and ensure that everything's smooth and juicy all the time and that you don't even see loading screens at all and that's great. But assuming that third parties will change their games completely, adjust levels and other stuff just to squeeze the most out of the PS5 architecture is just nutty. It won't happen. So again, what I think will be the usual case is that you'll see X1SX games render at 4k more regularly and / or at better framerates and on PS5 games will load faster. Players will have to decide what's more important to them.

Btw, one thing that'll suck for all of us is that 1TB is just too small nowadays, so prepare for housekeeping a lot more, at least until new console iterations appear with larger SSDs. The recent Call of Duty weighed in at like 170gb... So I doubt you'll be able to have more than 10-15 games or so simultaneously on your machine. Meh.

 

[BradGrenz]

I mean, sure, it might be a bit of a stretch to compare the two, since the super fast IO will be used by everyone automatically and will be a super nice bonus to have (50%+ faster load times would be HUGE!), but will games be specifically adjusted to make use of the IO to a degree where other platforms would have to suffer? I'd argue no, there's 0 chance that'll happen.

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Well, if engines are going the way of Unreal 5, they won't have to do anything to take advantage. You load in the original max quality art assets and the engine manages everything else. Anytime you are storage limited on XSX you will automatically be getting higher quality assets to screen on the PS5. Thinking in terms of "load times" is itself pretty short sighted.

 

[Prine]

The wondrous thing here is that we've seen this exact same thing in the past, but people are still building castle in the sky ideas about what'll happen this time around. The PS3 on paper was quite a bit more powerful than the X360 - IF you chose to fully indulge in their hardware choices, use all the SPUs, etc. But there was a lot of cost and development time involved with that. So what did Third Party's do? They completely ignored the extra potential power the PS3 might have had and instead opted for developing the same game across multiple platforms: PC, X360, PS3 at the time.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love for the SSD speeds the PS5 will apparently have to be the standard for all devices, but that just won't be the case. So my guess is that we'll see the PS5 winning in terms of loading times and the X1SX usually featuring higher resolutions and / or better framerates. And then it's up to gamers to decide what's more important to them. But will third party devs significantly alter their games to fully make use of one particular hardware config? No, of course not. It's hard enough to design great levels as it is, the last thing you want as a developer is to now having to change content just because potentially on some hardware you could stream things in instead of showing a loading screen. The more realistic thing to have happen here is that most third party devs will still opt to show the loading screen, but it'll take 5 seconds for X1SX to load the next batch of content, whereas the PS5 only needs 3 seconds. That's it.

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Thanks for taking your time to post here. Good to get real insight from someone with experience and expertise in shipping games, even more so given how well received your games have been.

 

[BlueManifest]

Everyone will take advantage of it, sure, why wouldn't you? It's the same as on PCs. You have a nice and fast SSD in X1SX and then you have a crazy fast SSD with some other stuff that allows you to shuffle data into RAM even faster on PS5. So that's awesome for the PS5 and I don't in any way want to downplay how awesome that is. My example before of 5s loads vs. 3s loads might've also downplayed that - but now scale that by 10. 50s loads vs. 30s loads would immediately make a game much more enjoyable on PS5. That said, with these super fast SSDs, I sure as shit hope that nobody will build stuff that takes THIS long to load anymore, but time will tell.

Now, let's say that the average load time with those SSDs on next-gen will be 10 seconds. And let's be generous and say that the PS5 SSD and throughput is twice as fast as X1SX - At that point you'd have 10s load times vs. 5s load times (keep in mind that loading often is more than just shuffling data around, so this isn't in any way accurate). I don't know if I'd care that much about 5 seconds saved every time I load if what I give up for that is framerate or resolution. And I guess that's the bet that Microsoft made here - more raw power rather than faster data transfer.

Now, it's clear that the Sony First Party devs will design their games around the crazy SSD and ensure that everything's smooth and juicy all the time and that you don't even see loading screens at all and that's great. But assuming that third parties will change their games completely, adjust levels and other stuff just to squeeze the most out of the PS5 architecture is just nutty. It won't happen. So again, what I think will be the usual case is that you'll see X1SX games render at 4k more regularly and / or at better framerates and on PS5 games will load faster. Players will have to decide what's more important to them.

Btw, one thing that'll suck for all of us is that 1TB is just too small nowadays, so prepare for housekeeping a lot more, at least until new console iterations appear with larger SSDs. The recent Call of Duty weighed in at like 170gb... So I doubt you'll be able to have more than 10-15 games or so simultaneously on your machine. Meh.

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I rather have better fps and res than 5 seconds saved

 

[severianb]

ahhh that takes me back. lol there was a thread of untold length on the other forum where one poster would not let the whole rapid packed math FP16 thing go. I also remember countless youtube videos on it as well where this feature was extolled and signaled as the item that would help propel the pro past the xbox one x (I may be wrong, but I also seem to remember people saying that the X was not a 6TF machine due to FP16 or something or other....fun times)

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Oh, I remember that *definitely* happened. It was *identical* to the talk about the OG Xbox One ESRAM and the current talk about the PS5 SSD. All of them were going to overcome GPU/CPU advantages. Jury is still out on the SSD.

 

[Jaypah]

Well, if engines are going the way of Unreal 5, they won't have to do anything to take advantage. You load in the original max quality art assets and the engine manages everything else. Anytime you are storage limited on XSX you will automatically be getting higher quality assets to screen on the PS5. Thinking in terms of "load times" is itself pretty short sighted.

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"The super fast IO will be used by everyone automatically" Seems like you're agreeing. It's not like UE5 will automatically create an elevator in the XSX version or level design that just wouldn't work on that platform. So the speed will be taken advantage of but not "to a degree where other platforms would have to suffer". Unless you consider lower quality assets suffering, which considering the extremes that have previously been discussed (elevators and compromised level design) seems like business as usual.

 

[Uzupedro]

I rather have better fps and res than 5 seconds saved

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I think the difference will be small enough to become a completely optional exchange. On PS5 you get 1 ~ 3 seconds of load time and slightly better LODs, and on XSX a slight improvement in resolution and performance.
Like, you're not wrong to make that choice, just adding a little bit of what I think.

 

[RoninChaos]

I know this is "thread-whining", but I'm getting tired of all these kinds of discussions.

Just show us some games man. They will look and run amazing on both consoles, I'm very sure of that. I just want to see results.

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Gotta say, I'm with you. These SSD speeds feel like "the power of the cloud" bullshit we used to hear. Just show me the fucking games and we can go from there. I care more about frame rate than seeing blades of grass 500 yards in the distance. Show me how this will actually affect games. Show me. This isn't the jump from Atari to PS4 like people keep making it out to be.

 

[BlastProcessing]

I rather have better fps and res than 5 seconds saved

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How do you feel about texture quality and pop in?

 

[bcatwilly]

Btw, one thing that'll suck for all of us is that 1TB is just too small nowadays, so prepare for housekeeping a lot more, at least until new console iterations appear with larger SSDs. The recent Call of Duty weighed in at like 170gb... So I doubt you'll be able to have more than 10-15 games or so simultaneously on your machine. Meh.

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Thanks for the insights Thomas, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps is GOTY quality awesome too by the way! One interesting thing about the PS5 SSD is that it is only 865 GB compared to 1 TB on the Xbox Series X, which is some TBD number of games less that can be installed on the drive at one time. And I really like the small external 1 TB expansion drive option for the Series X (hoping no more than $150) for anyone that wants to expand space further with the same performance specs as the internal drive, and it would be kinda fun to be able to take that little external drive to my brother's house or wherever to play my games without any hassle.

 

[scrapple]

1 second vs 5 seconds.... its all good.

 

[Jaypah]

Thanks for the insights Thomas, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps is GOTY quality awesome too by the way! One interesting thing about the PS5 SSD is that it is only 865 GB compared to 1 TB on the Xbox Series X, which is some TBD number of games less that can be installed on the drive at one time. And I really like the small external 1 TB expansion drive option for the Series X (hoping no more than $150) for anyone that wants to expand space further with the same performance specs as the internal drive, and it would be kinda fun to be able to take that little external drive to my brother's house or wherever to play my games without any hassle.

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I think that's a reasonable trade-off for what you gain with Sony's solution. It's not like it's half the size of the XSX drive. That would have been pretty bad.

 

[BlueManifest]

How do you feel about texture quality and pop in?

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Doubt I'll notice

 

[Kazooie]

Its not its faster than that, as Cerny said in his talk you cant take advantage of the higher bandwidth speeds because of the antiquated and non efficient IO systems. As far as we know and according to developers that are praising Sony's IO speed Microsoft does not have all the IO systems that Sony does. Which means it will be more than a 2 factor. It might just be 2 seconds vs 5 or 6 seconds or maybe longer.

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2 seconds is way too long anyway for the discussed streaming system anyway. 2 seconds will necessitate a loading screen or loading masking (elevator, hallway) at which point the solution for Xbox SX is immediate, no matter if it is factor 2, resulting in 4 seconds, or factor 3, resulting in 6 seconds: A longer load screen than on PS5. It can only really get critical for game design if the amount of data required is just barely small enough to be processed by PS5 in time for the next frame, meaning that XSX cannot keep up with the data streaming speed and would have to reduce quality of assets streamed in (at first).

 

[BlastProcessing]

Doubt I'll notice

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That's cool, different people notice different things. Personally, pop in and muddy textures drive me absolutely batty. It's nice that we have the potential for different platforms to be better fits for different people.

 

[Iwao]

Everyone will take advantage of it, sure, why wouldn't you? It's the same as on PCs. You have a nice and fast SSD in X1SX and then you have a crazy fast SSD with some other stuff that allows you to shuffle data into RAM even faster on PS5. So that's awesome for the PS5 and I don't in any way want to downplay how awesome that is. My example before of 5s loads vs. 3s loads might've also downplayed that - but now scale that by 10. 50s loads vs. 30s loads would immediately make a game much more enjoyable on PS5. That said, with these super fast SSDs, I sure as shit hope that nobody will build stuff that takes THIS long to load anymore, but time will tell.

Now, let's say that the average load time with those SSDs on next-gen will be 10 seconds. And let's be generous and say that the PS5 SSD and throughput is twice as fast as X1SX - At that point you'd have 10s load times vs. 5s load times (keep in mind that loading often is more than just shuffling data around, so this isn't in any way accurate). I don't know if I'd care that much about 5 seconds saved every time I load if what I give up for that is framerate or resolution. And I guess that's the bet that Microsoft made here - more raw power rather than faster data transfer.

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PS5 has been designed to nearly eliminate load times, and I suspect that is going to be one of their marketing points. The resolution and frame rate differences between consoles are likely going to be more imperceptible than they ever have been which makes asserting the importance of that over a seamless experience odd to me. There's also some possibility of the PS5 version also having better LOD and things like that which I think would be more noticable than comparisons between a native 4K image and a temporal / checkerboard image. More and more developers are going to opt for those kinds of resolutions to unlock more performance instead of being wasteful with native 4K.

In my view, having no load times will be a revelation and having even a few seconds more than that repeatedly within your game after you've adjusted would become irritating. To be honest, I don't think raw power is a "bet" that Microsoft has made at all - I just don't think they have sensed the desires of developers as well as Sony. SSD was the #1 ask and they doubled down on it whilst eliminating the necessary bottlenecks, and still having a very capable and efficiently designed APU.

 

[Godzilla24]

I rather have better fps and res than 5 seconds saved

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Same I also choose better fps and resolution.

 

[Calabi]

2 seconds is way too long anyway for the discussed streaming system anyway. 2 seconds will necessitate a loading screen or loading masking (elevator, hallway) at which point the solution for Xbox SX is immediate, no matter if it is factor 2, resulting in 4 seconds, or factor 3, resulting in 6 seconds: A longer load screen than on PS5. It can only really get critical for game design if the amount of data required is just barely small enough to be processed by PS5 in time for the next frame, meaning that XSX cannot keep up with the data streaming speed and would have to reduce quality of assets streamed in (at first).

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Exactly, I agree, its not going to make much of a difference to the games if they are on both consoles. Developers aren't going to make problems for themselves by designing their assets and content to the streaming potential of the PS5. They will design around the Xbox Series X and that will have minor corridors and lifts, and level loading screens and so both will.

I'm curious if open world games will be different though because they should surely have opportunity's to optimise there and increase the distance detail and asset loading on the PS5 version, and which shouldn't be to difficult to do.

 

[Dokkaebi G0SU]

Damn, i bet that felt good.

Bruh, SSD is the KEY to it all. i see the light now. money has moved.

 

[lukeskymac]

Hey so now that everyone's cool with assuming that the SSD difference in multiplats is going to be just 2 seconds vs 4 seconds load times, does that mean that you're all also cool with assuming that the GPU difference in multiplats just means 2160p vs 1989p? Because when people point that out the response usually isn't this accepting...

 

[Gitaroo]

If this helps texture streaming and lower the texture pop in, that is also good.

 

[jroc74]

Hey so now that everyone's cool with assuming that the SSD difference in multiplats is going to be just 2 seconds vs 4 seconds load times, does that mean that you're all also cool with assuming that the GPU difference in multiplats just means 2160p vs 1989p? Because when people point that out the response usually isn't this accepting...

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You do have a point, lol

 

[platocplx]

Hey so now that everyone's cool with assuming that the SSD difference in multiplats is going to be just 2 seconds vs 4 seconds load times, does that mean that you're all also cool with assuming that the GPU difference in multiplats just means 2160p vs 1989p? Because when people point that out the response usually isn't this accepting...

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Lmao! Very curious to see how they feel about that.

 

[Prototype Viktor]

The return of elevators? I hope not.

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Adds in escalators

 

[Deleted member 60993]

Did someone say elevators...

https://twitter.com/jeffrubenstein/status/1171233238326472704?s=20

 

[Kyoufu]

Hey so now that everyone's cool with assuming that the SSD difference in multiplats is going to be just 2 seconds vs 4 seconds load times, does that mean that you're all also cool with assuming that the GPU difference in multiplats just means 2160p vs 1989p? Because when people point that out the response usually isn't this accepting...

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Not going to notice higher quality assets but he'll definitely notice 2160p vs 1989p 🤔

Everyone will take advantage of it, sure, why wouldn't you? It's the same as on PCs. You have a nice and fast SSD in X1SX and then you have a crazy fast SSD with some other stuff that allows you to shuffle data into RAM even faster on PS5. So that's awesome for the PS5 and I don't in any way want to downplay how awesome that is. My example before of 5s loads vs. 3s loads might've also downplayed that - but now scale that by 10. 50s loads vs. 30s loads would immediately make a game much more enjoyable on PS5. That said, with these super fast SSDs, I sure as shit hope that nobody will build stuff that takes THIS long to load anymore, but time will tell.

Now, let's say that the average load time with those SSDs on next-gen will be 10 seconds. And let's be generous and say that the PS5 SSD and throughput is twice as fast as X1SX - At that point you'd have 10s load times vs. 5s load times (keep in mind that loading often is more than just shuffling data around, so this isn't in any way accurate). I don't know if I'd care that much about 5 seconds saved every time I load if what I give up for that is framerate or resolution. And I guess that's the bet that Microsoft made here - more raw power rather than faster data transfer.

Now, it's clear that the Sony First Party devs will design their games around the crazy SSD and ensure that everything's smooth and juicy all the time and that you don't even see loading screens at all and that's great. But assuming that third parties will change their games completely, adjust levels and other stuff just to squeeze the most out of the PS5 architecture is just nutty. It won't happen. So again, what I think will be the usual case is that you'll see X1SX games render at 4k more regularly and / or at better framerates and on PS5 games will load faster. Players will have to decide what's more important to them.

Btw, one thing that'll suck for all of us is that 1TB is just too small nowadays, so prepare for housekeeping a lot more, at least until new console iterations appear with larger SSDs. The recent Call of Duty weighed in at like 170gb... So I doubt you'll be able to have more than 10-15 games or so simultaneously on your machine. Meh.

Click to shrink...

To be honest it's disappointing to see a developer such as yourself boil the I/O down to just load times of 10 seconds vs 5 seconds. I'd hope that developers who put the SSD in their top requested hardware feature actually make better use of them than just load times.

 

[lukeskymac]

Not going to notice higher quality assets but he'll definitely notice 2160p vs 1989p 🤔

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It is going to be fascinating seeing people claiming to be pixel peepers when even DF is going to have a hard time.

To be honest it's disappointing to see a developer such as yourself boil the I/O down to just load times of 10 seconds vs 5 seconds. I'd hope that developers who put the SSD in their top requested hardware feature actually make better use of them than just load times.

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Well, not every type of game needs that much I/O, so maybe that really is the extent of what they'll get out of it. I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[j^aws]

Now, let's say that the average load time with those SSDs on next-gen will be 10 seconds. And let's be generous and say that the PS5 SSD and throughput is twice as fast as X1SX - At that point you'd have 10s load times vs. 5s load times (keep in mind that loading often is more than just shuffling data around, so this isn't in any way accurate). I don't know if I'd care that much about 5 seconds saved every time I load if what I give up for that is framerate or resolution. And I guess that's the bet that Microsoft made here - more raw power rather than faster data transfer.

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I hear this a lot, where concession to SSD IO for PS5 is better resolution for XSX, when PS5 has a higher pixel fillrate for resolution, what makes this a given?

 

[Kyoufu]

Well, not every type of game needs that much I/O, so maybe that really is the extent of what they'll get out of it. I wouldn't worry about it.

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Right. I'm not expecting Ori 3 to make use of that kind of speed, but for AAA projects I hope developers will use what they have to make the best possible product.

 

[Yerffej]

I hear this a lot, where concession to SSD IO for PS5 is better resolution for XSX, when PS5 has a higher pixel fillrate for resolution, what makes this a given?

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I don't remember hearing anything about pixel fillrate. Where was that talked about?

 

[pg2g]

To be honest it's disappointing to see a developer such as yourself boil the I/O down to just load times of 10 seconds vs 5 seconds. I'd hope that developers who put the SSD in their top requested hardware feature actually make better use of them than just load times.

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I don't think he is boiling it down to just loading times. He is saying that third party games will cater to thr lowest common denominator and after that you'll likely get the automatic benefits (like faster loading). Seems reasonable to me, dont we all expect that itll be the first party exclusives that really push yhe SSD?

 

[GSG]

I'm actually really excited that we're getting some differences between the platforms again. The PS4, X1 and the PC were essentially the same thing in terms of architecture.

 

[Kyoufu]

I don't think he is boiling it down to just loading times. He is saying that third party games will cater to thr lowest common denominator and after that you'll likely get the automatic benefits (like faster loading). Seems reasonable to me, dont we all expect that itll be the first party exclusives that really push yhe SSD?

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I expect 1st party devs to push it to the absolute maximum, yes, but I still expect 3rd party developers to use the extra speed in meaningful, albeit not as impressive ways perhaps. I don't see an entire generation where the only difference between an XSX game and a PS5 game is just load times. That would be underwhelming.

 

[pg2g]

I expect 1st party devs to push it to the absolute maximum, yes, but I still expect 3rd party developers to use the extra speed in meaningful, albeit not as impressive ways perhaps. I don't see an entire generation where the only difference between an XSX game and a PS5 game is just load times. That would be underwhelming.

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Well, increasing texture quality would also be a pretty hassle free way to do it.

 

[Apathy]

I expect 1st party devs to push it to the absolute maximum, yes, but I still expect 3rd party developers to use the extra speed in meaningful, albeit not as impressive ways perhaps. I don't see an entire generation where the only difference between an XSX game and a PS5 game is just load times. That would be underwhelming.

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He seems like thinking inside the box. Of course third party games are going to try and expand their creative chops with the ssd. They will just add whatever is required to have it run on the slower ssd

 

[Deleted member 50658]

It is going to be fascinating seeing people claiming to be pixel peepers when even DF is going to have a hard time.

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They even hinted that they have to start looking at other things this gen after seeing the UE5 demo and it's reconstruction method.

 

[j^aws]

I don't remember hearing anything about pixel fillrate. Where was that talked about?

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Everyone keeps harping on about CUs and TFs, whilst neglecting the rest of the GPU snd what scales with clockrate.

Extrapolating from AMDs RDNA1, the GPUs ROP capabilities are 64 pixels per cycle from 16 RBs outputting 4 pixels each:

XSX:
64 x 1.825GHz ~ 116.8 Giga pixels per second

PS5:
64 x 2.23GHz ~ 142.7 Giga pixels per second

The XSX does have higher bandwidth to its framebuffer and TFs not to be shader limited, though. Without knowing internal bottlenecks, it isn't that clear cut.

 

[lukeskymac]

Everyone keeps harping on about CUs and TFs, whilst neglecting the rest of the GPU snd what scales with clockrate.

Extrapolating from AMDs RDNA1, the GPUs ROP capabilities are 64 pixels per cycle from 16 RBs outputting 4 pixels each:

XSX:
64 x 1.825GHz ~ 116.8 Giga pixels per second

PS5:
64 x 2.23GHz ~ 142.7 Giga pixels per second

The XSX does have higher bandwidth to its framebuffer and TFs not to be shader limited, though. Without knowing internal bottlenecks, it isn't that clear cut.

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We don't know if they have the same amount of ROPs though. I know at least one site posted as much, but it was speculation as far as I know.

 

[Deleted member 14080]

I would be shocked if most third party developers would not just develop their games for the lowest common denominator. I mean, there's literally 0 chance that levels will get changed just because the PS5 can load them faster, simply because it's way too expensive and work intensive to do that.

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For Switch?

 

[pg2g]

He seems like thinking inside the box. Of course third party games are going to try and expand their creative chops with the ssd. They will just add whatever is required to have it run on the slower ssd

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Third parties are not going to design games around capabilities that don't exist on XSX and (likely) won't be required for PC. That doesn't mean their won't be benefits though.

 

[j^aws]

We don't know if they have the same amount of ROPs though. I know at least one site posted as much, but it was speculation as far as I know.

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Well, that's one of my points with all the automatic resolution concession talking. You can extrapolate a lot more from RDNA1 architecture papers, including internal cache bandwidths, culling rates, rasterisation and geometry processing being higher for PS5 as well. RDNA1 does 64 pixels per cycle for ROPs from AMD literature, so is a good assumption consoles follow the same.