PS5 SSD hype... PC?

MrMonolitas

So far i have not been interested in console wars, but recently this hype get caught with me. The AMAZING ps5 fast loading. I been trying to search what make it so special and when it would be available, if ever, on desktops. And why we still dont have that already? Is it overhyped thing or i can do the same on current technology?

Vrika

If you want to, something like Samsung 980 Pro SSD together with motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 can load even faster than PS5.
 
At least in theory. Fastest SSDs are already so fast that most of the time bottleneck is elsewhere.

Ridelynn

Funny thing - the Xbox is benching faster than the PS5 right now.

Probably has to do with XB CPU being clocked a good deal faster rather than any difference in SSD architecture

Both are, in general terms, nvme PCI 4 SSDs

MrMonolitas

Vrika said:

If you want to, something like Samsung 980 Pro SSD together with motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 can load even faster than PS5.
 
At least in theory. Fastest SSDs are already so fast that most of the time bottleneck is elsewhere.

Hm, so its because 4.0 PCle it can reach relatively no loading screens? I have 3.0 and it is not that fast. But what bottle neck could SSD would have?  

Vrika

MrMonolitas said:

Vrika said:

If you want to, something like Samsung 980 Pro SSD together with motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 can load even faster than PS5.
 
At least in theory. Fastest SSDs are already so fast that most of the time bottleneck is elsewhere.

Hm, so its because 4.0 PCle it can reach relatively no loading screens? I have 3.0 and it is not that fast. But what bottle neck could SSD would have?  

Loading involves more stuff than just reading data from SSD. Once you already have an SSD, that other stuff usually takes more time than actual reading of data, and at that point getting a faster SSD will have only small benefits.

Look at this article to see how much faster a fast SSD can load games:
  https://www.techspot.com/review/2116-storage-speed-game-loading/

Cuddleheart

MrMonolitas said:

Vrika said:

If you want to, something like Samsung 980 Pro SSD together with motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 can load even faster than PS5.
 
At least in theory. Fastest SSDs are already so fast that most of the time bottleneck is elsewhere.

Hm, so its because 4.0 PCle it can reach relatively no loading screens? I have 3.0 and it is not that fast. But what bottle neck could SSD would have?  

If I'm not mistaken, the instant loading screens aren't actually "loading" instantly, but rather the games are being optimized for the speed of the SSD and the cache that it has.  I was told that, for example, in the Ratchet and Clank game, the game is designed to try to precache the next area you will be in.  Since most of the "loading" has been done and stored in cache (and it still is VERY fast), the game gives the illusion of "instant" loading.

I could be off, but this is what I've been lead to understand about it.

Quizzical

If you know that all of your players have a PCI Express 4.0 SSD, 16 GB of memory, and a fast 8-core CPU, it allows you to do things that make use of all of that hardware that you wouldn't dare do if a game has to run on potentially much lower specs on a PC.

It's probably something akin to what Cuddleheart said:  loading one stage while you're playing the previous.  But that relies on having ample hardware to do it.

If you know that your normal game can run on 12 GB, and loading each stage takes less than 4 GB, then you've got plenty of space to load it ahead of time.  But if you try to load a 3 GB stage on a PC that only has 8 GB of memory, you run out of memory and things fall apart.

Similarly, if you know that your game runs fine while only using 6 of the 8 CPU cores, then it's fine to use two cores for loading the next stage.  If you try to do that on a PC that only has four cores, you've overloaded the CPU and frame rates plummet.

And that's without even relying upon the speed of the SSD, which they probably are.

Cleffy

With smart game design the player shouldn't see a loading screen in a modern game. Some companies like to have loading art so...
With a console you are talking about a mission focused device that cuts out any fluff to deliver a specific experience.

Vrika

Cleffy said:

With smart game design the player shouldn't see a loading screen in a modern game. Some companies like to have loading art so...
With a console you are talking about a mission focused device that cuts out any fluff to deliver a specific experience.

There are still some situations where loading screen is a good option. Good design decreases the loading screens, but going to the extreme and trying to remove them completely is a bit of an overkill.

Also a good loading screen is often better than some animation that's placed there to give the game time to load.

Quizzical

Cleffy said:

With smart game design the player shouldn't see a loading screen in a modern game. Some companies like to have loading art so...
With a console you are talking about a mission focused device that cuts out any fluff to deliver a specific experience.

You can eliminate loading screens in situations where you know ahead of time where the player is going to go next.  But you can't really do that in situations where it's unpredictable where the player will go.

For starters, consider what happens when loading the game in the first place.  Unless the console knew ahead of time which game the player would want to play and loaded it before the player asked to play it, you're going to have some loading time.

Or consider what happens when players are allowed to instantly warp to absolutely any location in the game.  That means that absolutely anything could need to be loaded, and you're going to need a loading screen or something equivalent in order to make that work.

Cleffy

The hardware in  the PS5 can load 5 gigs in a second. In what situation would you need enough time to display a loading screen even if the player is loading into a random area? Even considering loading a save, it shouldn't take more than a couple seconds.

Vrika

Cleffy said:

The hardware in  the PS5 can load 5 gigs in a second. In what situation would you need enough time to display a loading screen even if the player is loading into a random area? Even considering loading a save, it shouldn't take more than a couple seconds.

PS5 hardware can load 5 gigs a second if it's reading a single data block in sequence. If it has to do 10 000 different small reads for different objects that make up the area it can do nowhere near that.

If it needs to process player's save file or generate something procedurally then its hard disk reading speed doesn't even matter because it's more bottlenecked by CPU speed.

Quizzical

Cleffy said:

The hardware in  the PS5 can load 5 gigs in a second. In what situation would you need enough time to display a loading screen even if the player is loading into a random area? Even considering loading a save, it shouldn't take more than a couple seconds.

There is a lot more to loading a game than just reading data in from disk.  We often focus on that because it was commonly the bottleneck back when everyone used hard drives.  But there is typically a lot of CPU work to set things up, too.

If you open task manager and watch the disk usage when loading a game, you're likely to see that disk usage is effectively zero for parts of the loading process.  The details vary a lot by game, of course, but there is other work to do.

Wizardry

I still use a HDD on my laptop and I have very little issue  with loading times,Yes i have some issue loading in Atlas but it also likely the most system heavy loading game on the market because of tons of added AI in certain places.
I am dealing with BOTH land and water zones loading different properties,Ai in the water Ai on land and ALL of it is always mobile.The water physics is again a huge system draw so my point is that unless your playing something like Atlas you seriously do NOT need a SSD,i don't need it and I would be one of the few that could use it.

People just get caught up in hype,they want to feel like they have something special even though the games themselves won't utilize the power or even matter.What is the longest I wait for something to load,like a zone,maybe 5 seconds,if your life coems down to 5 seconds you better rethink your gaming hobby.So  how long does it take to start my laptop and get to windows,not long at all,takes me as long to login as it does to load.

The selling point so far with the new consoles has 100% been the faster loading and NOT better games because I predicted you will NOT see any better games and so far just same old crap and lot's of rebaked games.Well raytracing and 4K have also been some advertising gimmicks of 2020 but again lol BS nothing that will make a bad game good or a good game bad or imo even more than 2% better.