Can the Slowest PS5 SSD Upgrade Run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart?

Who are the Xbox fans that wanted a regular hard-drive? Please name these folks. 😐

There are still load times in games. What are you taking about? Name the games that have no load times and no load times on the PS4 because of Krakken.

Cerney wouldn't lie to us PS fans.

@Pedro: not ps4 games i mean updated ps5 version of the the ps4 gemes like ghost. Ghost has no load screen anymore. Rtcjetamd clank had no load screens. I'm sure deathstranded ps5 version not going to have a load screen. Xbox fans always find ways to down play ps5 ssd when in fact its still faster than series x. Just feels like they rather hard drive because no Xbox fans talk positive about even there own ssd. Like you guys don't see a huge difference in load speeds from last gen. The ssd is the best part of this gen in my opinion. Days gone, witcher 3 and many more had such long load screens.

PS4 games still have loading and loading screens. The SSD doesn't eliminate loading, the game has to be altered to remove loading.

Please share the names of ANY Xbox fans that implied anything of wanting standard hard-drive.

Don't pretend that you have not made the most ludicrous statements about the SSD and even that is understatement. Don't conveniently leave that out. 😊 Even now you are overhyping the SSD and despite the facts.

just like ps4....

Man this gonna be a loooong mad gen for the brigade.

lol :P

Thank you for accepting that Cerny and Insomniac are full of sh*t when they said the SSD will change the way games are designed.

@lundy86_4 said:

@pc_rocks said:

@lundy86_4 said:

@Pedro: Ouch. Great way to spend some R&D money.

There was no money lost in R&D. They hyped the SSD to high heavens because MS had the advantage in all other relevant areas. If MS was weaker they wouldn't have hyped the SSD as much as they did and would have also focused on GPU + CPU + memory.

That's exactly what I meant. They already designed it and it does what it was originally designed to do: to serve as a secondary cache because memory was getting increasingly expensive. Both MS and Sony included SSD for that. Turned out MS made a more balanced system.

What? How does the SSD serve as "secondary cache"?

swap (linux)/page (windows) file.

I'm sure the older consoles also did this, as well as pretty much any operating system. You only have a finite amount of memory, so sometimes you need to swap older memory to a file if you go over.

It doesn't require an SSD, but it's a whole lot smoother with one.

The way the PS3 was hyped. I hated that sh☆☆. With PS4, Sony at least had a good reason to hype it in the beginning over the Xbox one with its DRM and Kinect crap. Now we have got PS5 and the console has zero things to hype, at least in the technical areas. 8K capable? LMAO.

We are not going to see any real tangible gains from these fast SSD's until the games are designed around them and we drop all backwards support of the older consoles. Eventually we will see these SSD's being able to stream texture data to the gpu on the fly which can save memory and cpu resources, instead of using all of their vram limit, they can use a lot less at any given time and allocate it else where or crank up the texture detail instead.

Things like Primitive/Mesh Shaders, and Variable Rate Shading, Direct storage and PS5's version of that, once games are designed around those tech standards we will finally see a major jump in quality and less limitations in design options for games.

Everything you stated with regards to the SSDs is not limited by older tech. It is simply a matter of doing things traditionally and developers sticking to traditional design that is the hold up, not the hardware.

Yes SSD's can be limited by older tech, especially when your talking about slower cpu's, slower bus rates, slower system memory etc. With these high speed ssd's in these new consoles and "modern" PC's will allow developers to stream in game assets more on the fly vs having to prefetch and store more upcoming data into memory. This is why Mesh Shaders, and Variable Rate Shading, Direct storage will play a big role into complementing the new hardware features and power to be actually be able to use the higher tier storage medium to save and or reallocate resources vs traditional methods.

Also with the PS5 having decompressing processors tied to the SSD saves the cpu from having to do that workload and allows the cpu focus on other jobs. But PS5 SSD is over engineered for the hardware that's in it. The GPU will never be able to saturate the raw bandwidth of the SSD transfer rate if they started to stream virtually all texture assets on the fly. This is why MS's more conservative SSD speed choice is more practical for the hardware.

Dammit Sony, I was fed good stuff.

The SSDs on the PS5 and Xbox Series are not limited by older tech. You mentioning CPUs, bust rates etc is irrelevant because the SSDs are not being coupled with weak CPUs or limited bus rates as you are implying in your first claim then contradicting immediately after. Mesh shaders and variable rate shading has absolutely nothing to do with SSDs , memory usage or reallocation of resources.

PS5 like the Series X and any modern GPU has decompression for Direct Storage like solutions. You claim that the PS5 SSD is overengineered? How is it overengineered?

What you originally said "SSDs is not limited by older tech" and the fact is that SSD's can be limited by older tech. Now you have revised your statement saying that the SSD's on the these consoles are not limited by older tech (I assume you mean X1/PS4 ) because current is not older tech..... Which I have no issue with that revised statement. You need to articulate what you mean better.

Also do you not understand that Mesh shaders and variable rate shading....can be greatly affected by the ability of the SSD to stream GPU assets on the fly? Mesh shaders and variable rate shading by themselves do not deal with the SSD directly but the how the GPU efficiently streams/picks a chooses what quality, even and where something is rendered on the go. Being able to stream all GPU orientated assets on the fly with SSD coupling its streaming of assets along with these newer gpu features greatly reduces resources allocation and more efficiently uses GPU's processing and memory usage. All these features will mesh together....

PS5 SSD is over engineered based on the hardware level of performance that is in it. The raw bandwidth of the SSD let alone compressed could actually feed much stronger hardware.

We are literally speaking in context of these next gen consoles and your spin that the context was not implied despite the title of the thread and the fact when anyone is talking about SSDs and consoles, they are speaking of next gen. You are simply grasping at straws at the moment.

What? These are rendering tech and has absolutely nothing to do with the SSDs. You are implying that the game will be waiting for data from the SSD which makes it exceptionally clear that you don't know what you are talking about. That is like saying the rate at which the GPU can render is dependent on the SSD, which so ludicrous that it baffles me that you are playing with that line of thought. Mesh Shaders and Variable Rate Shading are NOT affected by the SSD. Stop spewing misinformation.

The grounds on your overegineered claim holds no merit and is equal to "just cause" reasoning.

You are ignoring one of the points of the Direct storage solutions of that tech feeding gpu's data directly bypassing the cpu and you dont think the features like VRS isnt going to affected by the transfer of data from the SSD directly feeding the gpu on the fly? Once game design bypasses traditional prefetching done today all those features that these gpus have will meld together in game design.

I never stated that those features require SSD's. And I know that those features are dependent on the gpu, if you think that those features wont be affected by future changes from streaming in assets on the fly from the SSD........ Your the one that clearly does not understand the point looking ahead.

O come on now your thread here alone is bashing PS5 SSD hype, showing a video using a slower pci-4 m.2 SSD installed the PS4 that does not come close to minimum requirements but is running a game just fine, that is suppose to start pushing the SSD in the PS5.

The PS5 SSD is over engineered aka overkill , just like how PS4's gpu was over engineered with the gpu having 8 ACE's( simply stuffing additional ACEs didn't magically make more execution resources available) or lets think about the PS3 originally suppose to be just the Cell but found out its wasn't enough so they threw in a Geforce 7 gpu and then they had figure out how to get the two to work together as best they could.

Fact is that they didn't need to include a odd ball sized fast 825gb SSD with 5.5gb/s of raw speed and have a hardware compression blocks allowing 9GB/s or more depending on the tools used. If they were to use that speed to feed the gpu directly and be able to swap out gpu data on the fly, the SSD would be wasted on the gpu since not being fast enough to handle true 4k and the amount of data that could be utilized would be wasted.

If your transferring and dumping gb/s of data constantly as the player moves in a game. Your then not relying on storing everything you can in the memory pool for a set amount of time ahead of the player "predicting" what where and how the interaction will take place.

With SSD's, and using GPU features like VRS, mesh shading or even what you stated improving Sampler Feedback saves the need to render pixels where the player is not looking or even near. And the faster your able to move data in and out of gpu buffer the better the experience will be in regards to increasing the quality of the image while removing or diminishing the "pop in" effect. Your removing alot of the overhead in memory allocation to render a scene where in one instance your saving resources but your going in turn allocate that savings into something else typically higher quality assets.

One of the major points of using these SSD's to feed gpu's directly and bypassing as much as cpu as you can is to save cpu resources and increase the efficiency of memory allocation

There is a thing called diminishing returns, and this is where the PS5 SSD and its decompression block design falls IMO, its does not need 5.5gb/s nor 9+gb/s compressed rates to feed the system properly with only 16Gb of unified memory.

You can repeat it as many times as you desire but VRS and Mesh shading has NO relation to the SSD. Stop making any assertion or implication of a sort. Sampler Feedback reduces memory allocation and does NOT reduce the number of pixels needed to render. The amount of pixels needed to render is generally static (dynamic res is the exception) Pop ins are usually a symptom of delayed loading. There is a system that evaluating what needs to be loaded and unloaded. Sometimes that system fails or stalls or the range is too short causing pop ins. So, don't view pop ins as a purely a lack of transfer speed.

I am not sure what memory overhead you are referring to. If you are allocated 13GB of memory, not using all of it doesn't give you added benefits. It is not a PC in which you need to allocate to multiple programs. When a game is running on these systems, the memory allocation is hard and the game either use it or don't. Nothing more.

The saving of CPU resources from direct to storage type tech is grossly over stated. However, what it allows is a reduction or removal of hiccups while playing the game due to the main thread not being hit hard with loading of assets. These consoles have 16 threads on a 8 cores system. 7 is allocated for gaming. If the game is cold loading and needs 2 cores to decompress, that is a minor hit especially since it is a cold load. Independent of that, steaming data is just part of the equation of a game loading. The bottlenecks vary from game to game.

Diminishing returns on just transfer rate can be seen between 500MB and 2.5GB /sec drives. The game is what determines the diminishing returns. As I have stated many times before, the vast majority of games are front load heavy. The moment developers start focusing on load times and breaking up their game levels instead of dumping almost all of it to memory, most of the high speed SSDs would become inconsequential after a certain speed, but until then, high speed is very beneficial for heavy front loading of assets.

Who knows if future games would be optimize with AI for better data flow because at the moment, extremely efficient data management is beyond most if not all programmers understanding due to the insane complexity of software nowadays.