Can PS5's faster SSD make games smaller on the drive?

Anything can be done on it. This SSD is out of this world. Have you seen Bob Lazar on Joe Rogan's podcast? Bob was referring to the ps5's SSD the whole time. Really is alien technology 🙃

I think you raised a very good question that no one has realized yet. I think it will be significantly reduced. Many games of current Gen are bloated as they make mirror copies of data at different locations on the HDD to ensure reduced load time and data seeking, such as textures, especially in open world games. If seek time and loading is nearly eliminated, then we are looking at games even creating textures on the fly, I recall maybe No Man's Sky did something similar for the procedurally generated planets. Case in point, game size is expected to be reduced next Gen.

:P

Cerney specifically said it would because they wouldn’t have to duplicate data to make up for slow hard drives. It’s one of Sony’s justifications for the smaller storage capacity. Both PS5 and Series X games will be smaller.

@Zero_epyon: I was going to say this too. I think this is the kind of thing that requires the dev to actually take advantage of that - but if they do, it makes sense.

well we know one game so far that will be smaller size. spiderman ps5 version is going to more than half the size as the ps4 version.

but the ssd in the ps5 is not the reason for those speeds. it's the main custom i/o that gets rid of bottlenecks that any normal ssd would have. this is a good read.

The controller itself hooks up to the main processor via a four-lane PCI Express 4.0 interconnect, and contains a number of bespoke hardware blocks designed to eliminate SSD bottlenecks. The system has six priority levels, meaning that developers can literally prioritise the delivery of data according to the game's needs.

The controller supports hardware decompression for the industry-standard ZLIB, but also the new Kraken format from RAD Game Tools, which offers an additional 10 per cent of compression efficiency. The bottom line? 5.5GBs of bandwidth translates into an effective eight or nine gigabytes per second fed into the system. "By the way, in terms of performance, that custom decompressor equates to nine of our Zen 2 cores, that's what it would take to decompress the Kraken stream with a conventional CPU," Cerny reveals.

A dedicated DMA controller (equivalent to one or two Zen 2 cores in performance terms) directs data to where it needs to be, while two dedicated, custom processors handle I/O and memory mapping. On top of that, coherency engines operate as housekeepers of sorts.

"Coherency comes up in a lot of places, probably the biggest coherency issue is stale data in the GPU caches," explains Cerny in his presentation. "Flushing all the GPU caches whenever the SSD is read is an unattractive option - it could really hurt the GPU performance - so we've implemented a gentler way of doing things, where the coherency engines inform the GPU of the overwritten address ranges and custom scrubbers in several dozen GPU caches do pinpoint evictions of just those address ranges."

All of this is delivered to developers without them needing to do anything. Even the decompression is taken care of by the custom silicon. "You just indicate what data you'd like to read from your original, uncompressed file, and where you'd like to put it, and the whole process of loading it happens invisibly to you and at very high speed," Cerny explains

this is why epic is saying the best ssd solution and not saying the best ssd.

According to both MS and Sony yes,because part of games been bigger now is that the same data is on the hdd many times.

For example a trash can that is 1MB in size is small and nothing,but because of hdd seek times been slow,data needs to be in múltiple parts of the hdd,so you have a trashcan that is now 300MB because it is 300 times in the hdd.

Ssd and NVME dont have that need,they are very fast and have no seek time compare to hdd.

There are a number of factors that come into play.

For instance, games do in fact have duplicate assets onto your HDD simply because they're too slow. A great example of this is Spiderman on PS4 where they would rather always be reading from the HDD and, toss away data they didn't need or where looking for. Removing duplicate assets would help reduce the size of the game.

Another could be called "asset optimization". This would include compress / decompression etc. Both the PS5 and, XSX have new hardware and software to deal with larger files. For instance, the PS5 has (Oodle) Kraken compression as opposed to Zlib out of the box and, Sony's giving free licenses of Oodle Texture compression to folks developing for PS4 / PS5. Both of these things should help quite a bit.

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There's a great deal of work being done by Sony, Microsoft, RAD (Oodle) etc. to improve file sizes without compromising quality but, I don't know if the technical improvements will actually outweigh or, balance out the practical need for larger files. Only time will tell.

There is so much misinformation in this thread its astonishing.

Both the Ps5 and Series x have great I/O solutions. My personal opinion Microsoft's Velocity Architecture is superior getting 6.0 gb/s ssd from a base 2.4 gb/s. Which is the 2.5 multiplier. Sony getting 8-9 gb/s out of a 5.5 base. Allthough in the future there software solution could increase.

that fact is assets are copied 300 or more on disc or in the hdd in many games. you take that out you have a smaller game size. spiderman ps5 will be more than half the size as the ps4 version. why can't you understand that? why is that misinformation?

sorry mark already stated that krakken will be 9 to 22 gigs if compressed very well. series x ssd i/o is still great though. mark said this in the deep dive video.

Is asset duplication on HDDs actually a thing? i could never find a clear answer to this. I know it was a thing for the blu-ray drive in the PS3 because it was pretty horrendous performance wise.

but it makes less sense on a HDD where the storage is shared out amongst different games. the developer cant guarantee where the data will be on the drive. they dont have as much control as they did over the placement of the data on the blu-ray disc back in the day. there would still probably be some benefit to doing it but enough to warrant the waste in storage?

As for whether games will actually be smaller? i doubt it. assuming asset duplication is still a thing, that can be done away with. compression will also be more effective (how much more: not sure). but the counterpoint is that the assets themselves will get a lot larger. higher fidelity audio (a boon for both next gen consoles), much more detailed textures....all that good stuff. thats still going to take up a lot of space. The jump will hopefully be reduced compared to the jump from last gen to this gen. But i dont think the next doom will be smaller in terms of GB compared to current gen doom for example.

very much still a thing. spiderman for ps4 has over 400 copies of the same asset. mail boxes telephone booths etc. that is the reason you can swing from one end to the city to the other without a load screen.

if you also notice in games in a level design you see the same structure over and over again.

@gifford38: Cerny is talking theoretical peak ssd speeds not average. XVA is getting 6 gb/s on average.

@gifford38: that makes no sense. the reason to have asset duplication on a disc drive it to reduce seek times.

Because of the duplication method allowed the game to load between 10-15 seconds vs taking 30 seconds to over a minute if duplication wasn't used. There is going to be a trade off I do believe, where they can stop the use of duplication to speed up the seek times, however the increase in quality of assets will off set alot of the space saved.

PS5 will not sustain that 5.5gb/s continuously while gaming. Nor will the XSX's 2.5gb/s, your going to have bursts of up to those uncompressed speeds. Too much heat and throttling will happen along with shorting the SSD's lifespan from the heat if they did such a thing. You will see those bursts while loading stuff initially and the start of a new level/area. Your going to see more a conservative number .... hundreds of megabytes sustained usage through out a game.

ooooh interesting. ok so duplication is still a thing. ref I must watch the whole video about the spiderman post mortem from GDC at some stage. seems interesting. but yeah around 10GB of spidermans footprint is duplicate data.

yes each block in spiderman is a chunk of data. each chunk has copied assets.

"If you look at a game like Marvel's Spider-Man," Cerny says, "there are some pieces of data duplicated 400 times on the hard drive." The SSD sweeps away the need for all that duping—so not only is its raw read speed dramatically faster than a hard drive, but it saves crucial space. How developers will take advantage of that space will likely differ; some may opt to build a larger or more detailed game world, others may be content to shrink the size of the games or patches.

this is from sony deep dive video. but ps5 version of spiderman will be half the size.

not saying game size will be smaller next gen because of level of detail and next gen textures etc.

but now the developer only needs one of those assets that can be brought in at anytime so you will see more assets on the screen at once. more animals in the world or npc walking around. they also can look different instead of the same guy over and over again.

no he is talking compression of krakken. 9 to 22 gigs of compressed krakken data. if a company is able to compress say 11 gigs instead of 9 it will work at the same speed as 9 gigs.

no matter how you look at it series x is 40x faster than the hhd in consoles while ps5 is 100x faster than hhd.

@gifford38: yes base that's correct. But it can be amplified through software. This is were XVA and Sony's solution kick in.

It can also be used to get to the moon. They just need to license it from Sony and replace all boosters in rockets with it.

@gifford38:

Because he started to downplay the PS5 ssd and now he cant turn around,the fun thing is not only Sony but also MS state the same.

Which is pretty logical and confirmed as well that there is redundant data in those hdd,because of how the opperate.

And misinformation continues to reign supreme.

@greygoose12:

Stop making crap up,probably neither will hold those speeds for ever,but in both cases that is peak,and by MS own word 4.8gb/s is with hardware descompression.

@pc_rocks:

Yeah single out sony when MS is doing and saying the exact same shit with a slower MVME and even have it a name velocity. 😂

I would recommend ignoring more less everything stated in this thread on the topic.

instead of telling we are wrong tell why we are wrong even better tell us why mark cerny is wrong sense you know more about tech than he does. everything we said came from his mouth and xbox mouth. xbox was praising there ssd until ps5 came out and said it was faster then xbox switched there focus on teraflops.

Uncompressed high resolution textures are massively bigger than their counter parts.

Storage isn't magic, if you want a fidelity increase it comes with a huge cost.

series x has a great ssd as well. just not as fast as the ps5. the ps5 has a great gpu and cpu but not as powerful as the series x.

so why can't we talk about the ssd solution in both systems? we already covered the teraflop numbers so many times.

but once these cross gen games come out we will find out if the ps4 version is a larger file than the ps5 version.

depends on how much next gen textures and particles etc takes up. will it be less that the multiple copies of the assets we don't know.

You have demonstrated many times that you refused to understand how things work. Why would anyone waste their time?

MS spent 1 hour talking about the magic of SSD over GPU, CPU, memory and memory bandwidth? Also, which SSD has MS named Velocity? If you were not a fraud and ever set foot in School you would know the difference between architecture and component (SSD).

But these are quite hard questions for you. Let's get to the basic one which you're avoiding for 3.5 months. For the 67th time, where are the sources for GDDR is better than DDR for CPUs, fraud?

You can talk about it but once you try to hype the least significant part of the system to compensate for the important stuff, you will be made fun of. Doesn't matter who does that.If lems were doing it then they would be laughed out as well just like the other idiot who keeps harping about the XSX and 60 FPS.

Series X NVME SSD is called velocity.....🤣

This thread is a gold mine for misinformation and ignorance.

Dude there are several articles on the net about the xbox velocity crap,stop playing are you showing your true colors it that it? Or you forgot again to change alts?

Stop evanding my question why do you single out Sony hypocrite and don't say the same about MS who has been talking lately about the same crap,piece by piece in fact there is even a thread based on new links in this moment here on system wars about the whole velocity crap.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/14/a-closer-look-at-xbox-velocity-architecture/

Same shit from I/O to hardware to compensate for compression and decompression,faster loadings of assets is the same shit but with a damn name Velocity.

Yet you say SHIT and yes the link is from MS and is from yesterday.

So stop asking for crap that you WERE GIVEN and which you don't want to admit because you are a console hater at least on this alt.😂😂😂🤣

yeah i can see that one lol. its just another fancy word for there i/o

https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-series-x-velocity-architecture-explained-loading-times-file-sizes

see i understand these next gen titles will be larger in file size because of the higher textures or particles and every gen leap upgrade. but there is only so much room on a blu-ray so these developers can use that space any other way they want. hence gives developers freedom. no more copies of assets = more space for other things.

but if you take a last gen game that already has copies of assets and update the game to use the ssd you will get a smaller size file unless they update the texture count etc. because they can remove the copies from the original file.

That's all cool but MS spent 1 hour talking about the magic of SSD over GPU, CPU, memory and memory bandwidth? Also, which SSD has MS named Velocity? Are you now backtracking that you don't know the difference between architecture and component?

But, let's get to the basics. For the 70th time, where are the sources for GDDR is better than DDR for CPUs, fraud? 3.5 months and counting.

how is the number one asked item from developers be the less important? the thing is graphics look great this gen as well but my gripe was the loading times. so when both xbox and sony announced there using a ssd and got to run as fast as they got to run. ssd in current gen system only runs 2x faster than the hdd. when they said they got one at 40x and one at 100x faster than current hdd in these systems i was like omg yes. and then said awesome to the rest of the specs i was happy for both systems over current gen.

fact is just like every gen some games will be 30 or 60 fps. depends how much graphic leap they put into there game.

I seen ps5 games and im very happy of what i have seen. now add no loads screens = even better.

now i want to see what xbox brings to see if i can get another 360 ps3 gen were both are worth having.

this gen sea of thiefs and oni are the only games i wanted to play. so if fable is announced i will get a xbox again and be able to play those games i missed this gen.

gamepass looks good as well i hope psnow is at that level this gen.

another fact is both systems the games are mostly run the same on both systems like the pro and one x.

I think Sony has a great i/o solution with different levels if priority. I think XAV is great if not better because Microsoft isn't afraid to explain it. You got one deep dive from Sony. Still A shit ton of questions unanswered.

Why isn't Sony explaining there system like Microsoft is ? It's late in the game, pre orders prob up soon and still no more info. I really don't care what Epic says. Devs going off on both sides about how great each system is. Of course who ever they are affiliated with most is who they praise.

@gifford38: simple he is not the face of the gaming industry. seem some how the fany boy think his is.

games will never go down in size. they will always go up. been gaming for over 35 years now. and those extra dup assets back then where not a thin. and games where on multi floppy.

but i see this thread wandering off. due to 1 side not debating on good faith.

not the face of gaming? Mark cerny really he not the face of gaming? who do think made marble madness at 19? he also made knack as a tech demo then made into a game. i believe him over phil any day. he never said games would go down in size. he said freedom which means less copies of assets = more space on the blu-ray for other things. i get these games will get bigger because of texture counts and raytracing and particles etc. but less copies = more copies of different looking assets. like npc looking different etc.

Quotes from developers who said they wanted SSD over faster and more memory?

@gifford38: the issue is for most people that what they think will happen.

like i said. again most people think the ssd is new. i already had to talk to one of my friend on it.

i said dude. i had that for years now.

hell they think the strange ps ssd is common.....

cerny never really answer or went further on game install sizes.

same with micorsoft. their dam tight lip atm on it.

What new has ms said about it? Didn't they already mention about their texture multiplier boosting performance during the DF video bldg. invite several months back while Sony went into more details about the ssd?

I'm interested if you have more links, I like reading them as long as it's not very, very technical.

The most coy thing from Sony seems to be their boosts on what their actual floor is and the avg sustained.

Both have decent CPUs now, so compression and decompression will be a cinch compared to this gen/last gen.

And afaik, the ultra magical PS5 SSD does help with that too 'cause it has a secret sauce that even the best of the best SSDs on PC doesn't have.

Faster than a speeding sheep, moooaar powahful than a hermit, able to leap tall lemmings in a single bound....

lolol :P

The PS5 SSD actually contains the entire universe, and we are just simple bytes written on the PS5 SSD.

Oh shit. So, Mark Cerny is the creator of the universe....

again its not the ssd in the ps5 that makes it so fast. its the o/i main chip inside. the main chip is the reason it got rid of ssd bottlenecks not the ssd card it self. your friends pc does not have the ps5 main cip inside. his ssd still has bottlenecks that mark was talking about.