mark said himself a game like spiderman has to copy a fire hydrant or mail box over one hundred times all over the game because the game is in chunks. like a city block. a lot of open worlds are done this way not all of them but some. but all of them has to make copies of assets because of seek time to get that asset up at that moment.
he said they had trouble fitting all those copies on blu-ray disc.
he said now they can have only one copy that streams in when needed and as many they need of that one asset instead of making hundreds of copies of the same item.
this is me not hyping the ps5. this is me trying to say the game data could be smaller because of this. it was more of a question. im not trying to embarrass myself or making things up. i say things that i hear come out of there month. there not guesses.
if you take the same spiderman game and they remake the same game with the ssd getting rid of the hundreds of copies you get a smaller file correct?
same with the series x ssd. if it fast enough because the ssd does not have seek times.
^ it's all explained right here.
They would put duplicate assets on the hard drive because it's much faster to read consecutive data and discard stuff you don't need than it is to physically have the hard drive seek to where the asset would be.
So ... yes, having an SSD would help remove the need to duplicate assets.
Does it mean games will be smaller next gen? Perhaps. The assets themselves will more likely be larger but, removing duplication and other things like compression definitely helps keep the file size down.
What Cerny said is not the same as what you and Grifford is saying. You don't need to read a 'fire hydrant' 100 times from a disc if a scene contains 100 instances of it. One read is enough.
What Cerny meant is developers make copies of the 'fire hydrant' and spread them over multiple HDD sectors in order to improve the 'seek' time i.e. reducing the time for that 'one read' not 100s or 1000s.
You're right. You would never read an asset the same number of times it appears in a specific scene.
But, I'm pretty sure these are exactly the same, no?
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The practice of spreading the same asset across multiple sectors is the "issue" here.
You don't need to do that with an (any) SSD which means you could save *some* storage space.
I.e. Spiderman would have taken up less storage if the PS4 used an SSD as the primary and default storage media.
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