Sony Epic Games interview: PCs will need to catch up to PS5's SSD

[crispy4000]

 

Quote

“It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. That’s going to be absolutely critical,” he says. “It’s one thing to render everything that can fit in memory,” he adds, but a much more impressive feat to render a world that “might be tens of gigabytes in size” almost instantaneously, as Sony’s new console and its M.2 solid-state drive are promising.

“We’ve been working super close with Sony for quite a long time on storage,” he says. “The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. [The PC market is] going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.”

... Sweeney isn’t saying that you can’t get a comparable M.2 drive for your PC, even now if you want to shell out for it. Rather, he’s saying the custom drive Sony created and the way it interacts with the overall PS5 data management system makes it faster and more impressive from a development standpoint that anything a consumer could readily buy today, especially considering PC developers aren’t yet building games that take advantage of such speeds. That may change in the future when both new consoles arrive and, as Sweeney predicts, inspire significant upgrades to PC component design and PC-specific game development.

https://www.theverge.com/21256299/epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-sony-ps5-ssd-impressive-pc-gaming-future-next-gen

 

Nothing we didn't already suspect, but Epic is confirming Sony's claims.  I'm not building a next-gen rig until this gets sorted out.

[Mr.Vic20]

This is a real problem that will set a hurdle in the path of the majority of PC gamers in the short term. I think its great that someone is pushing this forward though! Yes, it makes the PC marked a curious place for the next 24 months, that much is true, but beyond that, hyper fast, closely integrated storage, is a good thing. You're right though, it doesn't make much sense to buy a new PC (assuming the average PC game doesn't upgrade year on year like myself) unless your current rig is abysmally behind the times. 

[Reputator]

There's a lot that PCs will have to catch up on.

 

• The hardware-based compression system (Kraken). According to Cerny this boosts effective data throughput up about 64% (or 8-9GB/s). He says it would take 9 Zen 2 cores to replicate this performance.
• I/O acceleration. Without it, Cerny says it would take an entire Zen 2 core to perform the same amount of copy operations
• OS level file system optimizations. The next version of Windows would have to be very NVMe-aware
• Raw SSD speed. Someone can correct me on this, but I don't think there's a single M.2 NVMe stick on the market right now that can do 5.5GB/s read.

So a lot comes down to that custom I/O controller chip, but a lot is software, and a lot is the SSD itself. Given the complexity of the PC environment, I don't know if we'll ever truly catch up unless some major leaps occur.

[Zaku3]

7 minutes ago, Reputator said:

There's a lot that PCs will have to catch up on.

 

• The hardware-based compression system (Kraken). According to Cerny this boosts effective data throughput up about 64% (or 8-9GB/s). He says it would take 9 Zen 2 cores to replicate this performance.
• I/O acceleration. Without it, Cerny says it would take an entire Zen 2 core to perform the same amount of copy operations
• OS level file system optimizations. The next version of Windows would have to be very NVMe-aware
• Raw SSD speed. Someone can correct me on this, but I don't think there's a single M.2 NVMe stick on the market right now that can do 5.5GB/s read.

So a lot comes down to that custom I/O controller chip, but a lot is software, and a lot is the SSD itself. Given the complexity of the PC environment, I don't know if we'll ever truly catch up unless some major leaps occur.

This is gonna be a weird generation.

[Reputator]

This is also awkward for developers. How do the major studios make a cross-platform game that will run on PCs but also take advantage of console SSD technology?

 

 

Uhh, they pretty much can't, leaving first-party exclusive developers to be the only ones to make that push.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Just now, Reputator said:

This is also awkward for developers. How do the major studios make a cross-platform game that will run on PCs but also take advantage of console SSD technology?

 

 

Uhh, they pretty much can't, leaving first-party exclusive developers to be the only ones to make that push.

Especially since that console SSD technology appears to be limited to ONE of the consoles.

[Ghost_MH]

2 minutes ago, Reputator said:

 

• Raw SSD speed. Someone can correct me on this, but I don't think there's a single M.2 NVMe stick on the market right now that can do 5.5GB/s read.

So a lot comes down to that custom I/O controller chip, but a lot is software, and a lot is the SSD itself. Given the complexity of the PC environment, I don't know if we'll ever truly catch up unless some major leaps occur.

 

The SSD in my PC his 5GB/s reads. The other SSDs that were to hit the market with 5.5G/s reads have TBA release dates, I'm assuming sure to COVID.

 

I think a lot of this is just going to come down to optimizations on the Windows OS side along with using those additional cores. A 3900x should suffice with it's 12 cores/24 threads.

[Reputator]

Just now, Emperor Diocletian II said:

Especially since that console SSD technology appears to be limited to ONE of the consoles.

 

XSX has it, it just isn't as good as Sony's.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

8 minutes ago, Reputator said:

XSX has it, it just isn't as good as Sony's.

Oh gotcha!

[crispy4000]

10 minutes ago, Reputator said:

This is also awkward for developers. How do the major studios make a cross-platform game that will run on PCs but also take advantage of console SSD technology?

 

Uhh, they pretty much can't, leaving first-party exclusive developers to be the only ones to make that push.

Detail can always be scaled back.  PC ports can also be forward looking in the top end settings.  I think we’ll more of that.

[AbsolutSurgen]

One would think that a good PCIe 4.0 drive, combined with DirectStorage would be pretty competitive. 

[crispy4000]

35 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

The SSD in my PC his 5GB/s reads. The other SSDs that were to hit the market with 5.5G/s reads have TBA release dates, I'm assuming sure to COVID.

 

I think a lot of this is just going to come down to optimizations on the Windows OS side along with using those additional cores. A 3900x should suffice with it's 12 cores/24 threads.

That could depend on just how much work Sony’s propriety tech is doing inside the SSD itself:

 

 

I don’t doubt that PCs will make up for it next gen.  But it might be more efficient to think about it from the makeup of the SSD, which I think is what prompted Epic’s statement.

[crispy4000]

Quote

Would this demo run on my PC with a RTX 2070 Super? Yes, according to Libreri, and I should get "pretty good" performance. For comparison, the PlayStation 5 GPU the demo video was captured on achieves 10.28 teraflops, while the RTX 2070 Super hits just over 9 teraflops. (Note that teraflops are not everything.)
 

Regarding loading and streaming, though, Sweeney says that the PlayStation 5's SSD architecture is "god-tier" and "pretty far ahead of PCs," but that you should still get "awesome performance" with an NVMe SSD, which I'm using. One thing is for sure: If you haven't already, it's time to ditch HDDs, which Sweeney doesn't expect anyone to load games from in the near future.

https://www.pcgamer.com/unreal-engine-5-tech-demo/

[AbsolutSurgen]

40 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

That could depend on just how much work Sony’s propriety tech is doing inside the SSD itself:

 

 

I don’t doubt that PCs will make up for it next gen.  But it might be more efficient to think about it from the makeup of the SSD, which I think is what prompted Epic’s statement.

MS reported that DirectStorage would be very light on CPU usage when it is rolled out to PCs.  Using a full core is based on “current tech” - not the new APIs coming soon. 

While I expect PS5 to be blazing fast, and likely faster in the short term than a PC. My personal assumption isn’t that it will significantly faster than the newest / most expensive PC tech. At least until we see benchmarks. 

[TwinIon]

I built my PC at the beginning of this year, and there didn't seem to be any real benefit in a PCIe 4.0 SSD, especially not for the cost. I put two 1TB M.2 drives in RAID 0, and I feel like I'm finding that there are a number of things that are not storage limited.

 

If this gen of consoles is what makes everyone take better advantage of super fast storage, I'll happily upgrade to a PCIe 4.0 SSD.

[Xbob42]

I think the combination of cross-gen always being a thing, the fact that multiplatform games also have to target the Xbox Series X being a thing, and the fact that I can't see a tremendous amount of devs taking advantage of this in any serious way for a while being a thing, probably won't make this a big of a hurdle as it's being made out here. I think by the time it's something we have to focus on, the SSD market will have likely surpassed or at least equaled what the tech is doing here.

 

Either way, good on them for making new hardware that isn't old fucking trash. Goddamn laptop CPU in the current gen consoles.

[Chris-]

Haha get fucked PC nerds

[crispy4000]

2 hours ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

MS reported that DirectStorage would be very light on CPU usage when it is rolled out to PCs.  Using a full core is based on “current tech” - not the new APIs coming soon. 

While I expect PS5 to be blazing fast, and likely faster in the short term than a PC. My personal assumption isn’t that it will significantly faster than the newest / most expensive PC tech. At least until we see benchmarks. 

For now, I suppose it depends how literally Epic was talking when they said “pretty far ahead.”

[Mr.Vic20]

I assume PC will solve this the way it always has, brute force! 

[Xbob42]

8 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I assume PC will solve this the way it always has, brute force! 

[Reputator]

10 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I assume PC will solve this the way it always has, brute force! 

 

 

DONE!

[dualhunter]

When a Final Fantasy game developed for PS5 gets ported to PC the minimum ram specs are going to be 64GB so that a fan made patch can be released to get it perform well by loading all everything into ram.

[legend]

Yup, I've saying this is the most exciting aspect of the PS5 since the reveal  

[cusideabelincoln]

3 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I assume PC will solve this the way it always has, brute force! 

 

Consumer grade 32GB sticks of DDR4 is available, at reasonable prices.  We could throw 128GB of system RAM at these games;  turn 100GB of it into a RAM drive that will fit a game at a time.  

 

Except COD MW.  Fuck that 200GB of nonsense.

[JPDunks4]

I wish they'd have shown a side by side with a high end PC playing the same Tech Demo, to try and highlight how that SSD Tech actually translates to in game improvements.  Like if that ending sequence of the character flying, would the PC have more Pop in or something? 

 

 

[Keyser_Soze]

If you think PC gaming is gonna be tough Mac gaming has hit an even bigger setback.

[Nokt]

8 hours ago, BlueAngel said:

And I think my upgrade plans are on hold for the moment.

I'm basically holding out for DDR5 at this point. This SSD business is just making it easier to hold off.

[Keyser_Soze]

19 hours ago, BlueAngel said:

Epic store seems to be down go figure.

 

They didn't store GTAV on a PS5 SSD

[crispy4000]

18 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

They didn't store GTAV on a PS5 SSD

They didn’t charge enough royalties to maintain their servers.  

[CitizenVectron]

This is one of those things that gets thrown around every cycle. Oh no, PC gaming is going to fall behind...and then within a few months PCs are more powerful again, and increase the gap over the next 4-5 years.

 

I'm not arguing that console gaming isn't a more cost-productive way to get similar-level gaming, but PC gaming will always surpass it even a short while into a new gen due to the raw power difference that appears with time.

[SimpleG]

On 5/13/2020 at 7:40 PM, JPDunks4 said:

I wish they'd have shown a side by side with a high end PC playing the same Tech Demo, to try and highlight how that SSD Tech actually translates to in game improvements.  Like if that ending sequence of the character flying, would the PC have more Pop in or something? 

 

 

This is the million dollar question.  If this so far and away advanced a simple comparison demo between a mid range and higher end pc would have really sealed the deal. Any time someone touts X over Y but doesn’t actually demo it , I tend to be skeptical.

[number305]

4 minutes ago, SimpleG said:

This is the million dollar question.  If this so far and away advanced a simple comparison demo between a mid range and higher end pc would have really sealed the deal. Any time someone touts X over Y but doesn’t actually demo it , I tend to be skeptical.

This - compounded by the marketing deals in place between Epic and PS.  My guess is this demo looks identical on high end PC, SX, and PS.  

[SaysWho?]

34 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

This is one of those things that gets thrown around every cycle. Oh no, PC gaming is going to fall behind...and then within a few months PCs are more powerful again, and increase the gap over the next 4-5 years.

 

I'm not arguing that console gaming isn't a more cost-productive way to get similar-level gaming, but PC gaming will always surpass it even a short while into a new gen due to the raw power difference that appears with time.

 

This wasn't thrown around in 2013. 

 

It's been 15 years since the last time we heard it, at least. 

[legend]

4 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

This is one of those things that gets thrown around every cycle. Oh no, PC gaming is going to fall behind...and then within a few months PCs are more powerful again, and increase the gap over the next 4-5 years.

 

I'm not arguing that console gaming isn't a more cost-productive way to get similar-level gaming, but PC gaming will always surpass it even a short while into a new gen due to the raw power difference that appears with time.

 

I don't think that was true this last gen. Everyone agreed it was pretty much watered down PC parts without anything to make it stand out from the get go. So I think it's interesting and nice that this gen consoles are going to come out swinging.

 

But I do of course agree that PCs will be better again in not too much time.

[AbsolutSurgen]

2 minutes ago, legend said:

 

I don't think that was true this last gen. Everyone agreed it was pretty much watered down PC parts without anything to make it stand out from the get go. So I think it's interesting and nice that this gen consoles are going to come out swinging.

 

But I do of course agree that PCs will be better again in not too much time.

This gen everyone said PCs were going to stop getting games because of piracy.