General Gaming Super Fast SSD's

[JPDunks4]

So after Sony's recent event, we got to see in action, what the super fast SSD can do for gaming.  The portal's into different worlds, essentially instantly loading, was impressive to see.  I also remembered the Spiderman demo, where movement speed through the world could be achieved at much faster speeds due to the faster asset loaning.  

 

 

We all know XSX isn't as fast of an SSD, but I believe Medium also highlighted how they planned to use the faster SSD to instantly change between worlds.  

 

 

My question is, what other ways do we think this will be utilized in games? I can imagine we should see far less, or essentialy no pop in during games, potentially faster games, but a lot was said about game design and how these advancement can be used to change how games are designed.  In both of the above instances, those type of scenarios will be few and far between I'd imagine.  I am trying to understand and imagine what other games will take advantage of this kind of new tech, and how it'll improve other traditional games.

 

Like a Horizon 2 for instance.  Longer draw distances with less pop in? More highly populated areas?  Or are those type of things we'd naturally see with more powerful GPUs and CPUs?  

 

I'm playing RDR2 right now, and its absolutely stunning, even if I'm not a huge fan of the gameplay.  How might a game like this be designed different with these SSDs in mind?  What improvements to game design might be available that arent on the current gen machines.

[crispy4000]

Thread is incomplete without:
 

 

[JPDunks4]

5 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

Thread is incomplete without:

 

Good addition, but what do we think in this demo wouldn't be possible with a traditional NVME SSD?  

[crispy4000]

27 minutes ago, JPDunks4 said:

Good addition, but what do we think in this demo wouldn't be possible with a traditional NVME SSD?  

 

We only know that UE5 is scalable.  So presumably, that means 'nannite' could be toned down / switched off.

It also depends on what is bottlenecking the PS5 to 1440p/30.  It's an early-gen tech demo, but the answer for that question has implications for other hardware running UE5.

[cusideabelincoln]

Large-scale environmental changes on-the-fly.  Think of the lake in God of War changing levels, or an even older example the Water Temple(s) in Zelda games.  When this change happens, we are basically watching it like a cutscene or the actual change is going on in the background.  With faster storage speeds, these changes could be happening as we are interacting with the environment.  And as far as God of War is concerned, the choice to have long, narrow tunnels to hide loading screens can be eliminated or put in as an artistic choice, because while the game is great there are simply way too many times you run in a fucking circle waiting for the portal to open, or an elevator ride that is 10 times too long (or 10 times too slow).

 

We might see more scale-switching, from macro movement to micro movement and vice-versa.  You can be a humanoid figure, and then jump into a giant mech, and seamlessly transition to different types of field of view, in-game travel speed, height, level of detail, and you could be in completely different parts of the map, maybe even in different parts of time.  Think of the time jumps in Titanfall 2.  These are relegated to basically a single room, while next gen the entire world around you can change on the fly from past to present, present to future.

[Ghost_MH]

6 minutes ago, cusideabelincoln said:

We might see more scale-switching, from macro movement to micro movement and vice-versa.  You can be a humanoid figure, and then jump into a giant mech, and seamlessly transition to different types of field of view, in-game travel speed, height, level of detail, and you could be in completely different parts of the map, maybe even in different parts of time.  

 

That sounds like Star Citizen.

[cusideabelincoln]

2 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

That sounds like Star Citizen.

 

They do recommend an SSD, but not require one, right.  How does it perform on a regular HDD?

[Duderino]

A few examples off the top of my head:

• Faster traversal.
• More seamless cutscene/gameplay transitions between locals.
• Vertex streaming in lieu of LODs (see UE5 demo)
• More contextual animations with sets streaming becoming viable (especially applicable with motion matching)
• Use of data driven simulation and other machine learning based techniques.
• Greater variety of enemy encounters within a given timeframe (see R&C: Rift Apart)
• Less need for invisible walls with enemy navigation (think HZD).
• Long corridors, elevators rides and choke points can go from a requirement to a choice.
• Dynamic event spawning also no longer as limited by data access.
• Larger scale events and gameplay encounters possible.
• Less data occupying RAM, allowing more space for other needs, such as Raytracing BVH memory requirements.
• Potentially improved FX, with the possibility to stream volumetric data and/or flipbooks.
• Gains for anything audio related that requires lots of data access.
• etc

Most of all, faster i/o will reduce development blockers which will lead to greater accomplishments next-gen.  While RDR2 is impressive, it is a testament to what years of optimizations work can do to work around disc HDD limitations.  The western local (open spaces) helps too.

 

SSD's alone are a big leap, but any extra bandwidth the Series X and PS5 can provide will be a welcome addition.  In the context of this gen it may seem excessive, but in the future quite a lot could be competing for those resources.

[Xbob42]

A lot of this seems relevant for big, expensive games, but I wonder what the impact on the indie and budget devs will be. You know, the ones who already aren't pushing the hardware all that much, any ideas on the kinds of things they could pull off in the future that they couldn't right now, taking into account their lack of funding?

[Remarkableriots]

40 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

A lot of this seems relevant for big, expensive games, but I wonder what the impact on the indie and budget devs will be. You know, the ones who already aren't pushing the hardware all that much, any ideas on the kinds of things they could pull off in the future that they couldn't right now, taking into account their lack of funding?

I'M not sure if it would help but didn't they say assets in the game wouldn't need to be saved repeatedly? Wouldn't that cut down on bug fixing and programming time?

[crispy4000]

It’d probably cut down on optimization work more than anything for indies.  Especially for those that build more open area games.

[TwinIon]

I just posted this in the PS5 thread, but I think this graphic from Anandtech illustrates the benefits well:

 

So you're going from using maybe ~6GB for RAM to store 30 seconds of gameplay to having ~12GB to store 1 second. That's effectively a 60x increase in what you can have available in memory at any given time.

 

 

I know it's a little thing, but I'm excited to get rid of loading screens and elevators and spaces you need to slowly squeeze through and all those other tricks that devs use to hide loading times to varying degrees. 

[Duderino]

On a related note:

 

(1/3) Okay, I got some clarification on why they made RE8 next-gen only, when it was cross-gen previously. With the updated graphic fidelity overhaul they're doing (still in progress), the way RE8 was designed lead to past-gen consoles having a lot of pop-in/long texture loads/

— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) June 13, 2020

(2/3) load times because the game has you travelling through most of the Village and had a lot of load zones. Because there's a bigger focus on exploration this would lead to the last-gen console versions having notable issues, and it was holding back how pretty they could make

— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) June 13, 2020

(3/3) certain scenes. So they decided to drop the last-gen versions of the game to make it so the game had no loading at all (not limited by last gen hardware) and push the graphic overhaul further without the limitations of last-gen tech in mind.

— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) June 13, 2020

[AbsolutSurgen]

Faster storage can equal better gameplay.  Am I the only one who remembers the problems cause by loading on the PSX version of Shang Tsung  in MK3 vs. the arcade?  Pausing gameplay every time he switched characters? 

 

Developers will have more freedom in UI (think what used to be called "pause menus") -- many games have had them "slimmed down" because the game needs to keep everything in memory -- these new architectures should reduce this requirement.

 

Better customization visualization in games.  The ability to more quickly stream in textures/geometry will allow customization options to happen more quickly, and in a much more visual way.

 

More variation in NPCs/vehicles in open world games (remember in GTA, how you kept seeing the same cars as you drove around)?

 

Better level design -- less of a need to have doors/walls that are only there to enable loading.

 

I am sure the guys who are actually designing games have a long list of headaches they have had to deal with in the past, that will no longer exist that go well beyond this.

[Xbob42]

3 hours ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Faster storage can equal better gameplay.  Am I the only one who remembers the problems cause by loading on the PSX version of Shang Tsung  in MK3 vs. the arcade?  Pausing gameplay every time he switched characters? 

I was hoping for some slightly more recent examples. We'll definitely see a massive reduction in "sidling through wall cracks" or elevators, but I don't think those have been terribly common lately as is, at least not in anything I've played.

 

You know, a little thing I'm actually curious about is games designed around zone transitions. Obviously not every game is open world, so the player moves to a spot where you have a load transition, while I'd personally be happy to have it loaded as fast as humanly possible, I imagine most devs would want to have some sort of nice transition there to make it less jarring. Is this going to be the generation of custom transitions for games? What're your bets? Star Wars screen wipes? Iris in/out? Screen shatter? Some sakura petals covering the screen for a second? Character falling onto the camera and standing up in the next area?

[TwinIon]

57 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

I was hoping for some slightly more recent examples. We'll definitely see a massive reduction in "sidling through wall cracks" or elevators, but I don't think those have been terribly common lately as is, at least not in anything I've played.

 

You know, a little thing I'm actually curious about is games designed around zone transitions. Obviously not every game is open world, so the player moves to a spot where you have a load transition, while I'd personally be happy to have it loaded as fast as humanly possible, I imagine most devs would want to have some sort of nice transition there to make it less jarring. Is this going to be the generation of custom transitions for games? What're your bets? Star Wars screen wipes? Iris in/out? Screen shatter? Some sakura petals covering the screen for a second? Character falling onto the camera and standing up in the next area?

I do wonder how much of what we see in games is limited by storage/memory bandwidth, and how much is something else. 

 

Spider-man is a recent example, where you can travel through the whole of the city without any load times, but when you transition to a small warehouse interior all the sudden you're in for a long load time. There's no gameplay reason that transition needs to exist, so I can certainly imagine that kind of thing just happening instantly. Hopefully we'll see that this year.

 

I suppose it would be weird if you just appear everywhere without any kind of visual transition. I'm sure we'll see a lot of games that just steal from whatever classic movie they're taking inspiration from. Star Wars screen wipes feels like a good bet for a bunch of them.

 

This is a bit of an aside, but I've been playing the original Assassin's Creed and that game uses a Matrix style loading area, and gives you audio gameplay hints during the load. On my PC the load happens before the audio cues finish, always cutting off most of the hint. I think I remember having time to run around a bit and throw knives or something at NPCs, but now the transitions are too fast for that.