PS5 storage architecture: RIP SATA SSD

Looks like SATA SSDs are most likely not going to cut it in a year or so for new AAA games. We don't have a lot of details about this yet, but Sweeney saying it is pretty damning.

I doubt this is going to let it start at the proper timestamp, historically had an issue with that embedding video, topic is at 22:00

 

While theoretical performance is good, it is still worth considering if all this data is going to be processed by CPU and RAM. I think data bandwidth is not going to be the limiting factor for games and make SATA obsolete anytime soon. Also, what kind of gains are we talking about? In games NVME has no perceivable (only measurable) advantage over SATA, and no impact to performance once a game is loaded. This should only affect loading times.
Anyway, it's always interesting to see how the technology improves.

 

How does ssd affects FPS & Frametime?. 30 FPS gaming is not something to be considered revolutionary and that I don't want to experience regardless of the media hype on PS5 SSD!

 

I'm trying to wrap my head around what Sony might have done here that has not only Tim but we've seen statements by other devs as well that what they did was revolutionary. Can't wait to see a deep dive on it. Sony has been shooting themselves in the foot enough marketing this thing that I highly doubt they are paying anyone to say these things.

 

Allocate more pcie lanes to a custom NVME controller and software/os management is my bet. It’s not some wild architecture like Cell was. It’s just another AMD box with newer internals. It’s possible that MS took the same pcie lanes and routed them to the GPU for better performance in that department in conjunction with a bigger core.

 

Compared to the PS4 where the HDD was connected to the "chipset" via an USB to SATA converter, almost anything anything will sure blow the devs away by how fast it is compared to the actual crap interface.

And to make it faster than current NVMe, they can just use a x8 wide NVMe interface, boom, no need to PCIe4.0 to have faster speeds than current on the market NVMe SSD's, the question is, did they really do it, because that sounds expensive, and consoles are made to a price point.

 

It's already been proven that PCIe 4.0 SSDs (or even SATA vs PCIe gen 3) has near zero impact on PC gaming, but I suppose if they are actually taking steps to architect streaming large amounts of assets into the engines then it stands to reason it might actually make a difference if the software was built specifically to take advantage of it. Probably why there are next to zero gains for gaming moving to faster storage right now is the entire hardware/software architecture isn't built to take advantage of it.

 

I was thinking the same thing.

Look at GTA V though while flying a jet over the city causes textures to disappear and HDD cannot keep up....perfect example of why next gen consoles need a ssd..however will m.2 ssds become obsolete with new gen of gaming...absolutely not they are programming games with the new xbox and pcs in mind..the least powerful setup will get a worm also..

Very exciting knowing ill be alive to see photorealistic gaming in october....no looking back game graphics are going to peak this generation and upgrades will no longer be needed this much is a no brainer if you think about it.

 

Sweeney elaborates

https://wccftech.com/tim-sweeney-ex...-architecture-is-way-more-efficient-than-pcs/

Basically the architecture is able to very efficiently get data to the GPU from storage.

 

PC gaming needs usually comes down to what's the lowest common denominator. The XSX doesn't have a PS5's SSD, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

...and it only took me ~12.5 years to reach a 1000 posts.

 

You need an SSD in your posting my friend!

 

The SSD in PS5 is revolutionary because it achieves a lot of things:

• Data decompression is handled by the controller in the IO complex and doesn't use CPU resources.
• Data coherency is handled by hardware.
• Data can directly be sent to GPU caches.
• GPU scrubbers can redirect to correct memory locations without needing to flush and reload memory.
• DMA controller to control SSD memory with fine grain as extended RAM like.
• Co-processor to handle read file I/O requests and remove that latency

All of this coupled with a fast SSD of 5.5GB/s allows for something that is not currently possible on PC - but the real reason such SSD's were developed, was to counter the small amount of very expensive RAM on the new console.

Essentially, this state of the art SSD allows the console to "act out" as if it had way more RAM that it does, so that games can focus on loading and handling seconds worth of data and keep loading.flushing necessary memory in real time. Instead of the old trick of loading everything into regular RAM (like an entire section of a level) and then games load from RAM.

Despite having NVMe drives for a while, and SSD drives in general for a long time, games and game design have never really taken into account their use for gaming. Depending the game, the only thing you would notice, at best, would be reduced load times. But this is not how SSDs will be used in next gen consoles, and if such innovations reach PCs, we are looking into far better gaming development around SSD's performance.

does this mean we need a PS5 caliber SSD? Nah, NVMe drives in general are quite powerful and fast. But they will only get faster and we will finally have more impact on gaming thanks to them. I am not so sure how interconnected the GPU is to the SSD in PC. If we had the same caches and direct access, we could be loading far more texture data on the fly that would allow more detail on screen and simply load/remove memory as needed.

 

Thanks for summarizing this (obvs I was too lazy )!

With these types of real world optimizations coupled with the fact that the ps5 (and x1x for that matter but I digress we're talking PS5 storage arch) will have 16GB RAM tells me the PS5 is going to be a game changer really. Only 7% of respondents to the Steam Hardware Survey have over 16GB of RAM, with 16GB being most common at 38%. This console generation is going to be stellar. Streaming assets from storage and getting them into the rendering pipeline is the number one bottleneck for a lot of open world games that want to use extremely high levels of detail and polygon counts in their scenes. It's a stroke of genius architecting it this way.

EDIT: but what @thegreatsquare says is true, cross-platform games will tend to have to account for the lowest common denominator. It seems like PS5 exclusives are going to be some damn impressive works. I mean the Sony exclusives always were pretty special most of the time anyway.

Now I just need nvidia to release the 3000 series and price it competitively.

 

Imagine ps5 exclusives with 200gb worth of textures being streamed...i'd imagine if they are able to pull this off we might see some pretty impressive open world titles

 

Hopefully the 1st party devs and dev houses making exclusives can put their money where their mouth is on this one... I guess we will find out over the next couple years.

 

I really see them doing games at a photorealistic level this time....super excited for october.

but i fear in the end its just a gimmick like the cell processor in the ps3 which in the end did exactly nothing great

 

Very useful for number crunching.....only very recently decommissioned from USAF super computer usage. We had some in the lab at university for protein modeling purposes

 

cool but for ps3 gaming it did nothing. and i highly doubt a uberfast ssd will do much when the common denominator is the half speed ssd in the xbox s x

 

I want to see what they do with PS5 exclusives.

I recall quite a few PS3 exclusives being pretty good late in the cycle. I recall it taking a lot of time for devs to wrap their head around it.

 

yeah it was complex to program for. uncharted comes too mind

As for exclusives yeah its possible for it to be a game changer, only time will tell....i'm a bit of a cynic

 

It's been a while since we've had any technology move the needle in a single generation in any meaningful way. This seems like it would be the best shot at that when combining this storage tech + ray tracing + just more power in general.

But, these are just tools to build a game experience. We still need talented dev houses to actually execute on that utilizing these new features. Still also need good art direction, good gameplay, etc. These features are only going to be useful insofar as devs take advantage of them.

 

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

The Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, Lumen in the land of Nanite, has caused quite a bit of excitement since it was released. While we won't be seeing anything using the technology any time soon, and the engine itself won't be dropping until next year, that hasn't stopped a small war erupting between would-be fans of the next-gen consoles.

This escalated after an interview with an engineer from Epic China (which has since been taken down) revealed that the demo seen running on the PS5 ran just as well on a laptop. In fact the PC reportedly ran the demo better, with the PS5 managing 30fps at 1440p while the laptop hit 40fps at the same resolution. The laptop in question is no slouch mind, featuring Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics and a 970 Evo Plus. ​

 

LOL.. I'm still eager to see an exclusive game take advantage of the storage tech and the rest of the pieces of the whole. I am not surprised at all that a 2080 can push that many polygons. Seeing how that 2080 by itself without the rest of the laptop parts is more expensive than the entire console.

 

No offense but that's kinda a dumb comparison. It's like saying a Ferrari I own is slightly faster than a Honda civic. A 2080 laptop will cost you more than 3 consoles and 2 games for each console....I wish NBR members would stop comparing things as though money doesn't exist it's easy to come by or everyone has unlimited supply therefore comparing a 600 dollar item to a 4000 dollar one as though they are equal and can be fairly compared.

I honestly had better logic at 4


But back on track... exclusive titles may show us the unseen

 

I wonder how all this direct access to the SSD streaming from the GPU is going to impact longevity of the SSD. Streaming all that data essentially turning it into a scratch drive has to be very rough on the NAND cells....

 

By the time the SSD is done...it will be time for ps6 and rest assured a big company like Sony is well aware of the details. But yeah as you guys are thinking. Exclusive titles may force true gamers to buy a ps5 so they can enjoy hopefully new fun experiences

 

Reads won’t impact longevity, and NAND can survive petabytes of writes. If anything, the system will become obsolete, or other parts like the controller will fail, long before then.

 

There will be cheaper mobile GPUs about as strong as the 2080 [3060/3070] closer to the PS5's launch than we are now ...after, but not too far after. The comparison is useful enough to see where PC is and can be in the near future compared to the PS5, which is going to be the weaker of the two consoles coming later this year. The super fast SSD can only do so much. If the SDD isn't the bottleneck and the CPU isn't the bottleneck and the RAM isn't the bottleneck, that means that Sony built a console where the GPU is the bottleneck.

 

It’s not the reads I’m worried about. The GPU constantly writing stream data worth several GBs has to hurt. It sounds like it’s essentially a very active page file for GPU overflow. The Memory endurance greatly depends on the type of NAND being used. Doubt you will see PB endurance on a QLC or PLC drive

 

If the GPU ends up being the bottleneck that will be truely awesome and something to behold. I don't know about you guys but I might just after 30 years switch back to consoles for 1 or 2 years.

edit.

This might be the year of the gamer with cysis remastered coming out you might see more than you expect....its possible crytek will make crysis remastered close to photo realistic I really think it will knock are socks off. As for ps5 im sure they will be able to push the envelope even more.

 

Don't forget, UE5 is a cross platform engine, it's probably not going to be specifically coded to take advantage of novel PS5 architecture qualities. Doesn't take away from the fact that it's damn impressive for an inexpensive console.

 

Why?

Specifically, why does the GPU being the bottleneck encourage making the console the primary machine early?

I also thought [as I was letting this all stew in back of my head for a while] that maybe Sony should have gone with the bigger slower GPU if they were going to maximize performance with the SSD in this way. More pipelines well fed should perform better, especially with optimization over time. Cores generally beat speed in the longevity department.

 

because when the weakest common denominator is a gpu it means the most expensive part of the console will be fully exploited....make sense....good.


please leave it there as its been simplified to an already low level.

sorry man not trying to make you look dumb!!

Do you guys know of videos that show xbox one series x abilities

 

Honestly the GPU side of things might be where we need the least amount of upgrade past the increased speed and RT that we know we're already going to see. nVidia is already rumored to be negating RT perf hit with the 3000 series, let's see if AMD is going to be close to that as well since they are going to be 2 years past RT intro.

We can speculate all night and all day, proof will be in the games we see next year or two.

 

they say the ps5 ssd is cutting edge and something thats never been done before....um yeah

watch this

 

I just posted a video of a ssd getting 28gb/s and felt it was a nessessary bump

 

I saw that (i pretty much see all their vids hah), you do realize how much that thing costs right? Even the $70 Asus one you have to buy 4 SSD's.

 

Thats "just" an 8 NVMe RAID0, its not something ground breaking.

 

oic yeah I had no clue you could get 28gb/s...and what do you mean it's raid it looks like a single unit.


edit I just watched it again and yeah its raid

 

The first one is an Asus card for 4 NVMe drives.
At 3:22 you can see him installing the NVMe drives, and its clearly a card that takes 8 drives.

 

yeah I know I missed it, sorry senso

But dang thats still fast, so what do you know about the ps5 drive and what makes it groundbreaking, everyone seems to be talking about it.

 

You seem to have forgotten this post: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ture-rip-sata-ssd.832925/page-2#post-11015397

 

Yup, nothing special. You can RAID enough of them to try to get 100GB/s and won't affect anything on PC. Actually RAID will make it worse in some scenarios because it increases small file latency.

In PCs you can't change things as much as a console because its a general purpose platform and has to take everything into account. If you start changing filesystems and such you'll break compatibility with applications and hardware.

Also, games are mostly read only so you can jack up the transfer rates and not worry much about durability. If on PC SSDs are used like DRAM, you'll see its lifespan measured in days. You need little bit more revolutionary hardware such as Optane DIMMs. Yea they are expensive and that's how the world is - you can't get everything you have to choose and make compromises.

 

No I remember that post I just didn't see anything revolutionary....its like a larger capacity es ram like the xbox one has. the reason i say this is because es ram changed nothing

 

The revolutionary part is how the entire architecture is working together for the singular purpose of extremely efficient and fast transfer of game assets from storage to video card with the least amount of bottlenecks possible.

 

yeah because I don't know what the points in that post meant.....thanks for clearing that up

 

I am not sure exactly what you are asking. I'd say the best we're going to have to do is trust game devs when they say it is, because they would know best they are the ones working around the current limitations in their day to day work. And also wait for more in depth analysis once people have the console in hand.

I'm probably not going to buy either one of them at launch anyway, the OG XBox One we have is still good enough for our uses, and we hardly ever use it at this point, I never even bothered to get a PS4, traded in the PS3 when we got the XBox One for Skyrim. I can't even keep up with the games I want to play on PC let alone trying to dip into the console exclusives. I think God of War would be the only thing I'd like to play and I'm not about to get a PS4 just for that. What will probably happen is we'll get an XBox Series X when a new Bethesda game drops that takes advantage of it and my wife wants to play it. That's pretty much how the last two gens went. Bought XBox 360 on Oblivion launch day, bought XBox One on Skyrim launch day. I'm guessing we'll get an XBox Series X on Elder Scrolls VI launch day because I'm going to take a wild guess Starfield is close enough to have an XBox One version perhaps.

 

you covered what I was asking....I just personally don't find a hard drive running like ram to be revolutionary....nothing amazing and I also wonder why microsoft and sony didnt use 5tb hardrives and opt for an optane solution...having 1 tb ssd storage for these new consoles is going to suck, not fun installing and reinstalling library

 

Because the cost of 5TB of storage and Optane memory is EXPENSIVE. It's better to be smarter about the architecture itself with components that are more cost effective.

 

Optane didn't exist when the console's where released, nor would they be able to use them as they're exclusively AMD hardware, aside from the Switch which is also not Intel. Also, a 5TB HDD back then cost basically 2/3 of the console pricing