You can tell someone hasn't watched the Ratchet & Clank demo from the other day[0]. The SSDs in these consoles go far beyond short load times. They can radically change how games are made and designed.
Ratchet & Clank is the only demo with new gameplay based on the SSD.
But it's overused, giving each game world less weight. The technological imperative, preoccupied with whether they could, etc.
In contrast, artificial constraints add depth to gameplay, e.g. limited movement speed/duration ("sprint").
All that said, keeping processors fed with data is a central problem of CS. The innovations here are not just the SSD itself, but elimination of bottlenecks in the architecture (e.g. direct placement in GPU RAM).
Typically, storage is 1000x slower than RAM. On PS5, it's 50x. That has got to be a revolution in algorithmic space-time tradeoffs... which has got to be reflected in gameplay, somehow, somewhen.
Because execs will only be seeing demos after they’re loaded, and there’s no way some 55 year old is going to spend more than 5 minutes playing some Star Wars game and therefore trigger no world loading, games that do something special with the SSD will not be financed by anyone other than Sony. The technology is basically DOA for third parties. The stuff that third parties are saying is basically moot.
Conversely when Nintendo makes new hardware, it’s the same deal - they’re the only ones financing games that use the balance board or gesture controls or labo or whatever. They just put up a lot more money and have internal studios with more autonomy. SSDs are a Sony problem not a game design/engineering problem.
That portal transition effect likely hides the load screen - it's still there, nearly half a second, it's just shorter. This is comparable to current load times with an SSD on PC!
Or a PC game can just slap a minimum RAM requirement on and be done with it.
I’m impressed with the tech but it seems like the end goal was to keep console manufacturing costs down. Now
it’s being sold as a gameplay-enabling feature and reason to upgrade. The upgrade only looks impressive because the PS4 by now is so old.
Relying on cheap SSD storage instead of expensive RAM, and relieving CPU effort via the storage streaming chip is a cool trick. But that tech alone enables absolutely zero gameplay experiences.
It hasn’t been proven to us whether or not a typical gaming PC’s increased memory just overcomes the need for this tech. If I have a PC with 32GB of RAM and my GPU has 8GB of its own RAM I’m not convinced that a PS5 with 16GB of shared RAM will do anything that the PC setup can’t.
Desktop computers eclipsed the performance of current consoles gen consoles so long ago that I am still suspect: my prediction is that a decent mid-range gaming computer is completely capable of playing any PS5 game.
Most tests I've seen of real-time game asset loading between the various types of SSDs on PC are incredibly inconsistent - for most games it is hardly noticeable. I'd be excited if I was proven wrong but this really feels like the typical console hype ramp up to black friday that South Park portrays so well...
This is not great logic, as those games are not designed around taking advantage of the faster SSD storage like new games will be with the launch of the new consoles. Most games are built with an HDD in mind and thus the ssd is not the bottleneck.
All AAA games need to be cross platform to maximize revenue with a long tail, so they target the lowest common denominator for hardware requirements.
No one is going to design gameplay for a special hardware constraint unless the gameplay can degrade to lowest common denominator. Which of course, makes needing the special hardware optional.
There are few exceptions to this rule. Some platforms pay for exclusivity, effectively covering lost revenue from other platform streams. And Nintendo alone makes a profit on hardware, so they can produce platform exclusives to drive addtl revenue from hardware sales.
Special SSD pipelines, while PC gamers are still using 7200rpm HDDs, are about as appetizing to game devs as waggle controls or Kinect sensor games.
The new consoles include these SSDs not to make something possible now, but to remain relevant in ten years time when PCs may have caught up.
This is the game industry's equivalent of supporting IE 11.
This is simply not true. That's like saying no game on PC is possible because not everyone has a good enough graphics card. Just have a minimum spec for required storage speed and you're golden.
So imagine this tech in a simulated war mmo, where each server of 64 players represents a part of a battlefield and you instantly can transition to a new server representing the next part of the battlefield when you walk there. All of WW2 would be a collection of servers that represent parts of Europe.
Takes a little imagination, but when you look at the ingenuity of something like F-Zero on SNES (2.5d graphics), it’s pretty clear that your typical tech really can used in amazing ways.
Assuming the maps and assets are static, the only thing needing to be downloaded is the current state of the game and entities, which is a handful of megabytes. I agree that an SSD is completely irrelevant here, but so is the network. The hard problem here is how do you sync state between the different servers in real time so that transitioning between servers is seamless (and how do you handle reconciliation after an eventual net split).
From what I know, World of Warcraft does something like that on a conceptual level. Obviously syncing game state in non-action game like WoW is probably a little easier than something like a full blown action FPS.
Planetside 2 is a great and current example of multiple massive 100+ player battles occurring simultaneously in the same server/map.
Obviously its graphical detail is nowhere what was shown here, but the precedent exists, and the only thing that would be different is the geomotry and texture res.
Wow, I'm not going to believe that's realtime in my hands. I started the video thinking "whats so special about this", and when they started going interdimensional I realized either this is very cool or just hype.
That seems to be progressing on rails, what does the SSD help here? Maybe you can postpone preloading the assets later before the transition, and thus need to free up memory slightly later for next scene's asset decode/load buffers. Though there isn't anything here that looks like 2 or more scene's worth of assets couldn't be in memory at the same time.
That is impressive if each of those worlds is loaded as you go, but I feel like both Microsoft and Sony were holding off on this next generation until graphics tech got better.
We still are nowhere near photo realistic, cinema type game play (and yes I realize that such animation has to be scaled down a bit because it can disturb people if it's too real, but we're not even at that point yet).
Real time ray tracing was going to be nVidias whole push into a new generation of 3D graphics, but that turned out to be not all that impressive (and with huge performance costs).
it's been forever since I played the first Prey but I don't remember anything like this aside from perhaps the single usable portal in the game? Was pretty cool at the time and then Valve explored the concept properly in Portal 1 & 2.
Having said that, the original Prey looks pretty rough these days. And I don't see how a single portal is "the same thing" at all.
In fact, I think the only thing that I can think of to compare to is the ending of Portal 2 where you shoot a portal to the moon, but even that was just a single portal to a fairly low detail environment.
Are you referring to Prey's usage of that portal? Or something else.
FYI, the new Prey game released a few years ago is amazing. It has basically nothing to do with the original because they apparently just wanted to use their rights to the name on a flagship title. But it's amazing if you're into System Shock/BioShock type games.
It just means fast loading assets, so if SSD becomes RAM one day, anything interesting at all? Same goes for ray tracing, looking more realistic with control of light...
Nothing special here, no need to hype
edit:
You know what really makes a difference?
You playing an VR open world game where every single artificial intelligence NPC does thing in every possible way leading to different gameplay and outcome. And you as a character can just grab anything you want and throw at any monster that you just CREATED in that game itself
Or you can control that monster that you created in your own way, time travelling to another open world game saying hello to your friend playing in his house back and forth
Together with some AI NPC friends you made in that game, you live in that dimensional space forever as you want even after your human body dies, your conscious stays in electronic form
"SSD as RAM" is a bad way to think about it. What you need to realize is that the standard for games has been to treat RAM as storage, because the hard drive was too slow to use for loading data on the fly. SSDs mean games can use storage as storage, but they still have to fit the working set in RAM.
And that's really what the hype is about in terms of better game experiences on these new systems — we should be able to have larger working sets because you don't need to waste RAM as storage.
To get specific about what this enables, I think we will see many more indie games with great looking graphics. The combination of high res asset scans, automatic resolution scaling, automatic texture compression, generally less tight performance budgets that don't need teams to do optimization work (next gen consoles), and a financial model around tools to take advantage of all of this (Unreal + Quixel as the leader here) should make this next generation of games pretty awesome.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsnG-3-r6-Q