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shrike82 posted:Does the fast SSD tech on PS5 have any impact on game graphics moving forward? Does it impact the use of big textures or is it still too slow to really impact graphics? It's mostly for loading/streaming assets, the GPU is still king when it comes to that sort of thing. SSDs can indirectly make games look better by avoiding pop-in, but that's about it, and clever use of assets go a long way to mitigating that anyway. Cygni posted:why are we talking about the dumb pee-s five SSD again Because for better or worse, consoles set the pace for graphics on PCs. PC games of the last decade were almost exclusively designed with the lowest common denominator in mind - the xbox one - and now hardware requirements from early next year onwards is about to dramatically increase. It's all pertinent
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Jul 12, 2020 11:12
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Yup. Almost all PC games are written expecting that the machine has a HDD. So not only is a lot of code for loading game data single-threaded, there are no frameworks or API available to help facilitate much better data throughput. Game developers could improve their code and some do, but they'll still run into other roadblocks. These consoles will cause change to happen in the PC space. Microsoft has already brought over the DirectStorage API from Xbox to Windows, which will help and I wouldn't be surprised if we see some innovations here from the GPU vendors too. As I understand the GPU driver is a major impediment to getting data into VRAM from storage in a much faster manner.
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Jul 12, 2020 11:25
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the compression tech is kraken from radgametools so it's not an unknown quantity. ssd tech is going to be interesting over the next few years compared to gpus. i doubt we'll see the asset duplication feature of engines gone until 2 years in for multiplat so it'll be a tough sell of games demanding a large chunk of a fast ssd and gpu before the tech exists on pc last i checked asset duplication on textures alone accounted for at least 4x game storage if bundled for hdd seek times. any teardowns of recent games to give an idea for the general public?
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Jul 12, 2020 11:49
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I wonder if they'll still keep doing it for the PC, because it appears there's still more gamer PCs running mechanical hard drives than I feel there actually should be. Also, I loving hate doing maintenance on them.
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Jul 12, 2020 12:54
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Combat Pretzel posted:I wonder if they'll still keep doing it for the PC, because it appears there's still more gamer PCs running mechanical hard drives than I feel there actually should be. Also, I loving hate doing maintenance on them. I think they will actually just brute force that change through. Those still on HDDs are going to have terrible stuttering and performance. It is time to make the transition. It's never going to be as smooth or painless enough to satisfy everyone. I still remember the days of moving from AGP to PCI-express. So many bitter, salty, angry people.
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Jul 12, 2020 13:48
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I'm interested to see how Cyberpunk 2077 performs as a DX12 only title. Every game I've played that has an option between DX11 & DX12 has had the former deliver better performance than the later.
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Jul 12, 2020 14:33
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OhFunny posted:I'm interested to see how Cyberpunk 2077 performs as a DX12 only title. Every game I've played that has an option between DX11 & DX12 has had the former deliver better performance than the later. If it's DX12 only, you'll never find out the difference, then. The exact opposite has been true with Vulkan, in my experience
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Jul 12, 2020 14:39
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Quite a few games have dropped DX11 now Red Dead 2 (DX12 or Vulkan) Gears 5/Tactics (DX12 only) COD:MW reboot (DX12 only) Death Stranding (DX12 only) Forza Motorsport/Horizon (DX12 only) Wolfenstein 2/Youngblood (Vulkan only) Doom Eternal (Vulkan only) Detroit Become Human (Vulkan only) probably more
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Jul 12, 2020 14:41
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Combat Pretzel posted:I wonder if they'll still keep doing it for the PC, because it appears there's still more gamer PCs running mechanical hard drives than I feel there actually should be. Also, I loving hate doing maintenance on them. I think that’s because prebuilts love to use a small NVMe drive as a boot drive and then put like a 30 dollar spinny drive in so they can say it has over a terabyte of storage.
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Jul 12, 2020 14:48
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HalloKitty posted:If it's DX12 only, you'll never find out the difference, then. The exact opposite has been true with Vulkan, in my experience I know. It's just a tad annoying that it doesn't seem to deliver the stated boost from being "closer to the metal". DX11 brought tessellation over DX9. Is ray tracing exclusive to DX12?
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Jul 12, 2020 15:59
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Yes, hardware raytracing is only exposed via DX12 and Vulkan. It's hard to get a proper picture of the improvements DX12/Vulkan bring over the older APIs, because the games that support both and allow a direct comparison are usually compromised by having an rendering abstraction that caters to the lowest common denominator of DX11, so their DX12 path ends up more or less emulating a DX11 driver and often falls short of AMD/NVs actual DX11 driver that's been refined for a decade. Then when games shed that baggage and go DX12-first it's no longer possible to make a direct comparison to how it would run on DX11. In my experience the games that support both DX11 and DX12 often have issues with stuttering in DX12 mode, but the ones that target DX12 exclusively run fine. repiv fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 12, 2020 |
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Jul 12, 2020 16:25
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Codemasters aren't the best at engines and F1 2020 runs the same or slightly better on DX12, so I think we're maybe past the point where it's an issue with new games
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Jul 12, 2020 17:21
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repiv posted:Depends on how games end up allocating their memory, the XBSX does have 10GB of fast RAM ostensibly for the GPU and 6GB of of slower RAM ostensibly for the CPU, but only 3.5GB of that slow RAM is actually usable by games after the operating system takes its cut so IMO it's pretty likely that games will end up cutting into the fast RAM for non-graphics purposes and the actual graphics budget will be closer to 8GB. The 'slower' ram is 336/gb a sec, mind you. It's not as if the CPU can even utilize that bandwidth fully, part of it will definitely be used by the GPU.
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Jul 12, 2020 19:36
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:I think they will actually just brute force that change through. Those still on HDDs are going to have terrible stuttering and performance.
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Jul 12, 2020 19:39
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Happy_Misanthrope posted:The 'slower' ram is 336/gb a sec, mind you. It's not as if the CPU can even utilize that bandwidth fully, part of it will definitely be used by the GPU. The GPU could use the slower memory but will there be any left? I already see games built to current gen constraints using >3.5GB of RAM on the CPU side, seems more likely to me that the CPU will end up dipping into the faster RAM pool than vice versa. Maybe faster streaming will change the dynamics of how much RAM is needed on the CPU side though.
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Jul 12, 2020 20:07
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Microsoft mentioned that they came up with something called DirectStorage to deal with real-time decompression of game assets. I'm guessing this will make it's way over to PC, probably built into a storage controller that has really expensive RGB lights on it.
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Jul 13, 2020 02:40
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It needs to be built into the CPU side of the PCI lanes to work as well, doesn’t it?
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Jul 13, 2020 03:07
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Ideally yeah, that way the output side isn't bottlenecked by PCIe. Just pull in compressed data over PCIe and barf the decompressed data straight into RAM. get to it, intel and amd repiv fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jul 13, 2020 |
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Jul 13, 2020 03:13
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Subjunctive posted:It needs to be built into the CPU side of the PCI lanes to work as well, doesn’t it? Correct, or it's not going to actually help overcome the PCIe limits. Which is why I wouldn't expect it anytime soon--CPUs have quite a lead time.
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Jul 13, 2020 03:40
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Eh, the PS5 is supposed to have an SSD with a bandwidth of 5.5 gb/sec, that goes up to maybe 9 gb/sec with decompression. A PCIe 4.0 16x slot can do 16 gb/sec in both directions. Let's go ahead and say that the 64% boost in throughput from decompression is a real number. In that case, it's a question of how fast an SSD would have to be before that 64% boost reached the limit of the PCIe 4.0 slot. If there was an SSD that did 9.75 gb/sec on it's own, the decompression boost would push it right up to that limit. But then, with an SSD that fast, you would already have a storage solution fast enough to match a PS5, so you wouldn't need any kind of decompression solution, assuming you could be satisfied with console performance from your rig.
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Jul 13, 2020 04:21
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lol if people need to upgrade their mobos in the future to support 16x for both their graphics card and storage
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Jul 13, 2020 04:32
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shrike82 posted:lol if people need to upgrade their mobos in the future to support 16x for both their graphics card and storage Alright, I'll sweeten the deal for you. The DirectStorage storage controller (which features both RGB lighting and an active cooling solution) also does real-time compression. You can squeeze more juice out of your SSD while telling yourself that it's a side benefit that you have zero load times in Skyrim 2.
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Jul 13, 2020 04:39
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Maxwell Adams posted:Eh, the PS5 is supposed to have an SSD with a bandwidth of 5.5 gb/sec, that goes up to maybe 9 gb/sec with decompression. A PCIe 4.0 16x slot can do 16 gb/sec in both directions. A PCIe 16x slot, sure, but it's pretty unlikely that such will be available for use with a SSD in more than a small handful of high-end boards--Zen2 only has 24 lanes, after all, and even Zen 3 will be bottle-necking storage to 4x. So unless you think Threadripper is a viable platform to target mass-market games, it's far more likely that we'll have a similar situation to what we have now: 16x for a GPU, 4x for a M.2, and if you have a second 16x-physical slot, it'll be electrically 8x to split with the first 16x slot. And since a whooooole lot of people are only ever going to have a single 16x slot, that's gonna be used for the GPU. At best, maybe someone gets sporty and makes a 8x PCIe SSD on a sled, but you're gonna be paying an outrageous premium for something that niche. The point is that--at least for the foreseeable future, we're looking at design targets for PC SSDs limited to 4x PCIe 4.0 lanes, or about 8GB/s at flat out theoretical max. And even then we'd need SSDs actually fast enough to take advantage of that--the best we've seen so far are in the ~5GB/s range. So, yeah, the PS5 will in theory have a substantial SSD bandwidth advantage over both the XBox and PC. What (if anything) developers do with that is a different question. But on paper there won't be a practical way to compete with that for a few years. Maxwell Adams posted:Alright, I'll sweeten the deal for you. The DirectStorage storage controller (which features both RGB lighting and an active cooling solution) also does real-time compression. You can squeeze more juice out of your SSD while telling yourself that it's a side benefit that you have zero load times in Skyrim 2. DirectStorage is an API to provide low-level access to the NVMe controller. It's not a storage controller itself (though it may have specific hardware/firmware requirements that would need to be included in newer drives to be "DirectStorage compatible"--haven't seen much info on that yet), and doesn't do compression/decompression. The decompression engine for both the PS5 and Xbox are built into the SOC. Intel/AMD would need to build comparable fixed function hardware into their CPUs if they wanted something similar. It can't be added in as part of a SSD. And it's not practical to do heavy decompression in the CPU, either, as trying to decompress 5GB/s would crush most consumer-level CPUs. DrDork fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jul 13, 2020 |
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Jul 13, 2020 06:15
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DrDork posted:Zen2 only has 24 lanes, after all, and even Zen 3 will be bottle-necking storage to 4x. It's only 24? Somehow I thought it had a few more. DrDork posted:DirectStorage is an API to provide low-level access to the NVMe controller. It's not a storage controller itself (though it may have specific hardware/firmware requirements that would need to be included in newer drives to be "DirectStorage compatible"--haven't seen much info on that yet), and doesn't do compression/decompression. What MS has said about DirectStorage is really vauge. It has sometime to do with hardware decompression, and it drastically reduces the CPU power needed to handle storage I/O. The only way I see that making sense in a PC is with a storage controller that has a dedicated decompression processor.
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Jul 13, 2020 07:51
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DrDork posted:good words wouldn't the shift to DDR5 and new sockets in 2021-ish give the PC market the shift it'd need to restructure PCI lanes or whatever the heck to accommodate this thing that currently isn't supported except by HEDTs?
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Jul 13, 2020 08:06
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GPUs are only just bottlenecking on 8x PCI-E 3.0, there's room on 4.0
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Jul 13, 2020 09:53
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Maxwell Adams posted:It's only 24? Somehow I thought it had a few more. Maxwell Adams posted:What MS has said about DirectStorage is really vauge. It has sometime to do with hardware decompression, and it drastically reduces the CPU power needed to handle storage I/O. The only way I see that making sense in a PC is with a storage controller that has a dedicated decompression processor. If by "storage controller" you mean the I/O portion of the SOC having dedicated decompression hardware, then yeah. Both Sony and Microsoft have stated they're using dedicated hardware, because that's part of the point: on-the-fly decompression of large data is too costly to run on a general purpose CPU, so you need custom hardware to speed it up to the point you can actually use it while gaming. Sony seems to be layering that on top of the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD they could get, while Microsoft is layering it on top of what I'm guessing is a more pedestrian PCIe 3.0 drive. treasure bear posted:GPUs are only just bottlenecking on 8x PCI-E 3.0, there's room on 4.0 And yet you don't see any consumer PCIe 3.0 x8 SSDs, even though you very reasonably could build them. I highly doubt any SSD manufacturer is going to release a drive that doesn't fit in a normal m.2 slot anytime soon that's not a silly expensive niche product (if at all), and that unfortunately for all of us means settling on whatever 4x lanes can give us.
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Jul 13, 2020 14:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:wouldn't the shift to DDR5 and new sockets in 2021-ish give the PC market the shift it'd need to restructure PCI lanes or whatever the heck to accommodate this thing that currently isn't supported except by HEDTs? In the end, I'd be real surprised if Intel/AMD did anything at all, since that would be a lot of effort just to add a capability that will pretty much only be used by the tiny fraction of your customers who are top-tier $$$ gamers, since presumably any SSD that would take advantage of it would be quite expensive. And, again, we don't even really know that devs are going to be using the PS5/XBox storage system in a way that's totally outclassing PC drives, or can't be abstracted away through other tricks.
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Jul 13, 2020 14:45
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DrDork posted:DirectStorage is an API to provide low-level access to the NVMe controller. It's not a storage controller itself (though it may have specific hardware/firmware requirements that would need to be included in newer drives to be "DirectStorage compatible"--haven't seen much info on that yet), and doesn't do compression/decompression. The decompression engine for both the PS5 and Xbox are built into the SOC. Intel/AMD would need to build comparable fixed function hardware into their CPUs if they wanted something similar. It can't be added in as part of a SSD. And it's not practical to do heavy decompression in the CPU, either, as trying to decompress 5GB/s would crush most consumer-level CPUs. quote:How DirectStorage could improve the PC From here.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:04
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Yeah, you'll note that it's unfortunately real light on details, and sadly Microsoft hasn't released much in the way of additional info or clarifications. quote:The SSD and the DirectStorage API will be two of the four parts within the Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture, which also includes a dedicated hardware decompression block, and what Microsoft calls Sampler Feedback Streaming. I square those two statements as basically saying that they're offloading the decompression from the CPU to the dedicated hardware and using DirectStorage APIs to interact with it/the SSD itself. So maybe DirectStorage APIs are portable to Windows in a way that would help optimize the performance of existing SSDs, but it's not going to magically take 5 core's worth of decompression work down to 0.1 core--that's hardware offload right there doing the heavy lifting, not simply a better decompression algorithm or some API calls.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:15
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Pretty much sounds like the XSX will have the same hardware decompression as the PS5, with what being the sister CPU of latter. I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't ride on that one, taking wind out of Sony's sails, with what making the SSD and decompression a keypoint in the reveal.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:22
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It's okay you can call it XBOXSEX.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:25
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orcane posted:It's okay you can call it XBOXSEX. mom says it's my turn on the sexbox
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Jul 13, 2020 19:27
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Combat Pretzel posted:Pretty much sounds like the XSX will have the same hardware decompression as the PS5, with what being the sister CPU of latter. I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't ride on that one, taking wind out of Sony's sails, with what making the SSD and decompression a keypoint in the reveal. The decompression blocks seem to have been developed independently by Sony+AMD and Microsoft+AMD, given they landed on completely different codecs. The Xbox decompression block handles Zlib plus a bespoke codec for further compressing compressed GPU textures, and the PS5 block handles RADs proprietary Kraken codec. Sony has the better general purpose codec but missed the boat on texture compression, so they ended up licensing a software solution also from RAD to handle that.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:31
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Combat Pretzel posted:Pretty much sounds like the XSX will have the same hardware decompression as the PS5, with what being the sister CPU of latter. I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't ride on that one, taking wind out of Sony's sails, with what making the SSD and decompression a keypoint in the reveal. Interestingly, no--there's been some talk about how the PS5's Kraken decompression implementation is a general purpose decompression engine, while the XBox's "BCPack" implementation is "tailored for textures". Again, not a whole lot of actual information has been released, or how any of it will play out in practice. Given that, I'm likewise a little surprise that Microsoft didn't try to put some spin on it to try to emphasize how their implementation will load relevant stuff faster than the PS5, or at least be able to get close, despite the on-paper hardware disparity heavily favoring the PS5. Maybe it's because they know it's not? Maybe they figured the leading line is their heftier CPU/GPU combo and figured they could ignore it?  We'll find out this fall/winter, I suppose.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:31
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repiv posted:The Xbox decompression block handles Zlib plus a bespoke codec for further compressing compressed GPU textures, and the PS5 block handles RADs proprietary Kraken codec.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:42
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DrDork posted:Interestingly, no--there's been some talk about how the PS5's Kraken decompression implementation is a general purpose decompression engine, while the XBox's "BCPack" implementation is "tailored for textures". Again, not a whole lot of actual information has been released, or how any of it will play out in practice. The Xbox does have a general purpose engine too, it's just based on a weaker codec. Xbox is basically using Zip while the PS5 should be closer to 7zip/LZMA in compression ratios (different codec though). Last I checked there was no details on how BCPack works though - the software-based texture solution Sony went with basically just swizzles the texture data into a layout that's more amenable to being compressed by Kraken, so the hardware general purpose block still does the heavy lifting, but it's unclear if BCPack also leans on the general purpose engine or is a completely custom codec for texture super-compression.
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Jul 13, 2020 19:44
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Yeah, I'll be interested to see what (if any) difference the various implementations make in terms of actually being able to present usable data to the applications in a way that impacts how they run, especially with cross-platform support being a must-have for most games.
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Jul 13, 2020 20:17
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The PS5 hardware assist can decompress direct to GPU memory from SSD, is the same true of the XBox thing whatever it is - that article is so vague. The only fragment I can find isquote:This increased efficiency translates into two to three times improvement on the effective amount of physical memory, and two to three times more I/O bandwidth, Goossen said. Physical memory is probably not GPU memory unless they're decompressing post-flight so to speak. But again too vague to understand what they're doing. I hope it's at parity across the two new consoles in terms of final effect even if not in specific implementation detail so that 1-frame loads are the new normal. More motivation for games to change how they're made and work is a good thing all around. Having cool new tech in the PS5 held back to only exclusives would suck.
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Jul 13, 2020 20:54
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v1ld posted:Physical memory is probably not GPU memory unless they're decompressing post-flight so to speak. But again too vague to understand what they're doing. If they have extra texturing bandwidth, a couple of extra steps per pixel to decode a small compressed chunk might be worth it to get meaningful memory savings. Do people eschew ASTC and friends these days?
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Jul 13, 2020 21:07
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