Some thoughts on the Series X and PS5 SSD stuff

[Remij 5,047]

So about the Xbox Velocity architecture... It's really quite interesting stuff.  It seems like MS may have taken a different approach to Sony to essentially solve the same problem.

 

The problem:  RAM is too expensive to have the same type of generational leap over the previous gen as they have in past generations.  It's unreasonable to expect 64-128GB of RAM in the next gen consoles given the costs.  Having more RAM also doesn't help solve the problem of long loading times on its own.

 

The solution: Reduce the need for more RAM and instead augment that RAM with super fast storage which can load things into memory instantly as needed by the game. 

 

Now, taking what we know about PS5 into account... and remember, I'm basing this off of what they've spoken about and what we know about.  Sony's strategy seems to be about having higher throughput of the SSD and extremely efficient I/O to be able to load as needed within every second of gameplay.

Now MS on the other hand, with the Velocity Architecture, has gone more conservative with the SSD throughput, and instead is focusing on optimizing software stack and features of the hardware to reduce the need to have that massive throughput in the first place.

 

It comprises of a few parts.  You have the SSD, you have Sampler Feedback Streaming, you have DirectStorage, and you have the Hardware Decompression block.  The SSD and Decompression block are all pretty straight forward, so there's no real reason to explain them, but Sampler Feedback Streaming and DirectStorage are both BIG advancements which will help MS realize their goal.

Sampler Feedback Streaming is a new feature which has some parallels to "Partially Resident Textures" or "tiled resources".  Yes, it's been possible to do those on GPUs for a while now, but not in the same way, and not nearly as efficiently as MS can now with Series X.

 

With SFS, there's really a couple things MS is focusing on.  They already know that the vast majority of a game's data is comprised of textures.  Likewise, a huge chunk of what's loaded into memory when you play a game is texture data.  It turns out, that the vast majority of texture data loaded into memory at any given moment is not even used.  For example, loading textures for a room down the hall that you may or may not ever go into. So... what can they do about that?  Well, using the partially resident textures concept, they can essentially load less amounts textures into RAM... but even when doing so they can still be loading textures from storage into ram which aren't being used.

 

So that's one thing.. being smarter about the amount of textures you're loading and storing into RAM.  But what if you can go one step further?  Using SFS, devs can not only store more precisely what textures they need into memory, but now instead only store and load the PARTS of the textures that will be visible any given frame..  So now instead of needing the whole texture in memory, they only need a tiny fraction of each texture.

 

It's like the storing equivalent of geometry culling, but for textures.  You only render the polygons required to produce what is visible on the screen right? Rendering things outside the view frustum is wasteful, as well as rendering objects that are behind other objects. Well, it's the same with textures.  Now they can load into memory only the parts of the textures which are visible, instead of the entire texture.

 

That gives a huge exponential increase in throughput.  It's actually a MASSIVE advancement.

 

Now what does that mean though?  Well, the less data you need to store into memory in the first place, the more effective that 2.4GB/s - 4.8GB/s bandwidth becomes.  When I asked the Xbox Engine Architect on twitter about SFS, he told me that it wasn't a standard RDNA2 feature and seemed very intent on stressing the importance of how the custom texture filters they have built into the Series X hardware play into it.

 

So about that.. MS has built custom texture filters in hardware on the Series X which work with SFS to help texture streaming.  We all know how textures work in practice. The closer you are, the higher the quality of textures used is... the further away, the lower the quality.  They use different levels of quality called Mipmaps.  No sense in using the highest resolution of a texture if the object is far away.  So when you see textures "popping in" it's basically utilizing the lower quality MIP until the higher quality MIP is loaded then it pops in.  It can be pretty fucking ugly at times.

 

MS has developed, in hardware, custom texture filters to help for when a higher quality MIP fails to load in time, and to improve the quality of lower res MIPs.  Now, depending on how good these custom filters are, it could actually make a huge difference.  What if their filters are good enough to the point where they can further delay loading higher quality MIPS and the player wouldn't notice the difference?  They could even yet again be more selective about what quality of textures need to be loaded into memory at any given moment.  The other thing is that the better the filters, the smoother the transitions between MIPs will be.

 

In the end, this all means that less memory needs to be used for textures.  Textures are a huge part of what costs so much RAM in the first place.  The less RAM allocated to textures, the more can be allocated to other things, such as objects (geometry) and whatever else.  MS claims Series X can also instantly access 100GB of game data with a throughput of 4.8GB/s utilizing DMA (Direct Memory Access)  So 100GB of data (textures in this case) could be mapped out and they can instantly access it.

 

Now.. since Sony hasn't really spoken about any of this stuff.. we don't really know what they have done.  We don't know if they have something similar or not.  We know their SSD has amazing throughput and that they've developed their system around being able to stream huge amounts of data directly from the SSD to memory... but it IS possible that they might have done a more "brute force" approach with their SSD.  Sony may have figured that since their throughput is so high, they might not even require such techniques as they can move data around so much faster.  Remember, these aren't standard features of RDNA2.. so Sony might not have equivalents of the custom filters and streaming portion of Sampler Feedback that MS has designed for Series X.

 

If you think about it... for Sony it makes sense.  Their developers make high quality AAA productions which take many many years and cost a lot of money.  Having an SSD like they do in the PS5 means that life for those developers becomes MUCH easier... and not having to worry about optimizing as much around the limitations of the storage to realize their goals means that they can work more effectively and efficiently on things that matter.  I've said it before, but they want their devs' life to be as easy as possible.  Which is why we've been hearing so many good things from devs about how easy the system is to develop for.

 

So Sony may have take a more hardware based approach, where as MS has taken a more software based approach to tackle the same problem... which makes sense for both companies.  MS has not only Xbox, but PC as well, which also will benefit from MS optimizing their APIs to reduce a lot of the graphics, Windows I/O overhead, and CPU decompression bottlenecks.  It makes complete sense given that for MS to focus on those things for their console.

 

I'm not saying anything like what MS has done is going to make up the deficit... because in pure speed, it wont ever reach that of PS5 SSD.  But it could mitigate quite a bit of it.. and in the end could leave not too much difference between the two as far as real world differences are concerned in most games.

[lynux3 2,460]

Sony's solution is as dependent on software APIs and file management as much as Microsoft. There is no brute forcing; Sony's solution is just better because that's where their budget went.

Edited May 20, 2020 by lynux3

[Voidler 1,681]

Reads like the same nonsense like esRAM making up for the difference in RAM speed at the start of this gen

 

PS5 has the better SSD and MS have the better GPU. You dont need to read into it further than that

[Remij 5,047]

17 minutes ago, Voidler said:

Reads like the same nonsense like esRAM making up for the difference in RAM speed at the start of this gen

 

PS5 has the better SSD and MS have the better GPU. You dont need to read into it further than that

To an idiot maybe 

Edited May 20, 2020 by Remij_

[Voidler 1,681]

46 minutes ago, Remij_ said:

To an idiot maybe 

You made a whole ass essay assuming Sony have put all this budget, time and thought into the hardware efficiencies of SSD but forgot to do anything on the software front 

[Goukosan 2,453]

19 minutes ago, Voidler said:

You made a whole ass essay assuming Sony have put all this budget, time and thought into the hardware efficiencies of SSD but forgot to do anything on the software front 

Lemmings fantasies... hope n dreams 

[lynux3 2,460]

22 minutes ago, Voidler said:

You made a whole ass essay assuming Sony have put all this budget, time and thought into the hardware efficiencies of SSD but forgot to do anything on the software front 

bu directstorage, sampler feedbackz an teh velocities arch  

[JonDnD 3,026]

Lol the Sony Boys are gonna hang on to that ssd no matter how it compares to XSX

 

Getting BTFU in gpu , cpu, and literally everything else has left them sour 

[lynux3 2,460]

1 minute ago, JONBpc said:

Lol the Sony Boys are gonna hang on to that ssd no matter how it compares to XSX

 

Getting BTFU in gpu , cpu, and literally everything else has left them sour 

This thread is about lemmings still having a hard time swallowing PS5's vastly superior SSD. 

[JonDnD 3,026]

8 minutes ago, lynux3 said:

This thread is about lemmings still having a hard time swallowing PS5's vastly superior SSD. 

Nobody is having a hard time about it . 

[lynux3 2,460]

1 minute ago, JONBpc said:

Nobody is having a hard time about it . 

You're right, lemmings are nobodies. 

[JonDnD 3,026]

1 minute ago, lynux3 said:

You're right, lemmings are nobodies. 

Its hard to take people with mullets seriously 

[Goukosan 2,453]

26 minutes ago, JONBpc said:

Nobody is having a hard time about it . 

How many PS5 SSD threads have the lemmings made to try to convince themselves that the SSD advantage doesn't matter at all? 

 

 

Do you see any cows making threads saying that XSEX GPU advantage doesn't matter? nope... not one.

 

But yet somehow lemmings are so insecure about PS5 having a better SSD that they have to write fan fiction novels hoping and praying it doesn't make a difference 

Edited May 20, 2020 by Goukosan

[JonDnD 3,026]

I've seen quite a few cows downplay the gpu and cpu difference . Aza , linus , ike , etc .

 

Nothing remij wrote was fan fiction .

[Goukosan 2,453]

4 minutes ago, JONBpc said:

I've seen quite a few cows downplay the gpu and cpu difference . Aza , linus , ike , etc .

 

Nothing remij wrote was fan fiction .

bump those threads where they said the XSEX GPU advantage means nothing (in the terms of hardware performance, not sales) and it's a waste. 

 

Go ahead... I'll wait. 

Edited May 20, 2020 by Goukosan

[JonDnD 3,026]

17 minutes ago, Goukosan said:

bump those threads where they said the XSEX GPU advantage means nothing (in the terms of hardware performance, not sales) and it's a waste. 

 

Go ahead... I'll wait. 

Yeah you will wait because I'm not wasting time when you know I'm right .

 

Lil Jerry 

[Goukosan 2,453]

2 minutes ago, JONBpc said:

Yeah you will wait because I'm not wasting time when you know I'm right .

 

Lil Jerry 

Just like I thought.  You got nothing 

[Remij 5,047]

1 hour ago, Voidler said:

You made a whole ass essay assuming Sony have put all this budget, time and thought into the hardware efficiencies of SSD but forgot to do anything on the software front 

I didn't say that. Jesus fucking christ... and you wonder why I called you an idiot.

[JonDnD 3,026]

2 minutes ago, Goukosan said:

Just like I thought.  You got nothing 

Everyone here sees cows downplaying the difference in gpu and cpu. Youre trying to argue like Jerry.  

 

Funny seeing you in every xbox and ps thread . Nothing to talk about with nontonto ??

[Remij 5,047]

35 minutes ago, Goukosan said:

How many PS5 SSD threads have the lemmings made to try to convince themselves that the SSD advantage doesn't matter at all? 

 

 

Do you see any cows making threads saying that XSEX GPU advantage doesn't matter? nope... not one.

 

But yet somehow lemmings are so insecure about PS5 having a better SSD that they have to write fan fiction novels hoping and praying it doesn't make a difference 

fan fiction eh? So explaining how hardware features work is fan fiction?

 

Maybe... just maybe... I made a thread with the intent of discussing how the architecture works, and insecure cows and sheep are taking it as an attack on their precious Playstation... because they literally have nothing technical to discuss... just.. durr hopes and dreams

 

And yes, there are people who are saying Sonys 10TF will be more performant in cases because "the whole gpu runs at teh 2.2ghzzz"..