Pete Bottomley from White Paper Games had recently commented that the PS 5’s SSD when combined with Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, will bring “big changes to the level design” in the world of games.
In an interview with GamingBolt, Bottomley commented that with this combination, developers will be enabled to take advantage of the dual approach with PS 5’s ultra-fast SSD and the Unreal Engine 5.
Quicker loading times will mean there is a reduced need to “design features into loading screens along with the streaming of the content at runtime,” he said. This is because of Unreal Engine 5, which “chunks the content under the hood.”
PS5 x Unreal Engine 5
The best look so far is the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo for the PS5, showing us a glimpse of what the next-gen consoles can offer. Unreal Engine developer Epic Games was quick to praise the superfast SSD from Sony. In fact, the SSD was so fast, even more so than high-end equivalents for PC, that Epic Games had to rewrite Unreal Engine 5 in order to take full advantage of the drive!
- Nick Penwarden from Epic Games had said that these extreme speeds will allow developers to create much more detailed and denser environments, “changing how we think about streaming content”.
- He had also said that the PS 5’s SSD will mean a huge leap in graphics and computing and that the “storage architecture is also truly special.”
- While the Xbox Series from Microsoft also has an SSD, it is not as fast as Sony’s. The Xbox has more raw horsepower, but Sony’s SSD has given it the edge over Xbox.
- With this information, it is an understatement to state that the next-gen consoles are going to fundamentally change the experience of gaming in the coming years. Even without high-end graphics, just having an SSD can alter the entire development process and the ultimate experience for players.
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Ok I agree that UE5 and the next gen consoles and pc will bring new techniques to gaming. That said anyone who thinks a SSD is going to bring revolutionary graphics is lying or out of their mind.
The bottom line is all data on any console or pc has to be resident in memory (Ram) to be displayed on your monitor!!! Streaming data from any hard drive no matter the compression methods or hardware requires direction from a Cpu! The fast SSDs on both consoles are great for loading times but the 4 gigabyte per second bandwidth advantage the Ps5 SSD has over the XSX pales in comparison to the almost 200 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth the XSX had over the Ps5. Lets say in an imaginary perfect world the the Ps5 could use the SSD to feed data to and from the gpu at the same time the system ram is doing the same. That still would leave the ps5 laging a hundred plus gigabytes of memory bandwidth behind the series X. ALL FRAMEBUFFERS RESIDE IN THE GPU MEMORY POOL! The blazing fast SSD in the Ps5 will always amount to faster loading times over XSX. That said hard drives dont process shaders, texture units, render output units, Ray tracing or frame buffers. Until that happens SSDs will have absolutely zero effect on the actual gpu output of the PS5.
Tell that to the Xbox games developers struggling with the GDK.
I guess you haven’t had any actual experience of SDK Problems, API overhead, badwidth bottlenecks, and the many many architecture issuess that limit a console’s theoretical performance.
Otherwise the XSX would be flooded with exclusives by now surely?
The whole point of the PS5 SDD is it’s low latency, and ability to be directly addressable by the GPU.
It matters less and less now how big the frame buffer is, or how many ray intersections the GPU can process, a it’s all about scene detail now, as we’ve seen with the Unreal 5 Demo.
A well-lit, high detailed photorealistic 1080p frame, looks objectively better than a 4k render of a low detailed, badly lit scene.
And the evidence is already showing in the released games and demos, pointless trying to theorise now mate, March 2020 is long gone.
Lot of stuff is changing this generation. Direct Storage for MSFT, and Sony’s equivalent for the PS5, means the GPU can communicate directly with the SSD in realtime without relying on CPU throughput. VRAM is no longer the constraining factor for anything but what can be displayed in a bare handful of frames.
Whole levels don’t have to be loaded, because only what’s needed can be brought in during the time of a short animation.
Also of note is UE5’s nanite system, which doesn’t need to load all of however many massive textures into memory for rendering, but can stream textures in as needed and display only the visible pixels rather than processing all of the potentially billions of vertices that could bring many a GPU to their knees.
See the new Ratchet and Clank for a live demonstration of level loading on the fly, which Digital Foundry does a great breakdown of and interview with one of the developers, also see Mark Cerny’s pre launch tech dive on the PS5 for an explanation of how the architecture is fundamentally different this generation from what we’re used to seeing elsewhere thus far. Check the UE5 preview last year where they talked about how nanite would be employed, and you can see how GPU addressable SSDs is ultimately what makes it possible to not be constrained by VRAM.
But…
There are no PS5 exclusives. Games will have to work on the PS4 so all this fancy next gen stuff, is not going to take place until the end of the PS5 generation.
I’m confused. Better than the Xbox Series X? Well I have both PS5 and XboxSX and a 120hrz 4k hdr screen. Unless my eyes deceive me. The Series X is far superior over PS5. Specially on online multiplayer gaming like WARZONE.
Francisco…
I guess you haven’t played any of this year’d PS5 eclusives using the SSD, like Ratchet and Clank, or Returnal?
A simple Google would have saved you from posting a stupid comment.