Interesting Linus apology video about the PS5

[Phoenixmgs]

My last desktop lasted over 9 years with upgrades, and carried me through almost two console generations. As long as they keep making desktops I’ll always prefer the customizable platform over anything mobile/portable. I personally wouldn’t want to take a computer on the go when I already have to do that with a phone (also hate typing on those tiny damn things too).

My Ryzen will probably be able to play like 90% of the games I want to play next-gen, it's mainly about the few AAAs that actually interest me. I probably wouldn't have played Dvinity 2 on PS4 because I don't think I was going to play it without mods. Whereas I'll probably just get Desperados 3 in like a week on PS4 because I won't have to look up if controller support is there and I doubt I'd want any mods for it.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

And this time, an affordable PS5-level SSD is needed. On top of that it would have to be adopted widely enough in order for the developers to start developing games with that type of storage in mind for the PC. Like it or not, the PS5 SSD is a game changer. This generation of consoles marks the first time that games are being developed with an SSD in mind, and not just any SSD but one that is not even available outside the PS5. Most PC gamers still use large capacity HDD's and dropping a couple of hundred dollars on a high speed 1TB SSD that doesn't even come close to what the PS5 offers doesn't exactly cut it.

It's not the SSD itself that's the game changer. From what I understand the PS5 SSD itself isn't anything special. What's interesting is how the PS5's operating system and games are being built from the ground up to use that SSD.

If 3rd part developers put in the work to optimize their games to use the PS5's SSD (they probably won't) then those optimizations can come to the PC ports as well and would be usable by any PC players who have SSDs. And if 3rd party devs don't bother optimizing their games for the PS5's SSD then only exclusives are really going to take advantage of it, which are games that won't be coming to the PC anyway, so the PC still doesn't really lose anything.

Basically the question is how widely 3rd party devs are going to be adopting this tech. The wider the adoption the better it is for both the PS5 and PC, because PC players who have SSDs will be able to take advantage of the improvements as well.

A 1tb SSD for the PC also isn't necessarily hundreds of dollars. I just built my new PC with a 1tb M.2 NVME ssd and it cost $109 (and that's with currently inflated storage prices due to the COVID 19 pandemic). I think a lot of PC players will be willing to spend an additional $100 on an SSD if it starts providing a huge advantage in load times for new games.

 

[SupahEwok]

And this time, an affordable PS5-level SSD is needed. On top of that it would have to be adopted widely enough in order for the developers to start developing games with that type of storage in mind for the PC. Like it or not, the PS5 SSD is a game changer. This generation of consoles marks the first time that games are being developed with an SSD in mind, and not just any SSD but one that is not even available outside the PS5. Most PC gamers still use large capacity HDD's and dropping a couple of hundred dollars on a high speed 1TB SSD that doesn't even come close to what the PS5 offers doesn't exactly cut it.

I'd like to know where you get your numbers from. "Most" PC gaming is battle royales and Farmville-esque "social gaming". I wouldn't exactly call that the "market core" that pursue or even need more than the most basic of PCs.

Of those I know with a dedicated PC, everybody has an SSD. You didn't need a TB of SSD storage up until very recently when storage requirements ballooned; arguably, you still don't, I get by on a half TB just fine. SSD's in that storage range have been very affordable for years.

It's nice that consoles are finally catching up to a 10+ year old innovation. It's less nice that you're heralding a move back to proprietary architecture which makes porting (and eventually emulating) more difficult an "innovation".

PC has all the bottlenecks that won't allow it to do anything with the SSD that the PS5 should be able to do. It's why if you say upgrade to a PCIe SSD from a SATA SSD, you see pretty much no performance increase even though the PCIe SSD is 5x faster.

Okay, but that's not really much of a point, cuz my SSD already cuts loading screens to under 10 seconds even in the most intensive of use cases that I've encountered in my gaming. Many are 2 seconds or less.

I'll admit that I don't play AAA much these days, but Doom Eternal hit these marks. Proper programming overcoming hardware limitations is they story of the industry. Ultimately, your points come down to... so what?

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

My Ryzen will probably be able to play like 90% of the games I want to play next-gen, it's mainly about the few AAAs that actually interest me. I probably wouldn't have played Dvinity 2 on PS4 because I don't think I was going to play it without mods. Whereas I'll probably just get Desperados 3 in like a week on PS4 because I won't have to look up if controller support is there and I doubt I'd want any mods for it.

Plus it seems that would play better with KB/M anyways. For everything else that doesn’t have native DS4 support on PC, DS4 Windows covers it. Well, except Killer Instinct. That's unfortunately the only Steam game that I had to refund due to an incompatibility issue. I refuse to use anything like Xpadder or x360ce anymore when something like DS4 Windows is so user friendly.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Okay, but that's not really much of a point, cuz my SSD already cuts loading screens to under 10 seconds even in the most intensive of use cases that I've encountered in my gaming. Many are 2 seconds or less.

I'll admit that I don't play AAA much these days, but Doom Eternal hit these marks. Proper programming overcoming hardware limitations is they story of the industry. Ultimately, your points come down to... so what?

It's not just about loading times but how conventional game design can be changed by being able to pull data straight from storage vs it needing to be in RAM first.

Plus it seems that would play better with KB/M anyways. For everything else that doesn’t have native DS4 support on PC, DS4 Windows covers it. Well, except Killer Instinct. That's unfortunately the only Steam game that I had to refund due to an incompatibility issue. I refuse to use anything like Xpadder or x360ce anymore when something like DS4 Windows is so user friendly.

I use my DS4 to play Divinity and it just auto-detects it. I've never been a fan of mouse-clicking to move and the only downside of the controller is organizing the skill's hotbar. I don't play too many games on PC so I didn't even know about the DS4 Windows program, I guess I'll try it out when I get to playing XCOM Chimera Squad as it doesn't have (at least when it released) controller support built-in.

 

[Gordon_4]

It's not just about loading times but how conventional game design can be changed by being able to pull data straight from storage vs it needing to be in RAM first.

So, what changes to game design are you envisaging that being able go straight from storage to processors will allow or encourage?

 

[Phoenixmgs]

So, what changes to game design are you envisaging that being able go straight from storage to processors will allow or encourage?

I'm not exactly sure what it could enable devs to do as I'm not a programmer or anything. The video shortly discusses it @ 5:45. I asked the same thing in one of the threads here saying that faster loading is nice and all but how will that make the game itself any better?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I'm not exactly sure what it could enable devs to do as I'm not a programmer or anything. The video shortly discusses it @ 5:45. I asked the same thing in one of the threads here saying that faster loading is nice and all but how will that make the game itself any better?

I imagine it would allow you to instantly load and de-load textures and geometry.

Right now a game has to load a full area (a full room, a full level, etc) all at once so that anywhere that the player turns will be loaded in. If a game could load only what the camera was looking at and completely de-load everything else, and instantly load it whenever the camera swung around you would have the ability to have much higher fidelity games running on much worse hardware because only small sections of a level would need to be loaded at any given time rather than the entire level. You could also have much higher resolution textures, or much more dense geometry.

I don't think that the PS5 is going to be able to do that, at least not right when it launches (and probably not for another generation), but I think that's the direction things will be moving in.

What I think it more likely is the complete elimination of texture pop-in, increased draw distances, and a massive reduction of loading screens in some games and a complete elimination of them in others. I'm also hoping that devs are much more imaginative than I am and will use the technology better than I envision.

 

[Adam Jensen]

It's nice that consoles are finally catching up to a 10+ year old innovation.

Well, the PS5 is not catching up, it's exceeding anything that is currently available on the market. And when it becomes available, it likely won't be cheap enough to be adopted very quickly. But don't take my word for it, just mark my words because you'll see for yourself soon enough.

 

[SupahEwok]

Well, the PS5 is not catching up, it's exceeding anything that is currently available on the market. And when it becomes available, it likely won't be cheap enough to be adopted very quickly. But don't take my word for it, just mark my words because you'll see for yourself soon enough.

Mmm, I remember when you used to say a smoking gun to put Trump away would emerge from the Mueller investigation "any day now". Forgive me if I don't bother digging up a pen.

What console users never seem to remember is that any time a console "exceeds" in technology, PC catches up and surpasses within a couple of years. Furthermore, anybody who wants to port their games are still going to be constrained by the design of "lesser" machines. So the only games who will take full advantage of whatever gain you get from cutting out RAM (which, by the way, is a claim I doubt, given the 16 GB of VRAM that is almost certainly going to act as a combined RAM source), will be exclusives which never intend to come to other platforms, which is increasingly passé these days. Yet furthermore, historically it has been shown that only dev teams really willing to get down to the metal of console architecture have gotten the most out of the hardware's unique capabilities, and often only in the latter half of a console's life cycle.

What you and some others on this thread are doing is buying in to the standard pre-release hype machine, which precedes any major consumerist endeavor. The console will be what it is, and what it is, is only potential. Devs make games, not consoles.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Mmm, I remember when you used to say a smoking gun to put Trump away would emerge from the Mueller investigation "any day now". Forgive me if I don't bother digging up a pen.

What console users never seem to remember is that any time a console "exceeds" in technology, PC catches up and surpasses within a couple of years. Furthermore, anybody who wants to port their games are still going to be constrained by the design of "lesser" machines. So the only games who will take full advantage of whatever gain you get from cutting out RAM (which, by the way, is a claim I doubt, given the 16 GB of VRAM that is almost certainly going to act as a combined RAM source), will be exclusives which never intend to come to other platforms, which is increasingly passé these days. Yet furthermore, historically it has been shown that only dev teams really willing to get down to the metal of console architecture have gotten the most out of the hardware's unique capabilities, and often only in the latter half of a console's life cycle.

What you and some others on this thread are doing is buying in to the standard pre-release hype machine, which precedes any major consumerist endeavor. The console will be what it is, and what it is, is only potential. Devs make games, not consoles.

I’d think everyone’s aware that PC hardware is constantly evolving, but the fact that console makers are putting more tech into this area of design is a good sign that next generation hardware will by far have even less cross platform limitations than anything prior. Some of Sony’s first parties are also known to push the boundaries so it will be interesting to see what they can do with any advantage the hardware might have, at least for a while. The new controller is something that might actually be more of a game changer than anything.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

I imagine it would allow you to instantly load and de-load textures and geometry.

Right now a game has to load a full area (a full room, a full level, etc) all at once so that anywhere that the player turns will be loaded in. If a game could load only what the camera was looking at and completely de-load everything else, and instantly load it whenever the camera swung around you would have the ability to have much higher fidelity games running on much worse hardware because only small sections of a level would need to be loaded at any given time rather than the entire level. You could also have much higher resolution textures, or much more dense geometry.

Yeah, I got that from the video. I don't know what else could end up being a possibility beyond that though.

What console users never seem to remember is that any time a console "exceeds" in technology, PC catches up and surpasses within a couple of years. Furthermore, anybody who wants to port their games are still going to be constrained by the design of "lesser" machines. So the only games who will take full advantage of whatever gain you get from cutting out RAM (which, by the way, is a claim I doubt, given the 16 GB of VRAM that is almost certainly going to act as a combined RAM source), will be exclusives which never intend to come to other platforms, which is increasingly passé these days. Yet furthermore, historically it has been shown that only dev teams really willing to get down to the metal of console architecture have gotten the most out of the hardware's unique capabilities, and often only in the latter half of a console's life cycle.

What you and some others on this thread are doing is buying in to the standard pre-release hype machine, which precedes any major consumerist endeavor. The console will be what it is, and what it is, is only potential. Devs make games, not consoles.

PC can't catch up any time soon unless they make new mobos and everyone buys them along with Windows (or Linux) removing their software-side bottlenecks. This isn't making me buy a PS5 as I've literally said that I'd be surprised if there's any must-play game that you need next-gen hardware to play in the next 2 years. I don't think there's any AAA game that's on the way or even been announced that I'm more excited to play than Desperados 3, Baldur's Gate 3, Weird West. The reason I'll buy a next-gen console is mainly because buying a video card and power supply to upgrade my PC will probably be at best the same price as the console itself (especially by the time there's a shiny AAA next-gen game that I'd actually want to play).

 

[CaitSeith]

This thread is about the PS5, which isn't even going to be available for sale in many third world countries

Wanna bet? Don't underestimate 3rd world's black market.