Frickin A, wasted my time with the failed 3080 launch yesterday but missed all the PS5 preorders. Guess I'll just wait on both fronts.
I'm greedy and buying both. I plan on checking for stock often after release to get both asap. Not sure what the rush is, but console gaming has proven to be a good escape.Yeah Microsoft says Xbox goes live on Tuesday 11AM. It’s a lot more controlled. Also I believe the supply for the Xbox will be a bit better if Microsoft is to be believed. Either way I think Sony let it get out of hand by being so vague. Even seen some “also on pc” on some of their videos that they claim is a mistake. I think some of them will be on pc but they didn’t want everyone to know that. Also some titles they pushed as ps5 exclusives are actually going to be on PS4 too. This is understandable but they had thrown jabs at the Xbox for their titles being cross gen so it sends an odd message IMO. They haven’t been very open about this information and didn’t set a firm day for preorders and it turned into chaos. Very amateurish if you ask me and it’s not as if Sony is new to this. They seemed to rush into this.
If you were wondering about Storage space, Demon's Souls is 66 GB while MM Ultimate (which includes the remastered OG plus all the DLC) is 105 GB. That space is going to fill quickly.
Damn. That seems overboard to me but I dunno the texture sizes etc eithef
Yeah but a lot of that stuff is because they have duplicate data on there for access reasons. The SSD was supposed to eliminate that issue because there is no access time on SSD's.Games are crazy these days. Even Borderlands 3, which you know, is sort of washed out because of the cell shading style, is 104GB on my PC right now (that is with all 4 DLC; I think it was at least 60gb on Vanilla)
Yeah but a lot of that stuff is because they have duplicate data on there for access reasons. The SSD was supposed to eliminate that issue because there is no access time on SSD's.
That is crazy if the games are that huge with no duplicate data, or if it just has the duplicate data since they are just ports of old games.
I was not aware of that--I think on PCs of the last ~10 years at least, SSD or at least SSD caches should be considered standard....but were PS4 and XBone generation SSD or HDD? If HDD, that would explain why the gaming industry is still stuck in the stone age designing things that way.
darned consoles!
I would think PC's also are in the same boat but I don't know. I mean unless a game says SSD as a requirement, they have to assume mechanical HDDs are going to be used.I was not aware of that--I think on PCs of the last ~10 years at least, SSD or at least SSD caches should be considered standard....but were PS4 and XBone generation SSD or HDD? If HDD, that would explain why the gaming industry is still stuck in the stone age designing things that way.
darned consoles!
I would think PC's also are in the same boat but I don't know. I mean unless a game says SSD as a requirement, they have to assume mechanical HDDs are going to be used.
Yeah but a lot of that stuff is because they have duplicate data on there for access reasons. The SSD was supposed to eliminate that issue because there is no access time on SSD's.
That is crazy if the games are that huge with no duplicate data, or if it just has the duplicate data since they are just ports of old games.
Watch around 30 seconds in this video here. Sony flat out said there is tons of duplicate data on HDD's because of access speed.I think you're mixing up storage mediums in regard to data duplication. Data duplication was a thing for the discs because creating a disc image means you can guarantee the position of the data prior to publication. This meant you could avoid the seek times, which are not so great for optical media. The problem with hard drives is that you don't have full image capability like you do with a disc. In other words, unless you can demand that the operating system ensure that you are able to allocate a specific amount of space in a contiguous fashion, you may -- and likely will -- end up with fragmented data. This means that not only will a game's files be separate from each other, but individual files may be fragmented.
I can't speak much to the veracity of the following claim, but I've heard that one of the reasons why installs are so large is because of things like using uncompressed data. I heard something about Call of Duty using uncompressed sound files (likely raw files). I do wonder if the consoles having built-in decompression hardware will alleviate this to some degree, but it doesn't sound like it.
SSDs should really just serve to eliminate or significantly reduce load times. One topic that I saw being discussed was the nature of processing I/O operations, and how the consoles are likely going to be a bit better at this compared to a PC. The biggest thing is how you'll want to batch your I/O operations together, but if I recall, this is only an option available under NVMe. Features like DirectStorage are meant to tackle this and how Nvidia integrated I/O as part of their 30-series announcement, but that won't affect non-graphics aspects of games such as the aforementioned audio.
Watch around 30 seconds in this video here. Sony flat out said there is tons of duplicate data on HDD's because of access speed.
They said some of the objects are duplicated up to 400 times on disc in Spiderman.
And they can get rid of most of that extra data with newer titles because the access times on SSD are so low. On my pc for example, many games like Skyrim and the Witcher have loading screens with hints and information about wildlife. On a normal HDD I can read them and press a button to scroll through a few before the game loads. With an SSD I can’t even read the first one before the game loads. It’s really a huge difference and that’s just a normal SATA SSD, not even my nVME drive.
Yes I know. And that is why it's surprising that the sizes of these games are so large out the gate. Maybe since they are ports (Spiderman and Demon Souls) they didn't bother optimizing and have duplicate data still. We won't know for sure until someone can look at the data though.And they can get rid of most of that extra data with newer titles because the access times on SSD are so low. On my pc for example, many games like Skyrim and the Witcher have loading screens with hints and information about wildlife. On a normal HDD I can read them and press a button to scroll through a few before the game loads. With an SSD I can’t even read the first one before the game loads. It’s really a huge difference and that’s just a normal SATA SSD, not even my nVME drive.
Watch around 30 seconds in this video here. Sony flat out said there is tons of duplicate data on HDD's because of access speed.
They said some of the objects are duplicated up to 400 times on disc in Spiderman.
It would depend on the size of the data in question. If you're talking about smaller pieces, then it's likely far more possible to guarantee placement physically beside other data (e.g. 50MB of a level's 300MB of data is duplicated). However, as I noted, you cannot get around the fact that a hard drive -- unlike the pressed disc -- will become fragmented over time as data is deleted and added. However, Sony may be handling things behind the scenes to ensure that data is managed better. For example, if items such as Dynamic Skins are stored in a separate partition at the inside of the hard drive, games could be stored toward the outside, you can avoid those smaller files creating "holes" in the space that the games would use as they're deleted/added.
What you may end up seeing more is wasted space on DLC. For example, if I installed Spider-Man as well as a few other games, and then installed some Spider-Man DLC a few months later, then chances are the Spider-Man vanilla game data is not contiguous with the DLC data, and it may result in excess data to avoid having to load game data from multiple locations (i.e. basic game data from vanilla, DLC data from the DLC location).
But let's go back to duplication. Aspects of it still seem awkward to me. For example, how do you handle patches? Call of Duty has the infamous 50GB+ patches, but what exactly are these? If we go back to attempting to ensure contiguous files, do you now have to do a bunch of disk maintenance to ensure that specific data remains contiguous even after being updated? Or is there some routine that involves just creating new, contiguous data and deleting the old stuff?
It just seems like there are plenty of awkward pitfalls that you can run into with trying to ensure data remains a specific way on an ever-changing medium like a hard drive. It makes me wonder if the PlayStation ever performs any maintenance on the drive while it's not in use... sort of like how you'd run defrag tools on computers back in the day.
Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is that you don't have finite control over the entire image structure like you do on a game disc. Although, thinking about this more, that may actually be part of the reason why they'd want copies of game data strewn about. If I can't guarantee 30GB of contiguous space for my Spider-Man game, then I need to ensure that common data exists among other pieces for various areas, etc. If you could guarantee contiguous data, I don't think you'd need nearly as much copied data due to hard drives being faster than optical discs.