Halo Co-Creator Hyped About PS5's Super-Fast SSD Technology

I am genuinely excited to see what can be done with this technology, it could well turn out to be the biggest change in gaming since the 32 bit era

@get2sammyb I dunno I'm hoping for more densely detailed worlds with far more interaction and more buildings to explore, perhaps even more complex and player driven narratives. This generation has had some great games but they're basically just prettier versions than those we had on PS3 with a little refinement

Sadly, I don't think 'instant' loading is going to make a lot of difference to games on its own. We're still going to have the same devs with the same tired ideas, the same publishers scared to put money into anything too new or different, and the same gamers crying that anything too new or different "should be more like CoD" etc.

@Grimwood As far as I am aware from what I've read (and granted, I haven't read much new lately), Xbox has a standard SSD, while Sony's has been re-engineered and is faster than anything else currently available.

Hell, I’m ready to see some actual PS5 reveals. I’m ready to see the console and the entire controller. I’m ready to see Horizon New Dawn, God of War 2, Uncharted New Beginning, Infamous Third Son, Resistance 1985 and the other new games.

@Grimwood Xbox Series X has great SSD but it's nowhere near what PS5 has achieved in terms of RAW I/O and Compression overall speed. This puts a great smile for developers of how they'll optimize and design their games in the future when you don't have to deal with very old slow HDDs and it could affect the overall speed of developing their games in terms of their schedules.

"These platforms have been around for what, seven years?"

Exactly - that is an eternity in tech. We need an upgrade, show the hardware and open pre-orders.

For 3rd party games I’m really curious how it’ll turn out. In particular most of the games come out for PCs, where you have no clue what the components of the system are. I don’t see how you could design games for PC without keeping all those old artefacts like long elevators, hidden loading screens, etc. You can’t assume that PC’s have SSDs, and you can’t assume they’re optimized or you severely restrict your market.

I wonder if this will lead to a world where releasing for the PC actually holds back games.

@TheNewButler
To be fair when news about next gen come up PushSquare reports it as PS5 news and WHY NOT?
It's a PS site after all. They already talk too much about xbox as is.

@Mega-Gazz
That's why SSD x gen will be required more and more.

Can't wait to see the new games that will be developed specially for ps5 ssd, I believe it will be the biggest upgrade compared to previous gen, it's like a mix of cartridge speed and bluray capacity

@Mega-Gazz I think it will depend on the games, if it's a big AAA games either pc gamers upgrade to ssd or experience stutter and long loading times, for AA games ssd maybe will be used only for faster loading. I think most pc gamer that have good rigs for AAA games already have ssd, 250GB or 500GB is not too expensive compared to good video card.

@Mega-Gazz Won’t happen immediately. I would be surprised if you can play many new AAA games on the PC in 3 1/2 years time if you don’t have an NVMe SSD at least as fast as the one in the Xbox series X.

@wiiware but they’ll need to code for lowest common denominator, or at least lowest they want money from.... so stutter isn’t the issue, so much as other benefits - for example where they have to spend time optimizing the files for memory use, including repeating assets to avoid fragmented memory (recall the stream talking about “that mailbox may exist hundreds of times”). Or they may get into a situation where the game becomes unplayable without a crazy optimized system - so sony was talking about loading the things behind you as you turned around because it was that fast. On the PC this would manifest as severe symptoms much worse than “stutter”. So the time to market benefits of not having to optimize the files/memory in the same way would be gone by having to release for PC.

(Edit: end of the day so the above may not have come out as a coherent thought)

@Paranoimia imagine! No more pop inn. Less framedrop

Games like GTA5 and RDR3 will benefit from this sort of thing as will the next Spiderman and God of War.

@Grimwood
The Xbox's SSD is confirmed at 2.4Gb/s while the PS5 SSD is confirmed at 5.5Gb/s. Effectively the PS5 SSD is over twice as fast as the Xbox's which is barely keeping itself at standard SATA3 speeds.

@Ridwaano Sure, but that only means better visuals. Better visuals does not necessarily mean better games.

@Paranoimia more stable games means better game! Play.

@Ridwaano The only thing which makes better gameplay is better gameplay. And gameplay has been fine for most of the stuff on current and previous generations.

The devs are making a rod for their own backs with all this talk of "great new experiences". As much as I'd welcome the elimination of loading screens, I - sadly - would be willing to bet that 99% of what we get on the new systems will essentially be the same as what we have now, but with slightly prettier graphics... especially from the big third-party publishers.

It'll be up to Sony to lead the way in showing what can be done, and they'll have to put some money behind some original concepts, otherwise it'll just be more of the same for the next 5 years or so.

Peter Molyneux's "plant a nut, grow a tree" will finally come to fruition...3 gens later

@Grimwood The Series X has a very fast SSD, and yet, the PS5’s SSD is on a different level.

The Series X’s SSD has a raw speed of 2.4GB/s and a typical compression speed of 4.8GB/s with a max theoretical throughput of around 6GB/s.

The PS5’s SSD has a raw speed of 5.5GB/s and a typical compression speed of 8-9GB/s with a max theoretical throughput of around 22GB/s.

The Series X is going for greatly reduced load times while the PS5 is aiming for no load times. This is without factoring in potential game design changes an SSD of that speed can bring.

@Grimwood ps5 is more than twice as fast as series x.

@Paranoimia I see that the small studio can do way better since it will need less optimization. Less spreading out the data around the game once the disk/game files

Guess after both consoles launch, when a game comes out on both, we're going to be seeing many articles about which game runs and looks better.

At those speeds you might notice faster loading times if both consoles are side by side running the same otherwise the performance will be about the same. You aren't going to see much of a difference visually or performance wise.