An interesting look at the two main features of Unreal 5, how that compares to modern methods and why its 'next gen'. Could save a LOT of developer work time too....
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I’d be interested to know what the file size is. All the film quality assets can’t be small.
Very true, its an impressive showing and almost unlimited detail is nice to see, but those assets are going to be heavy. Still, that being said, baked light maps, additional textures and a few other bits and pieces are no longer going to be needed.
Im hoping that the additional weight these assets have will be offset by the less texture reliant pipeline opening up a little more. I think it will be pretty balanced.
Its always the way though, next gen, new games and bigger installs. Its nice to see that the PS5 will have non proprietary expandable storage, that 800+GB SSD will fill pretty quick. With PCIE4 and NVME drives catching up pretty quick in the main markets, it will get more and more affordable as time goes on to add additional storage.
On a similar note (and i stress this is a rumour) i did hear talk about a couple of editions of the PS5 being avilable at launch. Much like the PS3 (80gb, 120gb, 160gb and 500gb etc). I cant remember where i saw it but it was along the lines of doubling the capacity (800gb SSD > 1.6TB SSD). Again this a rumour as far as i know, but it would make sense. Guess we just have to wait for that all important reveal
@Belekai You’re definitely right about the price of SSDs dropping as time goes on. I remember when 64GB micro SDs were at a premium price back when I got one for my 3DS. Now you can get one in the hundreds of GB for the same price, it’s insane.
@nessisonett Tell me about it, i remember years go when SDRam (quite some time before DDR) went down to £1 a MB, people were loosing their minds. If it was the same today, a 8GB ram stick would cost you a little over £8000. But you and pick them up for about £50. I was the first person in my college class to have a 16mb USB drive, everyone else was stuck on 1.44" floppy drives hahaha. Man times change.
@Belekai With the better data organization on the PS5’s SSD likely doesn’t mean that PS5 games will be smaller than PS4 games, because the assets involved will get larger themselves, but it does mean that they’ll be much smaller than they could have been without it.
I doubt we will see different editions of the console with different hard drive sizes at launch as it is specifically 825GB to remove and reduce bottlenecks in the PS5’s architecture. That included custom hardware throughout, intended to marry the drive to other key components inside the device, including the CPU and the GPU itself. That’s also why it has such an unusual size at 825 GB, the perfect amount to meet the needs of its other components, Cerny said.
We will probably see something like that further down the line as tech improves.
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@JohnnyShoulder
But didn't Cerny say in the deepdive that Sony will release storage upgrades down the line ? If so, they most also work just as efficient as the 825GB one, don't you think ?
Mark Cerny stated that it met the the size and pricepoint to make this console affordable. Any larger and it would would have increased the costs significantly. I don't know why 825GB - maybe it has something to do with the way the memory is built and the connectivity to the Console.
At the moment, we don't know how Sony will be offering a way to increase the size. It could be similar to PS4 - ie, you buy a new 'internal' option and replace the one you are supplied with - which seems the most likely given the way it was discussed - or they do something similar to MS, have a port on the back you can plug in extra storage that adds to your supplied SSD. This can have 'multiple' extra storage you can simply plug in/out - that may limit you to say 2TB at once, but you could have 5TB (1TB built in + 4x1TB external) a pain maybe but more flexible and consumer friendly than buying a whole new internal SSD and replacing the one supplied.
Sony have said they are using a proprietary method of connecting the SSD to the system to get that data transfer and that nothing other than SSD's with that type of connection will work. There is currently nothing available on the open market so we don't know if they will be giving you a way to expand the storage through an external port or having to replace the internal SSD. The MS solution does expand on the built in option but was also built to be cooled by the console. I guess we will find out when Sony decide to show their PS5...
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@JohnnyShoulder Some good points there. Like i said it was a rumor i heard about the additional launch consoles, and i want that to be clear that a rumor is a rumor lol. Games will certainly not be smaller, we are currently on 100gb+ installs today and i expect that to increase much higher next gen, but as i was saying, its all about balance. Higher detail models, less texture maps needed, the question is, is it enough to offset the size of the models? Probably not.
Cerny was very clear that 3rd party drives would be compatible with the PS5 if/when they catch up in speed, and have been verified by sony. This is something we are seeing now with PCIE4 becoming the norm on PC's, and NVME drives getting even faster and faster.
Sony has shown an incredible amount of foresight with this design, not only are the drives faster, they are expandable from 3rd party hardware. MS on the other hand, well that system is locked into PCIE3, again somthing that is already being surpassed by PCIE4, and will be phased out by the end of the year. That is going to hurt them a lot down the road. And if that wasnt bad enogh, the only expandable storage from MS is 100% propriatary, no 3rd party here, MS or nothing.
The last time we saw a company do this it really hurt sales, yes im talking about the Memory Stick Duo, it nearly killed that console. However, sony learned and adapted, MS no so much. They went for raw power irresponsibly, sony went for innovation, the results are night and day
@Zeke68 The storage upgrades are the expansion card type things that slot into the expansion bay of the PS5. This will increase the storage size and be compatible with the SSD. You can still use a external USB drive, but only to play PS4 games. I'm don't recall Cerny mentioning upgrading the actual SSD, but I could be mistaken. That is totally different to releasing different models with different sizes of internal drives at launch.
I've done a little digging on the PS5 since the GoT preview last night. Exactly the preview to win back confidence, fantastic.
Anyway I was looking at the SSD size and whilst Mark Cerny mentions it's massive upsides which are a game changer, the less obvious things he mentioned have me a tad worried. Sony looked at the average game consumption over a weekend, week and month for the average gamer - this is bad for most of us massive gamers, we are not in that bracket. The SSD really is 825gb - not 1tb with room for the OS, 825gb which will then house the OS.
If you can remember @BAMozzy I asked you a month or so ago about file sizes changing years ago. It used to run at multiples of 4, which was altered for ease of understanding. I'm concerned a bit of word play has been used here. Doing some quick and flawed math using the old technique they are reducing the size of a 1tb SSD down by 12% with room for the PS to the tune of 50gb. Heres the magic number doing that leaves 64gb per channel - coincidence? No chance. No chance on earth. Even a simpleton like me has worked it out.
That's almost exactly a reduction of 1% storage space per channel (of which the PS5 has 12). The space would be more easily available by the channels at all times. Making it faster but we still lose the space.
What dya think? Pretty cool Conspiracy - which may be actually true
If we see future upgrades to the SSD at 1625gb approx (making 128gb per channel) then I will sit here all smug and stuff.
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@themcnoisy I wouldn't be surprised if there is something in that. However we probably won't know for certain.
What we do know though is that games won't need multiple copies of assets, multiple versions of those assets - at lower and lower quality with varying texture quality either for the object at various different distances or in different areas. That Statue in the demo for example may well be larger in file size, but the way games may work in the future is you only need that statue once on the disc - and any files attached to describe it materialistic properties for example. It doesn't matter if that statue is miles off in the distance or right up close, it scales with the resolution so if its tiny and only 1000 pixels, it only needs to be 1000 triangles and as you move closer, the image fills more screen and therefore the number of triangles go up. It also only counts the triangles you see - not those around the backside or any part that is obscured by objects in front of it.
Currently, games are built in 'blocks'. If you take an open world game for example and divide the entire map into a grid, each square will have ALL the assets for that - inc all the various different lower quality versions for that grid. Those are stored in one section as a 'block' that were loaded in to RAM as a complete set of assets for that area. As you move to the next block, it pulls all the assets for the next grid into RAM so any assets that are in both areas, need to be stored in both blocks on Disc (or SSD/HDD). What this means is that some assets can be stored in the game file many times - you may have the same Street lamp all over a city but it could be stored 20 times or more - obviously you don't need the asset for 'every' time its used - just for every 'block' or new area its used. If you have games that load up between levels, then of course you can have a single 'Assets' folder and the game will search through all those assets, pulling the ones that are needed etc - all of which takes time on a spinning disc as it mechanically has to search and move to right place for each asset and load them in at relatively low speed but on open world games where the game is streaming in assets for the next block, its much quicker to stream in a 'block' of assets from one area of storage than to search through a much larger folder and only pull in those assets.
The new system allows for 1 of any asset to be stored on an SSD and the game pulls it in as and when needed and incredibly quickly - not only are the search times significantly reduced, but also you only need the 'highest' quality asset and you have these massive transfer rates too so can be streamed in and out incredibly fast. You are not streaming in multiple versions of the asset, multiple textures etc for different distances. You don't 'need' texture maps because the texture is 'geometry'. A raised rivet on a piece of armour is 'raised' because its made of triangles and geometrically higher as opposed to a 'flat' texture that with baked in lighting etc 'looks' raised - which also means that it will react properly to lighting - that's getting off the subject a bit but the point is, that Statue could be used thousands of times and only needed to be stored once with no multiples of it, no texture maps etc etc.
The devs create these incredibly highly detailed geometric models and use those to create their texture maps for. They may have to create backed in lighting to create the illusion of depth, layers etc - like add in a 'fake' shadow of armour over cloth so it looks like the armour is on top because the whole thing is a few 100 polygons instead of the 1000's it was when they created that asset.
A Statue can have 32m pixels - of course its a 3D object but its not drawing 32m triangles either with this Nanite system. A 4k screen only has 8m pixels so its a waste of resources to draw all those triangles so what this engine is doing is looking at the 'image' from the cameras perspective and rendering all the triangles it needs to. It also can't render triangles less than 1 pixel in size so its essentially scaling those to fit. Its essentially how we see TV now. At 4k we can see individual hairs on a cat if its up close enough so those hairs at at least a pixel in width. As that cat moves back, you lose the individual hair detail maybe each pixel is now two hairs width so the pixel colour will be the average of those two hairs - a black and white hair would give a 'grey' pixel and the further away it moves, the more hairs have to be averaged out into a single colour. It can happen with a Denim jacket composed of clearly visible dark blue and white threads, move further back and the jacket looks 'light' blue and you lose that 'texture' because the pixels are too large to show individual threads. Obviously, the higher the pixel count, the smaller the pixels, the further away from the camera objects can be before they lose detail - A reason 4k can still make a noticeable difference in smaller sizes but these differences can be harder to spot (you don't need to buy a 100" 4K TV if you sit 10' away like some 'guides' will tell you as you will still see some benefits - particularly in the details of mid range objects). So what Nanite appears to be doing is culling and scaling triangles to fit the set resolution - disregarding any that are not visible from the cameras perspective and merging all the triangles into 1 pixel if they are less than that in size. That room full of statues, each 32m triangles is not rendering billions of triangles, its rendering ~2560x1440. Of course those assets are still large file sizes which will still have an impact on the processing of that scene, as it does today - why devs try and balance the point at which high and lower quality assets swap in with visual quality to deliver the required frame rate - otherwise they would just use the higher quality assets and textures anyway. They get away with using lower quality because they are more distant, smaller and therefore can save processing power for other aspects to ensure it hits the desire frame rates.
I wonder whether Devs will use Nanite for every aspect or only use it for certain things. SSD's may well enable a LOT higher quality assets to be streamed in very quickly but the GPU still has to process those. It may not be worth having a forest of high quality trees stretching off for miles - even if its culling and scaling a lot of the triangles to render what the camera sees - each one could still be 'very' large files to process and move but maybe certain objects, certain aspects - it maybe worth it to avoid pop-in of both objects/textures (as they switch from a lower quality to higher quality). I guess it will depend on the Devs, the style of the game and their objectives as far as design, performance (visual and frame rate) are concerned. SSD's do give them more choice and they don't have to have lower quality for loading/streaming reasons - unless they are all extremely large files. It maybe better to have many more different assets than a few (even if they use those 'few' a LOT - like the room full of statues) of the same repeated in which case, it may well be better to have lower quality - particularly those that you will never get close to.
This is just an option and can be used for all assets in a room for example but in a big open area, it maybe better to have a mix of very high polygon count assets and lower quality versions of others so the GPU can handle and process it easier. This demo ran with a dynamic resolution dropping below 1440p and at 30fps. As nanite scales with pixel count, dropping resolution also drops the quality of those assets - if it was 10000pixels at 1440p, but drops resolution, that could now be 9000pixels so only 9000 triangles.
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I thought it looked beautiful but to be honest, I'm just going to wait until the games come out and for when devs release next gen only titles.
A tech demo always looks great, as do nice trailers. I want to see how it is all going to change gameplay and everything. I think it is clear that games are going to get even better next gen. I am more excited about load times!
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@themcnoisy Well technically 1TB = 1024GB which would throw the maths off by about 5GB but that’s being really pedantic! It’s a pretty sound theory but it remains to be seen whether they’ll offer larger models on launch. If it was proprietary storage then I think they would have made us pay through the nose for the add-on storage.
@BAMozzy thanks for clearing that up mate. I have a better idea how it works now!
@nessisonett As I said my flawed maths hahaha, nice one for following my train of thought, respect man.
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@nessisonett I doubt there will be larger models available at launch, like i said the SSD has specifically been designed to be 825GB to remove and reduce bottlenecks in the PS5’s architecture. Cerny said this, so not sure why people are ignoring this or if they just forgotten he said this.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
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@JohnnyShoulder 825GB is surely including the system software, considering the ‘power of 2’ rule. Therefore it’s a 1TB drive installed in the console. Of course, Sony being Sony, you’d expect them to advertise it as 1TB.
@nessisonett Ah sorry man, my mistake I thought you were saying there would be different models like with the ps3. With all the fancy compression techniques the console uses, maybe the OS won't need as much space.
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