Load times have become a big talking point over the last few months. It all started when we got our first PS5 details, learning that Sony's next-gen machine will utilise a custom solid state drive that should dramatically reduce things like loading times. There was also the Marvel's Spider-Man demo, which showed the game running on hardware comparable to the eventual PS5. Its load times were cut down to less than a second.
Following the trend, Microsoft had developers talk of load times when it teased Project Scarlett at this year's Xbox E3 press conference. Reduced load times is clearly going to be marketing bullet point for the next generation of consoles.
Adding to the conversation is a new patent from Sony. It details technology that, in theory, could kill off loading screens completely. The patent is titled 'System and method for dynamically loading game software for smooth game play', and it outlines a system that monitors the player's location so that it knows when to load in a new area. Of course, all loading would take place in the background, so at least in concept, you'd never have to sit through a loading screen.
“A load boundary associated with a game environment is identified. A position of a character in the game environment is then monitored. Instructions corresponding to another game environment are loaded into a memory when the character crosses the load boundary, such that game play is not interrupted," the patent explains.
As is always the case with patents, you should never peg them as an inevitable reality, but it's this kind of tech that companies like Sony and Microsoft will have been exploring as they ready their next-gen machines. There's certainly a chance that this patent could give us a glimpse into what the PS5 is capable of.
[source uk.ign.com]
Comments 53
Anyone would think they never played Halo...
Sounds cool but let's actually have the box in our hands before we get hyped.
After playing spider-man and now bloodstained, all I have to say is good riddance. On my windows 10 pc the difference between hdd and ssd is game changers, after installing ssd my pc is as fast as my smartphone. It's not only in the games but browsing ps5 ui should be way faster and instantaneous. I hope we can buy off the shelf ssd to add more storage though.
The only thing that concerns me about the SSD is wanting more space? With it being a custom drive does that mean you will have to buy a official "Sony" one?
Sounds real expensive...
But we will probably still have 20 seconds of unskippable logos.
Bioware devs are reading this, thinking to themselves; "impossible!"
@Splat That's a good point.
I hadn't really paid too much attention beyond that they were going with SSD.
Given the relative ease that PS3 and PS4 HDDs could be swapped out - and the popularity of the non-proprietary nature of that, I'd like to think that the 'custom' nature of the drive may actually be the file system and not the drive itself.
Hopefully it'll be replaceable with other 'off-the-shelf' SSDs.
In games like Bloodborne where a boss just beat you and you're in a hurry to retry, long load times are momentum-killing. Other games' load times don't really bother me.
@KALofKRYPTON @Splat One rumour is that the PS5 will have a hard drive as well, which is used for storage purposes. The SSD is primarily used for actually running the games, which is supposedly why it's a custom build (that should, in theory, be cheaper for Sony).
I gotta say, fast loading doesn't exactly excite me. Frequent long loading is annoying (Pillars of Eternity) but generally it doesn't bother me.
@ShogunRok
That's... weird.
In that case, are we expecting the SSD to pre-load/cache from the HDD upon/before booting a game?
Didn’t Superman 64 already do this with its Kryptonite Fog?
@KALofKRYPTON It's apparently something like that, yeah. The SSD just handles certain things when you're actually running a game, so you would assume there's some sort of caching going on, or at least some kind of method where the SSD and the HDD have to "communicate". Be very interesting to see how it all works when we finally get the details.
@kyleforrester87 That's because you're an old man and you've got nowt else to live for, Kyle
@ShogunRok If there's a HDD and an SSD, then they're basically using the SSD as RAM?
Which is fine, 1TB HDD, 250GB SSD. I figured it would be something like that anyway, the system would only come with a smallish 250GB SSD and they would expect us to buy an external USB3 external HDD for storage. And then we would swap games back and forth that we want to play. If it also comes w/ an internal 1TB HDD so much the better.
Edit: Of course if we have to constantly move 100GB worth of game from the HDD, either external or internal, to the SSD so the game can play w/o loading screens, we're still talking about a lot of moving time for people who play more than 1 game at a time. Most probably would be willing to do that, but if you're a family like me w/ 3 people sharing the same system it could be a big problem if the SSD can only hold 1 game at a time.
OK, now they have my attention.
@rjejr Yeah, that's basically what people are suggesting. It works on paper (as far as we can guess), but we'll obviously have to see whether it holds up in reality. Fortunately I think we can be confident in Sony and Cerny's ability to make a good console at this point. I just hope that, like you say, there's not some weird and awkward caveat to it.
@ShogunRok devastating!
@ShogunRok
That will be interesting!
@rjejr
That would work, but would probably decrease the SSD life span, unless that is the reason for the 'custom' part of the drive...
Though that would free up resources for other bells & whistles like ray tracing and bi-neural audio and such.
@kyleforrester87 I'm a reduced load times fanboy now
@ShogunRok just imagine how much more efficiently you’ll be able to replay Dragon Age Inquisition though
@kyleforrester87 That's the playtime cut in half, at least
@Splat It's going to have a HDD too. It'll just cache the current game on the SSD. I really doubt it'll have a large enough SSD to be the only drive. A normal 1TB SSD costs £100, more than double that for a 2TB.
As for this patent thing, that's already a very common thing. Games don't load tbe whole area at once, it's not like, say, RDR2 has the whole region in memory, it streams it as required.
This could make me pick up Nioh again.
@Splat it will probably support external HDD's anyway like the PS4 does so i wouldn't worry about storage
@ShogunRok "confident in Sony and Cerny's ability"
Confidence, like trust, isn't really my strong suit. PS3 was, possibly, delayed a year waiting for the blu ray drives, and Cell wasn't easy to program for. PS4 has been good though, no complaints here beyond 4 hour DS4 battery life. They still have probably a year and a half to get the kinks out so I'm sure any caveat, which it seems there must be, will be minimized. I've been through a ton of crazy stuff w/ Nintendo hardware - way too limited Wii U & Switch storage, too small carts, changeover from SD to Micro SD from 3DS to New 3DS - I don't think Sony can do anything too odd I haven't seen before.
@KALofKRYPTON Hadn't given SSD failure rate any thought, but a quick google search shows you're right, it is something to be concerned about. If they are thinking 1 person plays 1 game a week, or maybe a month like Destiny or any other involved shooter or sports game, that may be fine over a 5 year lifetime, but 3 or 4 people sharing a PS5 - flatmates, college dorm, siblings - changing games often, like 2 or 3 times a day, I could easily see it becoming an issue.
It's seeming increasingly likely that it will be a dual-drive system, as I mentioned in a comment when the SSD was first revealed.
My concern would be the potential delay in a 50GB+ game whilst data is transferred from the HDD to the SSD. When you start a game, will there be a 30 second or more delay during which data is transferred? I'm thinking along the lines of the way that you can start playing some PS4 games after a short installation, but can't progress beyond a certain point until all of the data is ready. Or maybe we'll see a technique like ND use, where there is actually loading time between sections, but cleverly hidden behind cut-scenes.
I thought, basically, isn’t this how it’s already done?
Yay so we’re going back to a time of no loading screens like we had 20 years ago on the NES/SNES/N64!
Honestly, I could care less about the loading times, if they're not giving us 4k at stable 60 fps.
This is one of those buzzwords that is better to be ignored. Sure, run PS3 games on PS4 and there won't be loading times. Now, let's make the same experiment with a third-party game built for next-gen three years after PS5 launch.
I hope its a 2T SSD
But how else will we see those useful hints & tips and manoeuvrable 3D models?
It don't sound like it would cheap to upgrade a solid state drive?!?! With games getting bigger and bigger we really need a MASSIVE Hard drive I think for next-gen.
Super cool if they're able to do away with load times indefinitely. That would be a pretty revolutionary idea considering we saw some egregious load times this generation. It's a patent, nothing is set in stone, so I'll wait until then.
@Carl-G The idea of a large capacity SSD excites me, but my wallet quickly reals me back into reality. I know they're able to buy bulk and lower the price, but surely Sony and Microsoft don't get that large of discounts even in mass.
@Carl-G
I'd rather they refocus on retail disc tbh rather than pushing for more storage and digital going together like this gen .
It like what I've got in my ps4 now, a combi SSD/SATA drive. Games you play more recently load up slightly quicker from the SSD part of the drive. This sounds like they have expanded on it greatly so games load a lot quicker to almost non existent level.
Seems like this is pretty much how GTA5/RDR2 works. As long as you travel normally there aren't too many load screens, but when you start jumping around you are outside the bubble.
Didn't MS say certain computers with Win10 would eliminate the long startups. Maybe when it was new, but once you had a year's worth of updates and added apps/programs people saw it went back to waiting... waiting...
As for PS5/SSD I'll believe it when I see it.
@BridgeToClarity Same here. My old laptop took over 2 minutes to start up and another minute for the OS to be fully functional. Now I boot up my new laptop and I'm ready to go in about 12 seconds. Very excited to see new consoles adding them!
@rjejr @ShogunRok
I did this on a Ryzen 2600/B450 this year (256GB EVO 960 NVME + 4TB HDD), No idea when it all moves around. But it works and super fast.
PS5 is all based on AMD tech. Not about moving "the entire game"... but it could be textures of 1 and a map folder of another
@Agramonte Oooh, very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
I'm down with o.p.p. I meant to say I'm good with this news.word up son
Uncharted's load screens are the worst!!
I see people talking about it being a Sony only SSD, makes me think of the Vita's memory card fiasco.
I'll miss loading screens. When am I supposed to go pee or get snacks? Pause the game like animals? Pfft.
Remember when Nintendo 64 used cartridges to alleviate load times at the cost of storage space? Good times. Keep up the unnecessarily expensive proprietary storage solutions Sony, it's not like it was a definitive factor in the death of the Vita or anything.
Also, I logged in to remind everyone that the patent Namco had on loading screen 'mini-games' has been expired for almost 4 years and nobody has taken advantage of it that I know of. Seems like it would be a 24 year-old solution to a modern day problem.
@ApostateMage tips in loading screens are actually pretty nice when ur new to the game. Especially when u can press a button to skip to the next one.
@eltomo I don’t see why they wouldn’t use a perfectly normal PCI slot for the SSD. They allowed access to the SATA connection so you could change the old hard drive. I don’t see why they couldn’t have access to the PCI slot so you can change the SSD. Of course you need something as fast as the original but the same is true of the internal PlayStation drive upgrades today.
If they get rid of loading screens (which I doubt, it'll be like Mirror's Edge's incredibly long lift rides, or Metroid Prime's doors that take a day to open, or even Tony Hawk's American Wasteland's bus ride to the next area), they'll need to bring manuals back to help people learn to play, or have a dedicated menu for it. Loading screens have been used to parcel out tips and tutorials for a long time now.
Dark Souls, for instance, offers lore for certain items you may otherwise miss. Not to say I wouldn't miss how long the Soulsborne games take to load!
@ShogunRok @Agramonte I can't believe I watched that entire video and he didn't mention Superman or Kryptonite even once.
Oh, and his handwriting backwards is about 100x better than mine forwards so I'm going to assume it's a trick done with mirrors or something.
Informative watch. No mention of prices though. I'm guessing that CPU+HDD+SSD+RAM+GPU combo is > $399. By a lot. Maybe Sony goes back to two models, one w/ both a HDD and SSD for $599, one w/ only a SSD for $499. Even 256GB would be enough to get people started for a week or a month, still a lot more than the Switch's 32GB.
People w/ USB 3 HDD on their PS4 could just move it over since the PS5 is supposed to be BC anyway. Even I have an external HDD on my PS4 and I don't game that much compared to the rest of this site but even I needed one just for the PS+ games so I'm assuming almost everyone else must have one as well. Well except for the people who did the internal 4TB HDD swap themselves. Maybe Sony will leave an empty hole for that as well like the 12GB PS3 has which I filled w/ the old 80GB from my other PS3 which I put a 500GB into. Only w/ a 256GB SSD. Surely there's room for both.
Think I'll stick w/ that, 2 models, 256GB SSD + 1 or 2TB HDD and a 256SSD only model. Or maybe just the 256GB SSD w/ room for internal HDD or external USB 3 HDD if they only want one model. They still have 2 PS4 models they need to sort out before PS5 launches, can't have 3 models on store shelves, not enough room. Unless they really want a $199 PS4 Slim, $299 PS4 Pro, $399 PS5 Starter and $499 PS5 Duo.
Edit: Reread my post, and I suppose PS5 Starter really needs to be PS5 Uno to go with the PS5 Duo. Then they can market them as the dynamic duo. Gonna start w/ a Superman joke, gotta end w/ a Batman joke. 😂
@ShogunRok yw, Anytime!!
@rjejr Oh wow, I've seen it tons of times and never thought of the backwards thing... I was jealous either way 😅
Well NVME are cheap now. You can get 512GB for $60 (3,400/ 2,300MB/s) and that is retail on a separate M2 and profit. SONY could just put the chips on the motherboard itself and just leave the HDD Bay as exchangeable. Save money and space.
Only thing. It works best when you start with an empty 2nd drive. The NVME can have an OS... but warning boxes came up when the HDD had my Steam/Uplay/Origin folder. In the end I deleted it and started fresh.
I cant think of an IMAGE/Spawn influenced joke 😕
@Agramonte Spawn doesn't need any more jokes.
@rjejr true 🤣
I wonder if they will have any tricks for open world loading screens, because until you hit "Fast Travel" it won't know where you are going. It could guess though. You're doing a side quest, you need such and such, so it loads an area that you might go to or partially load multiple areas, then when selected, load the remaining.
As for the custom SSD they're talking about. If the have two drives a standard hard drive and a SSD for caching an entire game, there's no reason that they couldn't make it big enough for multiple games and keep them there until it becomes full and you need to play another game (out with the old, in with the new).
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