This Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Loading Transition Is a Reminder of What PS5 Can Do

One thing: is it up to developers to implement fast loading or is it up to Sony?

@KnightRider1982 everything is up to developers. You could give the devs the power or a thousand PS5s and still end with a tetris-like game running at 10 FPS and taking 1 hour to load. Of course hardware matters but... there's a lot of stuff involved, and then you can't compare games even on the same platform, or because they're more or less "the same"... Spiderman on PS5 loads so quickly it's amazing... 2 seconds I guess, then other PS5 "native" games still take several seconds (10ish or so)... maybe they're open world but you have to account for assets type, file distribution, loading strategies etc, etc... I'm a developer but noting gaming related, but looking at PS5 specs and real games like Demon Souls, Spiderman and R&C Rift Apart, is faily evident that 2 seconds load is what we should get from games really well optimized. I do think a PS4 game running "optimized" on PS5 (say, ported and modified to load as fast as possible) should take almost 1 second to load, given that PS4 had only 6GB of usable RAM for games, the PS5 I/O can fill that in no time. Anyway , games will tell, and game design will change for better.

I'm rarely wowed by video games anymore, but THAT was super impressive.

Too be fair, its seems like the same world but with an upside down version, most of the assets are shared between both. Still impressive though!

Yes, yes, sure, PlayStation 5's SSD is amazing, but let's not forget the amazing GPU that tesselates and animates these dancing sprites and sunlit skies for you. =)

And here i just got that song out of my head!

Yeah... that is a lot more that SSD. I have a 5,000mbps NVMe in my PC and it does not do anything close to that.

That is some Sony hardware engineering magic right there 😎

@munstre yes it is. The rails are there in both and the structures in the back ground just have different textures on them.

This is the game that makes me want a PS5.

@Loftimus exactly, its the same world framework...

I am soo pumped for this game!!!!! This and Demon's Soul ( ended up not buy it) is what I bought my PS5 day one for.

@KundaliniRising333 that's the one.

I'm saying they are time crystals, as that is the same area, in two different states. The first scene looking like the aftermath.

This game better come with bundles once this releases.

@KnightRider1982 @MattSilverado GoTsushi on last gen tech and no ssd, was able to achieve superfast load times. Even with the game being an open world style game, with a lot of assets. Goes to show the power of optimization.

Yeah, the ps5 ssd hype is real, can't wait for the game to arrive 😃

What PS5 can do. There can be only one. It's a kind of magic.

We are finally starting to see what this great console can do instead of all these PS4 ports!

Looking forward to the new GOW but i hope it's not held back by making it compatible with the old PS4 hardware???

I do wonder if there is some trickery going on here.

Like maybe that second area is "loaded" prior, at least in part, and the crystal simply exists to swap it in to play.

Could be some clever use if preloading into RAM here rather than "none of this was loaded but in a second it all is".

I just wonder how much of it is actual SSD speed and not long established optimisations with spare space developers had.

im glad they went with this kind of memory for the hard drive, even though its expensive its well worth it. hopefully they'll activate the 2nd hard drive space later on this year for more storage. i just had a new pc built and i included this type of memory in it , and its almost like instant boot up when i turn it on.

Reminder that this is happening in the first year of the console. Truly cannot wait to see what we get as the generation proceeds. We're going to see some CRAZY stuff, man.

As always every other company and the competition talk about this and that.
Sony and their studios just get on and deliver it.

I want this! I want this! Amazing!

I soooooooooo need to get a PS5 before this game comes out!

PS5 didn't show its SSD speed yet. It makes me wonder why this game can leverage that speed and other titles can't. Third partz games loads basicallz as fast as xbox

From now on I want all PlayStation Exclusives to be PS5 only really(sorry PS4 owners) Because then a games developer can try new stuff they just can't do with the PS4. So I am a bit disappointed that the New Horizon game will be PS4 to(and probably God of War to) :-/ Oh well.

@God_of_Nowt Thanks for that reply; very interesting!

@MattSilverado 6 GB Ram? Wow, no wonder it's so slow! That's less than my laptop which isn't specifically a gaming laptop haha

@PhhhCough yes, but optimization can only go so far. If you like tech resources and game development stuff please check the Games developers conference (GDC) on youtube. For sony last gen you could watch spiderman's and horizon's videos.
I'm playing Ghost right now (on PS5, of course it's BC) and yes it's fairly fast but there's always an explanation for everything, there's "no magic"... First it's not THAT fast, then maybe most/many game assets are already allocated into RAM so assets loading from the HDD is reduced (but if it's the case it has to do with clever world & assets design, not with luck or magic), then maybe some lazy loading strategies are in place such as "still loading while your playing but you can't notice because the devs hide it somehow". Then again, you can't compare Ghosts world design with, say, Cyberpunk so it's not valid to compare loading speeds there. If you have to load from HDD you have a physical limit on speed (around 100MB/s at best) so you could do the math, filling the PS4 6GBs of RAM (it's not a requirement to fill the ram but often needed) will take a minute and that's only talking file reading, then you have decompression and processing/game logic which runs on the CPU making the process slower... So you load less upfront, process less or something... There's no magic.

@Jayofmaya yes, I think it's 6GB available and 6 out of 8 CPU threads for game usage (although maybe a little more of both upon system software updates). But being slow it's not a RAM issue exclusively, say you could have 24GB RAM on the PS4 but you must fill that from the HDD... go bake a cake and return in 20 minutes 🤣

This game looks absolutely gorgeous 😳

I even like how they are going back and optimising games on ps4 like the last of us to load quicker, all credit to the devs.

@KnightRider1982
It's up to the devs to take advantage of the hardware.
The issue is, many games won't take true advantage of this unless they are first party.
I say that as many games are either cross-gen or multi-format, which means there's little incentive to spend too much time on a feature that's limited to one platform.
Even PC is holding this back, as they take account for mechanical HDD never mind custom gen 4 SSD's like on PS5.

@KnightRider1982 It's all on the devs. GTA Online took 6 minutes to start up but someone found inefficiencies in the code and wrote an unofficial patch to speed up the loading to less than 2 minutes.
https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

Whats amazing is they haven't scratched the surface of what this generation is capable of.

Did you just assume that Lombax's gender sideeyes?

I was not interested at all in this game, but now I've seen the trailer, OMG, it looks amazing and i might actually preoreder it!! God Damn You Sony :shakesfistatsony: lol

@MattSilverado You make the assumption that games need to fill up the entirety of the RAM when they load, which is not the case. Game worlds tend to be designed in segments that are loaded Just In Time to create a seamless experience.

This mechanic has a big flaw though, if you go to fast, you might reach an area before its loaded; or if you fast travel, its unlikely that that random section is cached. More RAM, all other things being equal, means you could stream in more of these segments, sooner.

@thedevilsjester of course I've made that assumption just for make it an easy case. Usually you want to do as little work as possible, be it a calculation, or data loading or whatever. But is the case that being HDD reading so slow, many open world games can't afford to do streaming while playing so they must load "in advance" and "just in case it's needed"... that's the case for most games, or at least AAA ones. Say, GTA can't present you the world if it hasn't loaded a big chunk of data... and neither can load all game data into RAM (because it's not smart, and also not possible). There a few game post mortem videos and notes over this topic, with different strategies for game world streaming etc, very instersting.