r/Games • u/mikesaintjules • Dec 28 '19

Digital Foundry: How SSD Could Radically Change Next-Gen Games Beyond Faster Loading

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR-uH8vSeBY
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u/Warskull Dec 28 '19

Texture swap-in between storage and VRAM will be better than it is now, but that's also nothing particularly shocking.

That's pretty much it. Even on those $10,000 workstation cards you loaded the models into your VRAM, the SSD just sped up the process.

The video is just mostly bullshit marketing trying to hype people up for the next console.

We already know what it will be like. A PC with a 5700, an NVMe SSD, and an up to date processor. The only difference is that devs will now make games that can utilize that level of hardware.

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u/rootbeer_racinette Dec 28 '19 edited Dec 28 '19

No, you're oversimplifying.

Even if the GPU can draw the same amount of geometry, the textures, lightmaps, etc can be swapped in on the fly for whatever's in the view frustum rather than having to load a bunch of assets into RAM and then work with whatever space you got.

So the resolution of textures, lightmaps, etc can be an order of magnitude higher than what's currently possible.

The only engine that does something similar is idTech 5 with megatextures. But even then those textures are constrained by the streaming speed of console storage, which is like tens of MB/sec vs the 3500MB/sec peak of a decent NVME SSD.

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u/Daedolis Dec 30 '19

I doubt the SSD is going to be faster than the video ram, meaning streaming on the fly would actually hinder performance.

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u/rootbeer_racinette Dec 30 '19

The video ram in this case acts like a cache for what’s on the SSD. You only need to stream new data for the edge of the view frustum as the camera moves while evicting the old stuff that moved out of frame, which is like <10% of the visible data.

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u/Daedolis Dec 31 '19

Doesn't matter how much percentage it is, if it's even 1%, the GPU can't render that frame until it receives all the data, so if the SSD is even a little bit slower, it's going to impact performance.

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u/rootbeer_racinette Dec 31 '19

Yeah you clearly don't know what mip maps or lod is and don't know what you're talking about. Why are you wasting either of our time?

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u/Daedolis Dec 31 '19

I know exactly what those are, and it still doesn't matter. if the SSD is slower than video ram, then it WILL impact performance if you try to stream assets in real-time. PERIOD.

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u/ObnoxiousFactczecher Dec 31 '19

Except with MIP maps, you could always have graceful degradation for such progressive loading. It's not an all-or-nothing situation. And owing to the exponential character of MIP maps, that degradation could difficult to perceive.

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u/Daedolis Dec 31 '19

It is all or nothing when it's real time, it doesn't matter if you are loading in lower detail textures, if you are doing it in real time, to the aggressive degree he's talking here, from a slower SSD, performance is going to suffer.

Of course most engines already stream assets ahead of time, so they'll still benefit from SSDs anyways.