They want MS to blink first. It’s very obvious that Microsoft’s BOM will be much, much higher, and if they don’t heavily subsidize it Sony will win on price this generation.
So how does this shape the future of games? Higher texture quality?
Load times are nice, but it’s lower on my list of chronic console failures. Whatever, I’ll take what I can get.
He said “most of the top 100”.
Drive speeds? It doesn’t, as I posted in the other thread that’s all bullshit. Moving from magnetic to SSD drives is a really big deal. Faster SSDs, not so much.
It does make the cool gamestate swapping stuff Microsoft demoed much faster. Basically the console is dumping all memory used by the game to disk to save the gamestate. That’s one scenario where super-fast sequential drive speed really matters.
The load times between say MHW on PC and PS4 are hugely notable. Not only that, I assume the developers have to take that into consideration so they don’t make it… worse. If they can smooth out the experience without huge sacrifice, that would make a pretty good improvement and open up more flexibility.
I agree, load times were not a big deal to me. The part I’m most looking forward to is that both of the new consoles will have ray-tracing, and faster CPUs. Those two things combined with faster SSDs should combine to bring a lot of gameplay not previously possible (CPU) and visuals and audio not previously possible (ray tracing).
So is, theoretically, saving 3 seconds versus 6 seconds much of a selling point?
I also think the pricing calculations have to be in flux right now. Revenues for almost everyone are going to nose-dive. Some companies have deeper pockets than others, but does that mean they’re willing to engage in a price war?
Well, if the gamestate stuff is slow people won’t bother to use it. It’s a feature, and a meaningful one, not complete BS.
I can imagine it being really great for games without saves, only checkpoints. No stress if you need to leave to go to work or whatever.
I believe you. It’s only my personal list of priorities. Bloodborne load times suck, but I care more about the 720p30 when it finally does load.
The specs for both systems seem good enough to achieve basic competence at 1080p60 or more, so I’m good now.
Yeah, I get that. It’s a cool feature. It just seems that the difference between going from HDD to SSD is, yes, worth it. But is the difference between XboxSeriesX SSD and PS5 SSD all that dramatic?
No, because the whole drive speed competition is bullshit that won’t enable better gameplay. SATA and even USB3 SSDs are more than fast enough to stream textures. Microsoft is saying they’re using drive space as virtual memory, and calling that revolutionary, but that has historically been known by another name-- frickin’ swap.
It will enable faster load times, and that cool savestate swap functionality. But it won’t make games better.
The selling point has been that this will enable eg bigger/better open worlds with no loading screens by enabling more assets to be streamed in on the fly. I’ll believe it when I see it, as loading times still exist and are not always minimal when I’m running games from an NVMe SSD.
Totally fair, but to date, no game has been designed with an SSD as the min spec. If you told a designer or engineer that every unit will have an SSD, they could come up with ways to make sure there are no load times, ever.
Once you’re playing the game you mean, as will still be a load time starting it up. And yes, that’s valid. But that’s a function of them being SSDs, not really how fast the SSDs are relative to one another.
Sure, yeah. There are load times on iOS games when they boot up. I don’t think there’s any way to prevent that, other than just keeping them in RAM.
I’m going to stay out of the “which SSD is better” argument. I don’t think it really matters. Nobody is going to be copying 5GB files between PS5s.
Well to be clear, I am talking about today’s experience with consoles, not really whether team MSFT or SONY will have a faster one. The drives are kind of a nasty bottleneck for current consoles, but whether or not this one is faster than this other one by one second in the future, I don’t care about that. I just want to get rid of today’s problems and get them up to speed with even a low budget gaming PC or better.
People will be picking apart the specs of the two for months. What I see is the baseline for next generation will bet a huge boost. I really believe the massive storage speed increases of both could be bigger for many games than GPU/CPU increases.
It won’t be.
Both consoles will be 4k capable at launch, real 4k, and that will be neat. Ray-tracing baseline will be great, every game will use it somewhere. Variable refresh will be awesome, if your display supports it. Full backwards-compatibility is fantastic, on XBSX. Sounds like PS5 will drop the ball there. Dramatically more powerful CPUs could enable PC-style strategy games and AI/bots. And finally, AI-powered HDR in old games sounds amazing.
There’s a lot to like about the new consoles, things that matter. Moving to SSD matters, that’s a real improvement. The competition about comparative SSD speeds, that’s bullshit. Doesn’t matter. PS5 including a standard NVME slot wins there, straight-up.
FTFY.
Only I matter, as the rest of you are illusions on the wall of my tent.