wumpus (lost.delete@this.in.a.cave) on April 17, 2019 12:13 pm wrote:
> anon (spam.delete.delete.delete@this.this.this.spam.com) on April 17, 2019 9:44 am wrote:
> > wumpus (lost.delete@this.in.a.cave) on April 17, 2019 9:24 am wrote:
> > > NoSpammer (no.delete@this.spam.com) on April 17, 2019 3:50 am wrote:
> > > > sleep (sleep.delete@this.sogetthis.com) on April 16, 2019 11:04 pm wrote:
> > > > > https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/
> > > >
> > > > I don't think you need to know much about games to figure out the reason.
> > > >
> > > > Fastest mainstream 7200 RPM hard disks nowadays give you around 150 MB/s. PS5 will likely have
> > > > 12GB+ of RAM. So that's 80 seconds to load game assets. This is truly 8-bit age loading time. Replace
> > > > with SSD on SATA - faster, but still way too slow. Consider that down the road say in 3 years (or
> > > > even sooner) gaming experience will be compared to a new PC with a fast NVMe SSD. If you want to
> > > > sell the "ultimate" gaming device for a long time you want to be prepared for that.
> > > >
> > > > So it makes perfect sense to include 256-512 GB of really
> > > > fast SSD storage using the fastest available interface,
> > > > and even for secondary storage extension option it is more future proof to have NVMe instead of SATA.
> > >
> > > The flip side of that is that multiple levels of 12GB+ will eat up storage. From what I've heard, current
> > > PS4 owners go straight to the 2TB storage limit. Assuming that they are dealing with ~20 second load
> > > times [sounds slightly high], that implies that they will want at least 8TB of storage in a PS5.
> > >
> > > I'd go so far as to claim that as long as you have that 256-512
> > > sufficiently high speed SSD (for loading assets
> > > of recently played games), 8TB of spinning storage is *more*
> > > "future proof" than 2TB of arbitrarily fast SSD.
> > > On the other hand, plenty of PS5 buyers are too young to think ahead and 2TB of SSD might sell better.
> > >
> >
> > I'd look at this from a different perspective. There will at the very least be 1 TB version
> > or it would be a downgrade. I think it's safe to assume that there will b a 2 TB version.
> > Think about what a 2 TB NVMe SSD that's actually faster than a SATA SSD (so not just a shitty 300 MB/s
> > 20k IOPS SSD with NVMe tacked on) costs. You can't spend >200$ on storage for a 400$ console.
> > Similarly I don't think it'll be 8 TB HDD + SSD.
> >
> > I'm not sure how 20 second load times imply 8 TB capacity are needed, mind
> > explaining that part again? I'm pretty sure I'm missing something.
> >
>
> The point was to compare a current "~20 second load time" against a hypothetical "80 second load time"
> that was used to declare SATA (and especially rotating hard drives) dead. If current load times are 20
> seconds and you are worried about them increasing by a factor of four thanks to bandwidth, you also need
> to be concerned about needing four times as much storage. The Wired article mentioned that Red Dead Redemption
> 2 took up ~100GB of space. If PS5 developers decide to load up even more assets (I can't imagine them
> not doing so, although the speed of delivery might be an issue) storage will be critical.
>

Yes, but the 80 second figure came from the having "12GB+ of RAM". Not from 20 seconds and a factor of 4. To increase the loading times by a factor of 4 would imply 4 times as much RAM, so 32-48 GB and I find that quite unlikely.
Bandwidth will most likely increase more than capacity to reduce loading times.
Also they only did 2 TB as a limited edition so I'm not sure if I'd use that as the basis for the calculation. 1 TB times the factor that you'd expect game assets to increase by for the base model seems more reasonable. Of course later models will probably add more capacity but I don't think they'll launch with 8 TB. 2 and 4 TB models, maybe just 4 seems more reasonable.

> It all comes down to the ratio of the cost of rotating storage vs. flash storage, presumably next
> year or possibly later. Flash seems to be cycling low, but I wouldn't count on flash to remain as
> cheap (nor would Sony get contracts based on historically low prices) by 2020-2021. But it is still
> possible that rotating storage might simply be priced out of a console and entirely replaced by flash
> (I'm more or less ignoring 2.5" prices: they won't provide the storage for the cost).
>

Yes, see Aaron Spink's post and my reply. Assuming 40$ for 1 TB of QLC NAND 8 TB would still be insane. It's hard to predict NAND prices in 2021 and beyond but I think by the time that they want 8 TB (or more) that should be very much affordable as an HDD, but not so much as an SSD.

> I'd expect to hear plenty from Google about how "your games reside in the cloud. Why not play them
> there instead of continually downloading them to your console", especially if the games become significantly
> larger than the storage provided in a PS5.

Yeah, that's why I'd expect bandwidth to grow faster than capacity.

> Personally, such things just make DRM-free gog.com more
> appealing (but I don't pretend to be a good example of the market the industry cares about).

Agreed, we're probably the opposite of what the industry wants. They'd want everyone to pay 10$ for the privilege of connecting that thing to the internet and I'm definitely not willing to do that.
Or Microsoft's interesting DRM plans.