I was wondering, games for the current consoles are being presented as being able to create a whole new experience of gaming because of ssd, but ssd has been on pcs for a long time and there was no such a thing as new way to experience games besides short screen loading times. While on consoles, ratchet and clank introduce new dimensions, ff XVI shows different phases of combat and more, and other games also show all kind of new experiences because of the ssd
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At the time the PS4/Xbox One generation launched, the cost of solid state drives was still too high to make them viable as the internal storage media of choice while still maintaining an attractive price point for the console. As such, the read/write performance limitations of hard drives remained for that generation of consoles. (For reference, it was only about a year or two before the Xbox One where consumer SSDs started reaching around the $1/gb price point)
The next generation was the first where developers could build their games around anticipating much greater drive performance.
Consumer PC hardware doesn’t move in such distinct generations, as many parts see more evolutionary changes as time progresses.
You might be referring to the PS5 where it has a novelty of connecting an ssd directly to the gpu. This brings mny unexpected advantges from uick loading times for gmes, being able to pause and switch games fast, to avoiding loading screens between levels thanks to dynamic content streaming.
The point is not the invention of SSD, which as you said, has been on PCs for years.
The point is that there are certain new types of SSD that are now so fast, and consoles are so specialized for gaming functions compared to PCs which still have to do a lot of other things, that you can build consoles in a way that the SSD basically functions as a straight, virtually infinite extension of video card RAM / normal RAM.
Among other things, this lets you have a higher number of different textures or effects on screen, or in a given area/level, than you could normally have on a PC without needing to hit a loading screen or doing more complicated pre-fetching logic, etc.
It doesn’t work *perfectly* that way, and the reality is a little more complicated. But from the perspective of an artist or designer, it basically does.
Because console provide the floor from which everything else is set
PC games almost never required an SSD. But because xsx and ps5 have SSD as standard devs don’t have to fight around low spec PCs.
That’s why consoles push everything in gaming when a new generation comes. Consoles provide a massive playerbase for developers that console specs can be the baseline.
On PC storage (like nearly all device types) is spectrum of new and older technologies and everything still commercially viable remains supported. Magenetic platter and optical storage had been around for a very long time with relatively small incremental gains in bandwidth and latency that did not foster any paradigm changes in how to use that storage. Early SSD technology enters the market and is better in latency, a little better in bandwidth, and far worse in storage capacity and capacity/$. It’s not sufficient enough of a disruptor to rewrite the rule books, it gets added to the spectrum.
On gen4 consoles loading times are the biggest performance headwind. It’s so slow that games have to be specifically designed to deal with it and users purchase aftermarket HDDs and SSDs in an attempt to alleviate the pain. It is the biggest user facing issue of owning that generation of console and source of technical costs on game designers to try and mitigate.
On gen5 consoles the advances in semiconductor lithography had been slowing. This meant that CPU and GPU improvements would be decent but a step function of 2x or 3x.
When gen5 consoles were being designed SSDs were improving in capacity/$ to be viable as the storage medium for this generation. But even better for a small incremental cost these SSDs could also be spec’d with gargantuam bandwidth. Console designers realized pretty early on that with high bandwidth SSDs this technology could deliver an order of magnitude (10x) or even better improvement.
So console designers targetted SSD storage as the disruptive innovation focus for gen5. They took advantage of owning the whole ecosystem to design hardware widgets, os, and software to maximize the benefit that cannot be done in the PC ecosystem with so much entrenched technology and various voices. It was a masterclass of hiding all of this work during the development of these consoles and surprising us with a big marketing splash.
A big reason we didn’t see dramatic differences in how games worked before consoles got high speed SSDs is that multi platform games have to take the weakest platforms into account when they design the games.
If you have a game like ratchet & clank rift apart that released for both pc and ps4, how do you implement a gameplay feature that switches the entire game level in half a second? Do you make the ps4 version pause for 2 minutes while the pc version still got the sub-second level switch?
However, if you make a game for ps5 and xbox x today, you know that the vast majority of customers will be playing it on a device that can handle super fast loading, and you can put a ssd as a minimum requirement on the pc version, and everyone will have a very similar game experience.
When I was a kid, write speeds of a dozen megabytes a second felt fast.
I had the pleasure of using a M.2 style SSD not too long ago. It had a write speed of over 3 gigabytes a second. Over 3000 megabytes.
I want to say it was actually over 7, but I can’t remember for sure, and I feel like 7 GB a second would be ridiculous, but either number is amazing.
I guess that’s really doesn’t answer the question, but holy crap. I very was impressed.
So in previous disc-based console generations, when a graphical asset was needed, the game would send a request to the underlying OS to retrieve the asset from the media then load it into RAM.. This was a slow process when compared to how fast RAM and GPUs operate.
Also, when data is stored on a rotating disk (hard drive or optical) the time it takes for the disk to spin-up, and locate the data is also a slow process. To combat the seeking, sometimes developers would craft data layouts with multiple copies of assets spread across the media so that seek times could be reduced. The multiple copies of assets also add bloat to the overall size of a game.
The current gen consoles address both the speed and bloat issues by being extremely fast (not as fast as modern RAM, but faster than hard disks, optical media, and even faster than previous types of SATA solid-state drives), and allowing the GPU to directly access assets from storage instead of passing requests through the OS. This extreme jump in storage access speed allows not only for better performance, but SSDs remove seek times from the equation which means the games no longer need multiple copies of assets which can make them smaller, if properly mastered..
Previous generation consoles could use SATA SSD’s which address access speeds, but since SSDs were not the default drive type, developers couldn’t really leverage any performance ‘tweak’ which relied on SSD speeds of the time.
Interesting to note, that the storage access method used in Xbox Series X was recently ported to Windows 10/11. It’s called DirectStorage and is supposedly being leveraged by some developers, but because there’s no guarantee of what type of drives people have in their computers, the mileage varies.
marketing is part of the answer
Layman’s guess, The other is SSD is now standard in the consoles so games are being developed with that in mind, ie quicker load times allowing for a more seamless experience, PC’s have had this for some time but again you cant rely on the whole PC market having the SSDs so probably wont design your game to be SSD only else you’d cut a good portion of the market. but for Playstation and Xbox are designing games specifically for SSD now as that’s the only configuration they have to cater to.
SSDs are an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive, and hard drives Re an order of magnitude faster than a CD/DVD drive.
The problem is that console games don’t let you easily make that comparison. They really do load dozens of times faster off an SSD than they did off a disk.
But rather than making games the same way, they account for that improved capacity, and make games that take dozens of times longer to load. Higher resolution, poorer optimization.
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