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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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.
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