Official Playstation 5 thread

[repoman0]

Frickin A, wasted my time with the failed 3080 launch yesterday but missed all the PS5 preorders. Guess I'll just wait on both fronts.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Frickin A, wasted my time with the failed 3080 launch yesterday but missed all the PS5 preorders. Guess I'll just wait on both fronts.

I missed the 3080 and couldn’t snag a ps5 lol. I might try for an Xbox to be honest. May actually run better than my 1080ti lol

 

[foghorn67]

Yeah Microsoft says Xbox goes live on Tuesday 11AM. It’s a lot more controlled. Also I believe the supply for the Xbox will be a bit better if Microsoft is to be believed. Either way I think Sony let it get out of hand by being so vague. Even seen some “also on pc” on some of their videos that they claim is a mistake. I think some of them will be on pc but they didn’t want everyone to know that. Also some titles they pushed as ps5 exclusives are actually going to be on PS4 too. This is understandable but they had thrown jabs at the Xbox for their titles being cross gen so it sends an odd message IMO. They haven’t been very open about this information and didn’t set a firm day for preorders and it turned into chaos. Very amateurish if you ask me and it’s not as if Sony is new to this. They seemed to rush into this.

I'm greedy and buying both. I plan on checking for stock often after release to get both asap. Not sure what the rush is, but console gaming has proven to be a good escape.
Maybe I'll build a PC next year as well. Going from a i5-8500 (or 8 something) and a 1060 to a Rizen and a 3070 might be a big enough jump to be worth it.

 

[cmdrdredd]

So I’m hearing that Sony’s invite system was a mess too. The link in the email takes you to a virtual queue and you basically get in line. Some people report getting to the front and having nothing to click. Not even any info on stock status. Someone said they went through the line twice and could not get one.

Apparently amazon has been sending some emails out telling people that they are not guaranteed to get theirs on launch day and it would depend on those in front of them actually completing the sale. Seems like more people than should have got through on amazon using the backdoor link.

I don’t really feel so bad about not getting one now. It would be far worse to be told I have to wait after jumping through hoops just to get an order in. Worse to get in on Sony’s special invitation only deal and be greeted with a blank page when you wait in line.

 

[purbeast0]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1307364082341740544

 

[sze5003]

Yea I just saw that lol. I've stopped refreshing pages anyway. Obviously demand is higher now with the pandemic. I remember I was able to preorder a PS4 immediately when they were announced without issues.

A good option is to use nowinstock website but they don't take text alerts from my carrier anymore. Relying on email is slower.

 

[jpiniero]

If you were wondering about Storage space, Demon's Souls is 66 GB while MM Ultimate (which includes the remastered OG plus all the DLC) is 105 GB. That space is going to fill quickly.

 

[purbeast0]

lol whoops, did not see post above!

 

[cmdrdredd]

If you were wondering about Storage space, Demon's Souls is 66 GB while MM Ultimate (which includes the remastered OG plus all the DLC) is 105 GB. That space is going to fill quickly.

Damn. That seems overboard to me but I dunno the texture sizes etc eithef

 

[zinfamous]

Damn. That seems overboard to me but I dunno the texture sizes etc eithef

Games are crazy these days. Even Borderlands 3, which you know, is sort of washed out because of the cell shading style, is 104GB on my PC right now (that is with all 4 DLC; I think it was at least 60gb on Vanilla)

 

[purbeast0]

Games are crazy these days. Even Borderlands 3, which you know, is sort of washed out because of the cell shading style, is 104GB on my PC right now (that is with all 4 DLC; I think it was at least 60gb on Vanilla)

Yeah but a lot of that stuff is because they have duplicate data on there for access reasons. The SSD was supposed to eliminate that issue because there is no access time on SSD's.

That is crazy if the games are that huge with no duplicate data, or if it just has the duplicate data since they are just ports of old games.

 

[zinfamous]

Yeah but a lot of that stuff is because they have duplicate data on there for access reasons. The SSD was supposed to eliminate that issue because there is no access time on SSD's.

That is crazy if the games are that huge with no duplicate data, or if it just has the duplicate data since they are just ports of old games.

I was not aware of that--I think on PCs of the last ~10 years at least, SSD or at least SSD caches should be considered standard....but were PS4 and XBone generation SSD or HDD? If HDD, that would explain why the gaming industry is still stuck in the stone age designing things that way.

darned consoles!

 

[jpiniero]

I was not aware of that--I think on PCs of the last ~10 years at least, SSD or at least SSD caches should be considered standard....but were PS4 and XBone generation SSD or HDD? If HDD, that would explain why the gaming industry is still stuck in the stone age designing things that way.

darned consoles!

Stock is platter. The PS4 at least you can replace the HDD with an SSHD or SSD with varying but unspectacular results since it is optimized for HDD.

The current gen consoles were released 7 years ago. There's probably people still playing current gen PC games on platter.

 

[purbeast0]

I was not aware of that--I think on PCs of the last ~10 years at least, SSD or at least SSD caches should be considered standard....but were PS4 and XBone generation SSD or HDD? If HDD, that would explain why the gaming industry is still stuck in the stone age designing things that way.

darned consoles!

I would think PC's also are in the same boat but I don't know. I mean unless a game says SSD as a requirement, they have to assume mechanical HDDs are going to be used.

 

[zinfamous]

I would think PC's also are in the same boat but I don't know. I mean unless a game says SSD as a requirement, they have to assume mechanical HDDs are going to be used.

I guess, but the $/gb on SSDs has gotten so reasonable, that even OEM business machines are pretty easy to come by with at least a 500gb SSD for reasonable price.

I think that more and more, HDD is being relegated to NAS/long term storage/archive purposes. Obviously, I know plenty are still out there in the wild on old, and really cheap machines, but ...without knowing any sort of numbers, I'd assume that SSD has to have at least overtaken install share from HDD by now for personal computers? (at least, there will be some form of SSD in most machines, if not a vast majority of them)

 

[cmdrdredd]

Difference is nobody writes games specifically for I/O times with nvme SSD even though it’s been pretty standard on the pc for a while. With the new consoles, they know that this is going to be available so they can do different cache systems etc to leverage that. So a game on PC won’t have any optimized SSD trickery because most of the user base is probably on a huge platter drive for storage. Heck the latest steam survey of hardware says most people are on gtx 1060 level of performance. That’s like 3 generations behind the new consoles.

 

[Aikouka]

Yeah but a lot of that stuff is because they have duplicate data on there for access reasons. The SSD was supposed to eliminate that issue because there is no access time on SSD's.

That is crazy if the games are that huge with no duplicate data, or if it just has the duplicate data since they are just ports of old games.

I think you're mixing up storage mediums in regard to data duplication. Data duplication was a thing for the discs because creating a disc image means you can guarantee the position of the data prior to publication. This meant you could avoid the seek times, which are not so great for optical media. The problem with hard drives is that you don't have full image capability like you do with a disc. In other words, unless you can demand that the operating system ensure that you are able to allocate a specific amount of space in a contiguous fashion, you may -- and likely will -- end up with fragmented data. This means that not only will a game's files be separate from each other, but individual files may be fragmented.

I can't speak much to the veracity of the following claim, but I've heard that one of the reasons why installs are so large is because of things like using uncompressed data. I heard something about Call of Duty using uncompressed sound files (likely raw files). I do wonder if the consoles having built-in decompression hardware will alleviate this to some degree, but it doesn't sound like it.

SSDs should really just serve to eliminate or significantly reduce load times. One topic that I saw being discussed was the nature of processing I/O operations, and how the consoles are likely going to be a bit better at this compared to a PC. The biggest thing is how you'll want to batch your I/O operations together, but if I recall, this is only an option available under NVMe. Features like DirectStorage are meant to tackle this and how Nvidia integrated I/O as part of their 30-series announcement, but that won't affect non-graphics aspects of games such as the aforementioned audio.

 

[purbeast0]

I think you're mixing up storage mediums in regard to data duplication. Data duplication was a thing for the discs because creating a disc image means you can guarantee the position of the data prior to publication. This meant you could avoid the seek times, which are not so great for optical media. The problem with hard drives is that you don't have full image capability like you do with a disc. In other words, unless you can demand that the operating system ensure that you are able to allocate a specific amount of space in a contiguous fashion, you may -- and likely will -- end up with fragmented data. This means that not only will a game's files be separate from each other, but individual files may be fragmented.

I can't speak much to the veracity of the following claim, but I've heard that one of the reasons why installs are so large is because of things like using uncompressed data. I heard something about Call of Duty using uncompressed sound files (likely raw files). I do wonder if the consoles having built-in decompression hardware will alleviate this to some degree, but it doesn't sound like it.

SSDs should really just serve to eliminate or significantly reduce load times. One topic that I saw being discussed was the nature of processing I/O operations, and how the consoles are likely going to be a bit better at this compared to a PC. The biggest thing is how you'll want to batch your I/O operations together, but if I recall, this is only an option available under NVMe. Features like DirectStorage are meant to tackle this and how Nvidia integrated I/O as part of their 30-series announcement, but that won't affect non-graphics aspects of games such as the aforementioned audio.

Watch around 30 seconds in this video here. Sony flat out said there is tons of duplicate data on HDD's because of access speed.

They said some of the objects are duplicated up to 400 times on disc in Spiderman.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Watch around 30 seconds in this video here. Sony flat out said there is tons of duplicate data on HDD's because of access speed.

They said some of the objects are duplicated up to 400 times on disc in Spiderman.

And they can get rid of most of that extra data with newer titles because the access times on SSD are so low. On my pc for example, many games like Skyrim and the Witcher have loading screens with hints and information about wildlife. On a normal HDD I can read them and press a button to scroll through a few before the game loads. With an SSD I can’t even read the first one before the game loads. It’s really a huge difference and that’s just a normal SATA SSD, not even my nVME drive.

 

[quikah]

And they can get rid of most of that extra data with newer titles because the access times on SSD are so low. On my pc for example, many games like Skyrim and the Witcher have loading screens with hints and information about wildlife. On a normal HDD I can read them and press a button to scroll through a few before the game loads. With an SSD I can’t even read the first one before the game loads. It’s really a huge difference and that’s just a normal SATA SSD, not even my nVME drive.

They are going to have to start making game manuals again.

 

[purbeast0]

And they can get rid of most of that extra data with newer titles because the access times on SSD are so low. On my pc for example, many games like Skyrim and the Witcher have loading screens with hints and information about wildlife. On a normal HDD I can read them and press a button to scroll through a few before the game loads. With an SSD I can’t even read the first one before the game loads. It’s really a huge difference and that’s just a normal SATA SSD, not even my nVME drive.

Yes I know. And that is why it's surprising that the sizes of these games are so large out the gate. Maybe since they are ports (Spiderman and Demon Souls) they didn't bother optimizing and have duplicate data still. We won't know for sure until someone can look at the data though.

 

[Aikouka]

Watch around 30 seconds in this video here. Sony flat out said there is tons of duplicate data on HDD's because of access speed.

They said some of the objects are duplicated up to 400 times on disc in Spiderman.

It would depend on the size of the data in question. If you're talking about smaller pieces, then it's likely far more possible to guarantee placement physically beside other data (e.g. 50MB of a level's 300MB of data is duplicated). However, as I noted, you cannot get around the fact that a hard drive -- unlike the pressed disc -- will become fragmented over time as data is deleted and added. However, Sony may be handling things behind the scenes to ensure that data is managed better. For example, if items such as Dynamic Skins are stored in a separate partition at the inside of the hard drive, games could be stored toward the outside, you can avoid those smaller files creating "holes" in the space that the games would use as they're deleted/added.

What you may end up seeing more is wasted space on DLC. For example, if I installed Spider-Man as well as a few other games, and then installed some Spider-Man DLC a few months later, then chances are the Spider-Man vanilla game data is not contiguous with the DLC data, and it may result in excess data to avoid having to load game data from multiple locations (i.e. basic game data from vanilla, DLC data from the DLC location).

But let's go back to duplication. Aspects of it still seem awkward to me. For example, how do you handle patches? Call of Duty has the infamous 50GB+ patches, but what exactly are these? If we go back to attempting to ensure contiguous files, do you now have to do a bunch of disk maintenance to ensure that specific data remains contiguous even after being updated? Or is there some routine that involves just creating new, contiguous data and deleting the old stuff?

It just seems like there are plenty of awkward pitfalls that you can run into with trying to ensure data remains a specific way on an ever-changing medium like a hard drive. It makes me wonder if the PlayStation ever performs any maintenance on the drive while it's not in use... sort of like how you'd run defrag tools on computers back in the day.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is that you don't have finite control over the entire image structure like you do on a game disc. Although, thinking about this more, that may actually be part of the reason why they'd want copies of game data strewn about. If I can't guarantee 30GB of contiguous space for my Spider-Man game, then I need to ensure that common data exists among other pieces for various areas, etc. If you could guarantee contiguous data, I don't think you'd need nearly as much copied data due to hard drives being faster than optical discs.

 

[blckgrffn]

It would depend on the size of the data in question. If you're talking about smaller pieces, then it's likely far more possible to guarantee placement physically beside other data (e.g. 50MB of a level's 300MB of data is duplicated). However, as I noted, you cannot get around the fact that a hard drive -- unlike the pressed disc -- will become fragmented over time as data is deleted and added. However, Sony may be handling things behind the scenes to ensure that data is managed better. For example, if items such as Dynamic Skins are stored in a separate partition at the inside of the hard drive, games could be stored toward the outside, you can avoid those smaller files creating "holes" in the space that the games would use as they're deleted/added.

What you may end up seeing more is wasted space on DLC. For example, if I installed Spider-Man as well as a few other games, and then installed some Spider-Man DLC a few months later, then chances are the Spider-Man vanilla game data is not contiguous with the DLC data, and it may result in excess data to avoid having to load game data from multiple locations (i.e. basic game data from vanilla, DLC data from the DLC location).

But let's go back to duplication. Aspects of it still seem awkward to me. For example, how do you handle patches? Call of Duty has the infamous 50GB+ patches, but what exactly are these? If we go back to attempting to ensure contiguous files, do you now have to do a bunch of disk maintenance to ensure that specific data remains contiguous even after being updated? Or is there some routine that involves just creating new, contiguous data and deleting the old stuff?

It just seems like there are plenty of awkward pitfalls that you can run into with trying to ensure data remains a specific way on an ever-changing medium like a hard drive. It makes me wonder if the PlayStation ever performs any maintenance on the drive while it's not in use... sort of like how you'd run defrag tools on computers back in the day.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is that you don't have finite control over the entire image structure like you do on a game disc. Although, thinking about this more, that may actually be part of the reason why they'd want copies of game data strewn about. If I can't guarantee 30GB of contiguous space for my Spider-Man game, then I need to ensure that common data exists among other pieces for various areas, etc. If you could guarantee contiguous data, I don't think you'd need nearly as much copied data due to hard drives being faster than optical discs.

I've read that console game and OS patches are so big/can take so long for exactly this reason.

Rather than in the PC space where we've seemingly accepted disk fragmentation or background routines that keep it from getting full on insane, the consoles are laying out data on the disk physically & directly to make the most of peak read speeds and to mitigate latency. It's just so much overhead...

I wish I could find it easy but it was in one of the many press releases for the Series X over the last few weeks where this was mentioned by MS as one of the huge quality of life upgrades for both users and game companies that could ship their patches without such painstaking, low level mucking about.

 

[Saylick]

Speaking of storage, AT just posted their Samsung 980 PRO review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16087/the-samsung-980-pro-pcie-4-ssd-review

Looking at the specs, I think it fits the bill for the PS5 (7 GB/s read). Only $229 for 1 TB, which honestly doesn't seem that bad when the rumored price for the Xbox Series X expansion card by Seagate was $220 and it probably isn't as fast as the 980 PRO.

 

[Oyeve]

Whats the storage situation on the 5? I know it has some weird proprietary less than 1TB but, my current PS4 pro has (I swapped it long ago) a 2TB SSD/HD drive inside and an external 2TB SSD connected via USB to SATA dongle. I have 2 4TB SSDs BNIB I can use but can I use both via external connectors? The PS4 did not allow that. I am gonna have a hell of a time copying nearly 4TB of stuff to a Ps5. I hope Sony made it easier.