That portal transition effect likely hides the load screen - it's still there, nearly half a second, it's just shorter. This is comparable to current load times with an SSD on PC!
Or a PC game can just slap a minimum RAM requirement on and be done with it.
I’m impressed with the tech but it seems like the end goal was to keep console manufacturing costs down. Now
it’s being sold as a gameplay-enabling feature and reason to upgrade. The upgrade only looks impressive because the PS4 by now is so old.
Relying on cheap SSD storage instead of expensive RAM, and relieving CPU effort via the storage streaming chip is a cool trick. But that tech alone enables absolutely zero gameplay experiences.
It hasn’t been proven to us whether or not a typical gaming PC’s increased memory just overcomes the need for this tech. If I have a PC with 32GB of RAM and my GPU has 8GB of its own RAM I’m not convinced that a PS5 with 16GB of shared RAM will do anything that the PC setup can’t.
Desktop computers eclipsed the performance of current consoles gen consoles so long ago that I am still suspect: my prediction is that a decent mid-range gaming computer is completely capable of playing any PS5 game.
Most tests I've seen of real-time game asset loading between the various types of SSDs on PC are incredibly inconsistent - for most games it is hardly noticeable. I'd be excited if I was proven wrong but this really feels like the typical console hype ramp up to black friday that South Park portrays so well...
This is not great logic, as those games are not designed around taking advantage of the faster SSD storage like new games will be with the launch of the new consoles. Most games are built with an HDD in mind and thus the ssd is not the bottleneck.
All AAA games need to be cross platform to maximize revenue with a long tail, so they target the lowest common denominator for hardware requirements.
No one is going to design gameplay for a special hardware constraint unless the gameplay can degrade to lowest common denominator. Which of course, makes needing the special hardware optional.
There are few exceptions to this rule. Some platforms pay for exclusivity, effectively covering lost revenue from other platform streams. And Nintendo alone makes a profit on hardware, so they can produce platform exclusives to drive addtl revenue from hardware sales.
Special SSD pipelines, while PC gamers are still using 7200rpm HDDs, are about as appetizing to game devs as waggle controls or Kinect sensor games.
The new consoles include these SSDs not to make something possible now, but to remain relevant in ten years time when PCs may have caught up.
This is the game industry's equivalent of supporting IE 11.
This is simply not true. That's like saying no game on PC is possible because not everyone has a good enough graphics card. Just have a minimum spec for required storage speed and you're golden.
So imagine this tech in a simulated war mmo, where each server of 64 players represents a part of a battlefield and you instantly can transition to a new server representing the next part of the battlefield when you walk there. All of WW2 would be a collection of servers that represent parts of Europe.
Takes a little imagination, but when you look at the ingenuity of something like F-Zero on SNES (2.5d graphics), it’s pretty clear that your typical tech really can used in amazing ways.
Assuming the maps and assets are static, the only thing needing to be downloaded is the current state of the game and entities, which is a handful of megabytes. I agree that an SSD is completely irrelevant here, but so is the network. The hard problem here is how do you sync state between the different servers in real time so that transitioning between servers is seamless (and how do you handle reconciliation after an eventual net split).
From what I know, World of Warcraft does something like that on a conceptual level. Obviously syncing game state in non-action game like WoW is probably a little easier than something like a full blown action FPS.
Planetside 2 is a great and current example of multiple massive 100+ player battles occurring simultaneously in the same server/map.
Obviously its graphical detail is nowhere what was shown here, but the precedent exists, and the only thing that would be different is the geomotry and texture res.
