Slick wrote on Jun 2, 2020, 15:44:
Illuminate to me why this is the fault of the OS and not the game?

Because it was the baseline used to start tying up core usage. Then I loaded the system with other processor intensive applications and kept them actively running in the background on side monitors along with a system resource monitor where I could get real time stats on how the underlying OS was handling it all.

This isn't about just one application, this is about total performance under a heavy load and Windows absolutely sucks at evenly distributing and handling that load.

I should say that the PS5 does have some really cool low-level hardware that does more than just compress/decompress really fast. Shit to do with being more intelligent about calls and swapping out data. It is genuinely new. But it's yet to be seen if it's something that can't be done by a significant OS update and a few extra CPU cores.

What would be cool is if the PS5 SSD and on-die I/O silicon turned out to be such a game-changer that PC CPUs were forced to adopt them in future chips.

For the moment i'm still confidant that us PC folk can just brute-force it. Pci-e 5.0 which should be dropping in 2021/2022 will have 14GB/s uncompressed bandwidth for a 4x lane SSD. And it's yet to be seen if any game will make use of anything more than the lowest-common denominator Xbox Series X SSD @ 2.5GB uncompressed.

Trying to imagine what a PS5 game could do to really flex that bandwidth, I'm imagining something like the opening of the movie Ready Player One where the viewer is transported through many different detailed worlds for about 1-2 seconds each. Some kind of game that uses a portal mechanic to rapidly change between whole map texture sets would be an idea.

Slick wrote on Jun 2, 2020, 05:13:

RedEye9 wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 21:51:
Currently there is nothing in the PC world that can equate with how the PS5 will utilize its new proprietary SSD and related interconnects. And I doubt the PC world will get that tech for many years, if ever.

Don't underestimate the sleeping giant of the Windows Operating system. It's been a while since consoles got the shiny new toys before the PC crowd (nothing could compete with an N64 when it came out), but the arc of history is long, and the next gen hasn't even started yet. A couple extra CPU cores can compress and decompress data all day long, Sony just offloaded it, same with their audio engine. Windows took over the audio stack from sound cards years ago and no one even noticed, it's all on CPU. Consoles are also stuck with 8 cores, we'll have 24-32 core CPUs as the new i9 equivalent by the end of this coming generation.

Also shit, didn't they just ratify Pci-e 6.0? That's 28GB/sec uncompressed. We'll see that on PC near the tail end of this generation.

What we should all be celebrating is twofold:

1) The lowest-common denominator is really high, games are going to look amazing.

2) Game devs no longer have any excuse. No calling the wahmbulance because you were bottlenecked. This gen will separate the men from the boys, and the fem-men from the fem-boys, or whatever they're called.

No more HDD or CPU bottleneck, beefy GPU, fast memory, all the fixins. This is the high tide that lifts all ships. And yes, Sony ramped this up with their SSD, but IMO it doesn't matter because Xbox uses Pci-e 3.0, so for all multi-platform games (non-PS5 exclusives, ie. 98% of games) will use this as the baseline to code for. When I get my 7GB/s SSD in the fall I'll be well ahead of the curve.

We'll see some nifty titles that Sony can flex for the PS5, but don't pretend that 5.5GB/sec is anything special. And the only special about their compression is that it's "free", ie. no resources from their CPU is required. All that is old news for PC users. Now we'll finally have games developed that might wanna try using it.

Good analysis.

First off, you obviously know more about the innards of the OS than me, so I'm not going to contest you and all your big words on technical details. What I will challenge you on is your anecdotal evidence of a physics-based game that makes poor use of multi-core rendering. Illuminate to me why this is the fault of the OS and not the game?

I play Battlefield V on an AMD 3900x. I get all 24 threads lighting up, usually sitting between 30-50%, some a bit higher, none of them jacked to 100%. I can also encode using all 24 threads. The OS doesn't have any issue throwing out work for cores to do, if only the software made use of it.

At least that's my take as a Level 3 (noob tier) tech.

And yes, everything is virtualized like the winsockets and audio stacks etc. That's why I'm not too scared of the PS5 SSD, although it is super badass. Reminds me of the old Ageia PhysX Pci-e card that got turned into a GPGPU function when bought by nVidia. There is no "PhysX" chip. They just offloaded that shit to some cores that could perform the same work easily. I'm sure there's a similar solution for fast compression/decompression just waiting to be fleshed out.

Or maybe we'll see it on a new AMD CPU package, that would be kinda radical.

Slick wrote on Jun 2, 2020, 05:13:
Don't underestimate the sleeping giant of the Windows Operating system.

I hope you didn't type that with a straight face.

WinOS is utter garbage in its usage of a true multicore system (8+ cores, not threads). A while back I posted an informal comparison on my hardware of how Windows handles running a physics (thus CPU) intensive game while I was also doing several ancillary things in the background versus how my Linux install handles it. Long story short, Windows will load up core 0-1 and maybe, just maybe stretch itself to core 3...if the planets align and I have sufficiently pleased the gods with a sacrifice of a virgin redhead. Cores 4+? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Maybe 1-2% usage.

However, what is Windows now and what will be Windows in the future are very likely to be very different beasts. If we look at what Microsoft is doing with WSL2, Azure Sphere OS, WinGet, etc, it seems pretty obvious to me that future Windows will be a DE only and the ancient, creaky, NT kernel architecture will be jettisoned. At this point, its legacy cruft is a millstone, not a benefit. Even Microsoft knows this by looking at what they're doing and planning with Windows Server 2019 and forward. Look at how much legacy cruft they have just sheared away and the stated plans to shear more of it away.

Almost nothing gets direct hardware access any more. You brought up the audio stack. Ever dig deep in to the docs for that? Look a lot like pipewire to you at a fundamental level? Sure does to me. The network stack is similar, too. That's why I can create and destroy network sockets on the fly with ease and create a vast amount of virtual adapters. None of it is "real" hardware anymore on the OS level, they're just sockets...not actual adapters. Windows is going modular and they are incorporating that modularity more and more. I believe they will standarize around Azure Sphere OS as the base with "Windows" just being a DE setting atop it. A common core OS with modular blocks sitting atop it for people to click their shiny buttons.

RedEye9 wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 21:51:
Currently there is nothing in the PC world that can equate with how the PS5 will utilize its new proprietary SSD and related interconnects. And I doubt the PC world will get that tech for many years, if ever.

Don't underestimate the sleeping giant of the Windows Operating system. It's been a while since consoles got the shiny new toys before the PC crowd (nothing could compete with an N64 when it came out), but the arc of history is long, and the next gen hasn't even started yet. A couple extra CPU cores can compress and decompress data all day long, Sony just offloaded it, same with their audio engine. Windows took over the audio stack from sound cards years ago and no one even noticed, it's all on CPU. Consoles are also stuck with 8 cores, we'll have 24-32 core CPUs as the new i9 equivalent by the end of this coming generation.

Also shit, didn't they just ratify Pci-e 6.0? That's 28GB/sec uncompressed. We'll see that on PC near the tail end of this generation.

What we should all be celebrating is twofold:

1) The lowest-common denominator is really high, games are going to look amazing.

2) Game devs no longer have any excuse. No calling the wahmbulance because you were bottlenecked. This gen will separate the men from the boys, and the fem-men from the fem-boys, or whatever they're called.

No more HDD or CPU bottleneck, beefy GPU, fast memory, all the fixins. This is the high tide that lifts all ships. And yes, Sony ramped this up with their SSD, but IMO it doesn't matter because Xbox uses Pci-e 3.0, so for all multi-platform games (non-PS5 exclusives, ie. 98% of games) will use this as the baseline to code for. When I get my 7GB/s SSD in the fall I'll be well ahead of the curve.

We'll see some nifty titles that Sony can flex for the PS5, but don't pretend that 5.5GB/sec is anything special. And the only special about their compression is that it's "free", ie. no resources from their CPU is required. All that is old news for PC users. Now we'll finally have games developed that might wanna try using it.

It is an entertaining LTT video, but then I generally like his stuff.

Currently there is nothing in the PC world that can equate with how the PS5 will utilize its new proprietary SSD and related interconnects. And I doubt the PC world will get that tech for many years, if ever.

Beamer wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 19:17:
It's like some PC gamers are just willfully ignorant. [...] Every topic about this is filled with the same fundamental refusal to understand.

Again, I don't think it's about game design. He made a claim--that no amount of money can match the performance of the PS5's SSD on PC--that is not true. That's literally all it's about. It doesn't matter what he meant to say or what he should have said or how he should have clarified the implications. It's about what was said and that it's incorrect.

I am curious, though. This thing is supposed to push 9GB/s compressed, 5.5GB/s raw data. Isn't that a bit like saying that if I compress some data to a third its original size and then transfer it to an SSD at 5GB/s (throughput you can achieve with a single drive, btw), that the compressed data rate is 15GB/s? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the metrics, but that seems really disingenuous, not to mention far less impressive than a drive that has raw throughput of 9GB/s.

This comment was edited on Jun 3, 2020, 02:00.

jdreyer wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 15:59:

Slick wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 15:14:
Also, for anyone else interested in that monitor (or any of the new gen of 240hz 1440p monitors) that Sammy G7 only supports HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.4 with DSC (compression).

It's a giant dick move by Samsung, as both HDMI 2.1 and DP 2.0 are coming out with the upcoming GPUs, and these new monitors can't run at their advertised rez/refresh rates without compression with those old standards.

Charging $1150 USD for a 27" monitor that will be out-of-spec 3 months after it launches is bad.

I don't need 240hz, but what's a good 1440P ~120hz monitor? Also, widescreen 21:9.

The Alienware 34" widescreen 120hz is amazing, i love it.
I also bought the ASUS version of it some years back for way more money(paid 1600$ i think at release, and the picture quality is way inferior to the Alienware I now have.
the colors pop, i highly recommend it!

Beamer wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 19:17:
We always have the same conversation here. It's like some PC gamers are just willfully ignorant. Maybe not willfully. Maybe they truly don't understand game design.

No one cares what your $2000 PC can do. You're in the top 1% of performance. No game is written for that. It's written for the bottom 30%. So nothing will require your performance. All your performance does is speed things up.

With the PS5, every owner will have that performance. Now, first party games can be written for it. It can use it for something other than shorter loading screens.


Every topic about this is filled with the same fundamental refusal to understand.

Hey man, in case you didn't notice you're standing on my lawn...

We always have the same conversation here. It's like some PC gamers are just willfully ignorant. Maybe not willfully. Maybe they truly don't understand game design.

No one cares what your $2000 PC can do. You're in the top 1% of performance. No game is written for that. It's written for the bottom 30%. So nothing will require your performance. All your performance does is speed things up.

With the PS5, every owner will have that performance. Now, first party games can be written for it. It can use it for something other than shorter loading screens.


Every topic about this is filled with the same fundamental refusal to understand.

phinn wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 17:40:
There's a lot of blowhard PC gamer talk here. I love my home built rig but there is no disputing the PS5's 9GB/s (peak compressed) storage will be among the fastest in the world when it ships, why bother arguing about it.

According to Mark Cerny's talk, the peak is actually 22GB/s for "data that can be more easily compressed"

IMO none of this matters because the Xbox Series X is using a good old-fashioned PCI-e 3.0 M.2 SSD, so that is the lowest-common denominator for the next gen of games. And it's running at a gimped 2.5GB/s instead of the 3.5GB/s that our PC M.2's can do right now.

And you know that some of this compression/decompression magic will spill over to the PC space with Windows. You can't replace hardware, but shit, I have 12 CPU cores already, in the next 7-8 years of the next-gen cycle that will be considered entry level perhaps lol. That's alot of extra CPU power sitting around that could be intelligently used.

All of this is also jumping the shark as who knows how game devs will use all this data throughput. Watching dev react videos to the UE5 demo, the big take-away is "ya ya ya sure, looks great, but if the assets in that demo are as detailed as is claimed, that demo is probably 500GB big. No game is going to do that, there will be optimization"

How dare anyone defy the glorious PC master race!

There's a lot of blowhard PC gamer talk here. I love my home built rig but there is no disputing the PS5's 9GB/s (peak compressed) storage will be among the fastest in the world when it ships, why bother arguing about it.

Should anyone be surprised that Tim Sweeney is fucking wrong? Despite EGS and Fortnite, that douchebag has always preferred the console landscape and wants PC's to be more like them.

Korrd wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 14:27:
Maybe you could explain how ignorance might be the reason...

Regardless, it seems like pride to me. Sweeney claimed the PS5's throughput can't be done on a PC at any price, which is simply false. You don't even need enterprise class hardware to do it.

Pretty sure Sony stated that it has more to do with HOW the data streams to and from the SSD have been optimized between the CPU / RAM / Video Card / etc. than it has to do with the SSD's actual "hardware specifications."

So technically... If Sony is to be believed... you CAN'T do that on a PC. It would take custom hardware and a custom OS (or, at least, a highly modified one) to deliver the same thing.

This comment was edited on Jun 1, 2020, 17:02.

BTW, VA panels (some 21:9 ones are) are slow. ie there's ghosting and general burriness. But they have the deepest blacks and IMO the best colour pop.

Short answer is I don't know (i don't follow anything that isn't 16:9). But my instincts tell me basically anything that gets a good review from TFTcentral, BlurBusters, and RTINGS.

The 1440p 120/144/165hz panels are like 5 years old. They've made steady improvements (think like Intel's 14++++ nm nodes) so it's all very mature.

The 1440p 240hz ones are the first of the true "next gen" panels coming from LG, Au Optronics, and some other chinese company i haven't heard of before and can't remember.

So I'm shopping for the first wave of a new gen, so unsurprisingly it's a shit show, they'll be more mature in a couple years.

IMO once you go 240hz with blacklight strobing there's no going back. it's like going back to 60hz from 120hz. The clarity is insane, I can read nametags when spinning around doing a 180 on a dime. I can bob and weave in high-motion games while being able to see everything perfectly clearly. And I'm almost 40, I don't have the reflexes of a teenager.

Slick wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 15:14:
Also, for anyone else interested in that monitor (or any of the new gen of 240hz 1440p monitors) that Sammy G7 only supports HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.4 with DSC (compression).

It's a giant dick move by Samsung, as both HDMI 2.1 and DP 2.0 are coming out with the upcoming GPUs, and these new monitors can't run at their advertised rez/refresh rates without compression with those old standards.

Charging $1150 USD for a 27" monitor that will be out-of-spec 3 months after it launches is bad.

I don't need 240hz, but what's a good 1440P ~120hz monitor? Also, widescreen 21:9.