The War of "Secret Sauce": PS5's SSD Speed Advantage vs. Xbox Series X Velocity

[BizioEE]

The War of "Secret Sauce": PS5's SSD Speed Advantage vs. Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture

What is Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture ?

Xbox Velocity Architecture promises no-compromise gameplay and cuts load times, drawing the best from Xbox Series X.

Microsoft frames the Xbox Velocity Architecture as a fundamental component of Xbox Series X, comprised of both hardware and software, poised to "unlock new capabilities never-before-seen in console development." Beyond the marketing, the moniker refers to a new architecture designed for Xbox Series X, streamlining storage and processing on the console.

Velocity Architecture improves how Xbox Series X loads game assets from storage, known as asset streaming, while reducing the space those assets occupy on the drive. The solution tackles two key challenges modern titles face, with installation sizes rapidly on the rise and more computationally demanding than ever. The upshot is a backbone to support complex next-generation games, while also reducing loading times...

Xbox Velocity Architecture may sound complicated to the everyday gamer, but best understood when broken into just a few fundamental components. Microsoft describes the technology as the culmination of four crucial modules, featuring two custom hardware components inside Xbox Series X, with software to complement.

Microsoft's new custom SSD storage is central to Velocity Architecture on Xbox Series X, adopting an in-house NVMe solution, delivering unseen speeds in past generations. That provides 2.4 GB/s raw I/O throughput — or 4.8 GB/s compressed, enabled by a custom decompression block. Compared to the 120MB/s offered by Xbox One X, quick maths reveals up to 40 times increases could be a reality.

The hardware decompression block plays a vital role, allowing games to consume less space via compression on the SSD. That hardware is devoted to tackling run-time decompression, keeping games running smoothly without giving more work to the CPU. It uses Zlib, a general-purpose data-compression library, and a mysterious new system named "BCPack," geared to GPU textures.

https://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-velocity-architecture


PlayStation 5: Mark Cerny’s deep dive into SSD memory

Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for the Sony PlayStation 5, took a deep dive today into the solid-state storage drive (SSD) for the upcoming video game console that launches in the fall.

That’s pretty geeky talk for a game console revelation, but Cerny did a good job explaining why the strategy around the SSD is important to both game developers and gamers. The talk was more like a developer-to-developer talk for the Game Developers Conference, but Sony took it online after GDC was canceled.

On his explorations with more than 100 game developers, the main request was to add solid state drive (SSD) memory, which is faster than a hard disk drive in delivering data for games. Those hard drives were valuable in a way, as they made feeding data from Blu-ray disk drives possible, but developers were banging up against the limits of the hard drive.

“To me, the SSD is a game-changer,” Cerny said.

It takes 2 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds to load data from a hard disk, at 50MBs to 100MBs a second in terms of fetching the data from either the center or the edge of a hard drive. Two-thirds of the time is spent locating the right game data, and a third of the time is spent loading it. So 20 seconds has been the norm for big transitions.

For players, that meant slow load times and even slow “fast travel” times. SSDs can load at 5GBs a second, with an almost instantaneous seek time in finding data. So the load time for 2GBs of data from an SSD is 2.7 seconds, or 10 times faster.

For gamers, this is good. The game for a PS5 will boot in a second. For reloading after you die, you are immediately back in the action.

But that’s not the main reason that Cerny included the SSDs, he said. The primary reason is the SSD gives the game designer more freedom. The hard drive sabotaged the game design in the past. Like having a 30-second elevator ride to load something. They just couldn’t do what they wanted to do...

https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/18/playstation-5-mark-cernys-deep-dive-into-ssd-memory/


I'm very excited about this Next Generation, and I'm confident the best Developers will really deliver amazing Games like we have never seen before. The hardware is there, and it is really much much more powerful and balanced than previous Gen.   I hope we will see a taste of what these new Consoles are cabable of ON LAUNCH, on DAY ONE !

[Paul2]

i just watched your secret sauce youtube video and i don't understand much of what its said but it does sound cool.  at the end of the video, it said the xsx and ps5 ssd should be much faster than pc i assumed pc ssd or hdd.

i didn't really read your links about xsx velocity architecteure or ps5 ssd memory yet but i might sometimes later.  i feel lazy and kind of tired now.

[Paul2]

okay, i just finished reading your xbox velocity architecture and ps5 deep dive into ssd memory and they are a good read and i don't understand some of what it said though but again, it sounds cool.

so both consoles have the cpu and gpu on the same chip if what i am reading on your ps5 link saying the ps5 cpu and gpu are made on the same chip.  that is probably the case with xsx.

anyway, both of these consoles with custom built ssd loads much faster than hdd meaning much faster loading times and/or bigger open worlds.