Comment on I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 18 hours agoI was always under the impression that these were here specifically because loading screens broke immersion and were just as disruptive.
This is especially infuriating when you’re playing on a PS5 where there shouldn’t be a need for a loading screen but the game is cross platform and they need to design them into the levels because PC and PS4 need them.
The God of War reboot released on the PS4, where it also “didn’t need” loading screens.
The PS5 does still need some time to load anything, it’s not magic. You can expand a PS5 with M.2 NVMe storage, which is also used in many PCs.
The benefits of the PS5/NVMe storage are greatly reduced loading times and faster data streaming (which enables, for example, the ability to move faster through a higher fidelity NYC in Spiderman without buildings visibly popping in).
The PS5 does still need some time to load anything, it’s not magic.
It’s not magic, it’s engineering. Games specifically designed for the PS5 can pretty much load instantly. It’s not just the SSDs raw bandwidth. The SSD controller plays a huge role. It can decompress data as it’s loading from the SSD, effectively acting as a bandwidth multiplier. It also communicates directly with the GPU cache.
Remember that PCs are held back by their modular architecture. To allow for an interchangeable GPU it needs to be on a PCIe card with its own separate VRAM. This all comes at a huge performance penalty. Data needs to be copied over the slow PCIe bus to the VRAM before it can be accessed by the GPU. On a PS5 with its unified memory architecture everything is immediately usable once it hits the system RAM. This is a massive advantage when streaming assets.
The big difference is latency. Not how much data it can load per second, but the time between starting a load and the data actually being available. Sony spent a lot of effort in getting this as short as possible throwing a lot of purpose-designed hardware at it. Something you can’t do in a PC because it’s a general purpose machine.
Another huge factor is that every PS5 has the same minimum performance level. The fact that you have a super fast SSD is meaningless because the game has to be designed to work with the crappiest spinning rust HDD that meets the minimum system requirements. So while a PS5 may not be as fast as the best PC that can run the game, it is much faster than the crappiest PC that can run the game, so the developers can optimize for a much faster machine than they can when they have to take into account that crappy low-end PC that has to be able to run it.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Why would you think that a PC would need a loading screen when a PS5 doesn’t…?
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 16 hours ago
See my other post. A PC is a general purpose machine designed to be modular, this comes at a pretty significant cost in performance. Everything in technology is a trade-off, nothing comes for free.
A PS5 may use the same x86 architecture but the system architecture is not the same as a generic PC. It’s not that a PS5 punches above its weight, it’s actually the other way around: PC’s perform relatively poorly considering their specs. For example: the ability to replace the GPU comes at a massive cost in performance. PCs make up for this somewhat with sheer brute force. A purpose-built machine will always be more efficient.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
lol I don’t know if this is supposed to be a bit or not.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 11 hours ago
The user is correct in that the modularity of a home PC is not the most efficient way for the electronics to communicate, and therefore some performance is lost.
I would also point out that while a PS5 has known, defined specs that a developer can plan for, a PC could be pretty much any specs. And while yes the dev can state a minimum spec requirement, but if they are launching on PC they are going to want to target a wide audience.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 14 hours ago
LOL, What do I know right. I only have a degree in computer engineering and 20 years of experience as a software engineer.