You can tell someone hasn't watched the Ratchet & Clank demo from the other day[0]. The SSDs in these consoles go far beyond short load times. They can radically change how games are made and designed.
But it's overused, giving each game world less weight. The technological imperative, preoccupied with whether they could, etc. In contrast, artificial constraints add depth to gameplay, e.g. limited movement speed/duration ("sprint").
All that said, keeping processors fed with data is a central problem of CS. The innovations here are not just the SSD itself, but elimination of bottlenecks in the architecture (e.g. direct placement in GPU RAM).
Typically, storage is 1000x slower than RAM. On PS5, it's 50x. That has got to be a revolution in algorithmic space-time tradeoffs... which has got to be reflected in gameplay, somehow, somewhen.
Conversely when Nintendo makes new hardware, it’s the same deal - they’re the only ones financing games that use the balance board or gesture controls or labo or whatever. They just put up a lot more money and have internal studios with more autonomy. SSDs are a Sony problem not a game design/engineering problem.
Until all (or most) PCs are equiped with high performance NVMe SSDs, those kind of features won't be possible other than on consoles.
Also, the PS5's architecture is optimized end-to-end for faster loading times, it's more than just faster storage.
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.
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.
Finally the gamer gets low/no loading which is nice to have.
But also it becomes much easier for Game Developers.
I'm still looking forward to it, after all, it is an huge improvement to current gen, independently of how long it took and how old the ps4 is.
And i'm not 100% sure if this doesn't affect PC Gaming. After all Direct Storage will hopefully fix small SSD Issues you also have on PC right now.
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.
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.
We still are nowhere near photo realistic, cinema type game play (and yes I realize that such animation has to be scaled down a bit because it can disturb people if it's too real, but we're not even at that point yet).
Real time ray tracing was going to be nVidias whole push into a new generation of 3D graphics, but that turned out to be not all that impressive (and with huge performance costs).
Having said that, the original Prey looks pretty rough these days. And I don't see how a single portal is "the same thing" at all.
In fact, I think the only thing that I can think of to compare to is the ending of Portal 2 where you shoot a portal to the moon, but even that was just a single portal to a fairly low detail environment.
Are you referring to Prey's usage of that portal? Or something else.
FYI, the new Prey game released a few years ago is amazing. It has basically nothing to do with the original because they apparently just wanted to use their rights to the name on a flagship title. But it's amazing if you're into System Shock/BioShock type games.
Nothing special here, no need to hype
edit:
You know what really makes a difference?
You playing an VR open world game where every single artificial intelligence NPC does thing in every possible way leading to different gameplay and outcome. And you as a character can just grab anything you want and throw at any monster that you just CREATED in that game itself
Or you can control that monster that you created in your own way, time travelling to another open world game saying hello to your friend playing in his house back and forth
Together with some AI NPC friends you made in that game, you live in that dimensional space forever as you want even after your human body dies, your conscious stays in electronic form
Referencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Art_Online:_Alicization
It means you have a lot more RAM, e.g. thus, PS5 has 825GB of RAM. RAM in the TB, soon.
Would a couple of orders of magnitude make a difference? If software is designed with terabytes of RAM in mind?
To get specific about what this enables, I think we will see many more indie games with great looking graphics. The combination of high res asset scans, automatic resolution scaling, automatic texture compression, generally less tight performance budgets that don't need teams to do optimization work (next gen consoles), and a financial model around tools to take advantage of all of this (Unreal + Quixel as the leader here) should make this next generation of games pretty awesome.