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Comment by wejick | Hacker News Reader

Funny that I thought the biggest improvement of PS5 is actually crazy fast storage. No loading screen is really gamechanger. I would love to get xbox instant resume on Playstation.

Graphic is nice but not number one.

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The hardware 3D audio acceleration (basically fancy HRTFs) is also really cool, but almost no 3rd party games use it.

I've had issues with Xbox instant resume. Lots of "your save file has changed since the last time you played, so we have to close the game and relaunch" issues. Even when the game was suspended an hour earlier. I assume it's just cloud save time sync issues where the cloud save looks newer because it has a timestamp 2 seconds after the local one. Doesn't fill me with confidence, though.

Pretty sure they licensed a compression codec from RAD and implemented it in hardware, which is why storage is so fast on the PS5. Sounds like they're doing the same thing for GPU transfers now.

Storage on the PS5 isn't really fast. It's just not stupidly slow. At the time of release, the raw SSD speeds for the PS5 were comparable to the high-end consumer SSDs of the time, which Sony achieved by using a controller with more channels than usual so that they didn't have to source the latest NAND flash memory (and so that they could ship with only 0.75 TB capacity). The hardware compression support merely compensates for the PS5 having much less CPU power than a typical gaming desktop PC. For its price, the PS5 has better storage performance than you'd expect from a similarly-priced PC, but it's not particularly innovative and even gaming laptops have surpassed it.

The most important impact by far of the PS5 adopting this storage architecture (and the Xbox Series X doing something similar) is that it gave game developers permission to make games that require SSD performance.

So, you're saying they built a novel storage architecture that competed with state-of-the-art consumer hardware, at a lower price point. Five years later, laptops are just catching up, and that at the same price point, it's faster than what you'd expect from a PC.

The compression codec they licensed was built by some of the best programmers alive [0], and was later acquired by Epic [1]

I dunno how you put those together and come up with "isn't really fast" or "not particularly innovative".

Fast doesn't mean 'faster than anything else in existence'. Fast is relative to other existing solutions with similar resource constraints.

[0] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/about/ [1] https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-acquires-rad-...

Their storage architecture was novel in that they made different tradeoffs than off the shelf SSDs for consumer PCs, but there's absolutely no innovation aspect to copy and pasting four more NAND PHYs that are each individually running at outdated speeds for the time. Sony simply made a short-term decision to build a slightly more expensive SSD controller to enable significant cost savings on the NAND flash itself. That stopped mattering within a year of the PS5 launching, because off the shelf 8-channel drives with higher speeds were no longer in short supply.

"Five years later, laptops are just catching up" is a flat out lie.

"at the same price point, it's faster than what you'd expect from a PC" sounds impressive until you remember that the entire business model of Sony and Microsoft consoles is to sell the console at or below cost and make the real money on games, subscription services, and accessories.

The only interesting or at all innovative part of this story is the hardware decompression stuff (that's in the SoC rather than the SSD controller), but you're overselling it. Microsoft did pretty much the same thing with their console and a different compression codec. (Also, the fact that Kraken is a very good compression method for running on CPUs absolutely does not imply that it's the best choice for implementing in silicon. Sony's decision to implement it in hardware was likely mainly due to the fact that lots of PS4 games used it.) Your own source says that space savings for PS5 games were more due to the deduplication enabled by not having seek latency to worry about, than due to the Kraken compression.

I’m not quite sure why you’re so negative about the storage architecture, the idea of having the storage controller unpack and write into memory itself with no cpu in the loop (after the initial request) is a really cool idea, and clearly pays off.

To my knowledge we haven’t really got a version of that in PC land. The closest is an nvidia-specific thing that lets the GPU read storage directly, but that’s still not the same.

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