Posted on Monday, May 18 2020 @ 10:57 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
WCCF Tech
spotted that Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney revealed more information about the Sony PlayStation 5 console's storage system at his Twitter feed. While there are some SSDs that roughly match the raw bandwidth of the PS5, Sweeney pointed out that the PS5 architecture is much more efficient as PCs suffer from a lot of layering and overhead:
Systems integration and whole-system performance. Bringing in data from high-bandwidth storage into video memory in its native format with hardware decompression is very efficient. The software and hardware stack go to great lengths to minimize latency and maximize the bandwidth that's actually accessible by games.
Those PC numbers are theoretical and are from drive into kernel memory. From there, it's a slow and circuitous journey through software decompression to GPU driver swizzling into video memory where you can eventually use it. The PS5 path for this is several times more efficient. And then there's latency.
On PC, there's a lot of layering and overhead. Then you have the issue of getting compressed textures into video memory requires reading into RAM, software decompressing, then calling into a GPU driver to transfer and swizzle them, with numerous kernel transitions throughout.
Intel's work on non-volatile NVDIMMs is very exciting and may get PC data transfer on a better track over the coming years.
