PCIe NVMe SSDs can be up to 50 times faster than traditional hard drives when it comes to sequential read speed, so it stands to reason therefore that game developers will take advantage of new PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles. generation equip this type of storage units, but will it affect the FPS of console games ?
Both Microsoft and SONY have opted for NVMe storage solutions for their next-gen consoles, and while they have already talked at length about the benefits that this will have for the overall performance of the console (such as reducing or almost eliminating screens) loading ), we can not help wondering if this will also influence the performance of the games. So, we are going to analyze if the consoles have an NVMe SSD may or may not affect the FPS of the games.
The benefits of using an SSD on consoles
As we have already mentioned before, when a developer is creating a game for consoles, he has the great advantage that he knows exactly what hardware the computer on which the game will run will have, and for this reason he can optimize it for a specific hardware.
For starters, solid state drives can tolerate a high degree of data fragmentation without this having a noticeable impact on performance, eliminating the need to defragment game files after installing or updating it. Defragmentation is something most PC users no longer need to think about, but it is still a necessary occasional (albeit automatic) maintenance process on current consoles.
Since game developers no longer need to be as concerned with maintaining the spatial location of data on disk, data that is reused in various parts of a game will not need to be duplicated across multiple parts of the disk. Commonly reused sounds, textures, and patterns should only be included once in game files; We might think that this will mean that the installation size of the games will be reduced, although this remains to be seen.
Something that we will notice the use of an SSD in games is that these messages will surely disappear, warning us that we should not turn off or restart the console while saving the game. The console SSD write speeds are fast enough that saving the game takes much less time than it would take for the user to turn off the console, so ideally these warnings will disappear.
NVMe SSDs have write speeds that go well beyond this requirement, and that allows for changes in the way games are saved. Instead of summarizing progress in a specific save file, consoles will be free to download gigabytes to disk; All the RAM used by a game can be saved to the NVMe SSD in a matter of seconds, and this means not only that we could have the game saved that we could access in an instant, but that the load of the game could be significantly reduced because instead having to read everything from the beginning, we could load it from a file on the SSD similar to hibernation on PCs.
Microsoft has in fact already announced this faculty, which it has called “Quick resume”.
Deduplication of game assets is a benefit that will surely carry over to PC game ports, but this is something we will talk about later. So far we have seen some benefits of having SSDs on consoles, but they are all “convenience” for a better overall experience of using the console. However we are going to what we are going to do: will these very fast SSDs affect the FPS in games?
How console SSDs will affect FPS in games
There is no doubt that reducing or eliminating loading screens will be a very welcome benefit for everyone. This often takes the form of a level design that hides what would have been a loading screen, where the player’s movement or field of view is noticeably restricted, dramatically reducing the assets that must remain in RAM and allowing swapping all the other data while preserving an “illusory” player freedom: long and narrow corridors as in the Dark Souls, elevator rides as in Resident Evil, air locks, etc. They are standard design elements of modern games to “hide” loading screens.
Finally we come to what may be the most significant consequence of using NVMe SSDs on consoles: both Microsoft and SONY have stated that their SSDs can be used almost as RAM . Let us be clear on this point: that is not possible. The PS5’s SSD can supply data at 5.5 GB / s, while “standard” RAM does so at 448 GB / s, about 81 times faster. Consoles are 16GB GDDR6, and if a game needs more than this amount to render a scene, the FPS speed will drop considerably because the SSD is not fast, plain and simple enough.
Certainly, it is possible for a level of a game to use more than 16 GB of assets, but not all on the screen at the same time. The technical term for this is “working set”, and what changes the SSD is the threshold of what can be considered active. With a fast SSD the assets to be kept in the DRAM are not much more than what is currently on the screen, and the game does not need to search for them in advance.
What new generation games will do is that, for example, the textures of an object from the room we are in but that are not on the screen can be “saved” to the SSD instead of RAM, to load them in this when the camera begins to rotate in that direction. Not that it is a substantial change, but this will allow to put a greater number of objects in each scene. Of course, in less overloaded scenes, this will leave much more free graphic memory and, with this technique, it will be possible to improve the FPS, but we repeat that this would only be in scenes that are lightly loaded with objects.
In other words, having an SSD in the consoles will not directly improve the FPS, but it will help to have scenes with a greater number of objects and textures without the performance suffering.