(UPDATED) Microsoft walks back decision to double price of Xbox Live Gold subscriptions

This matters less than you think.

That is because LTT tested games that were designed to run from spinning disks. Once the disk is no longer the bottleneck, very quickly something else becomes the bottleneck. Mark Cerny explained this very well in the Road to PS5 presentation why they need a fast SSD (between 8:43 and 9:30), and which bottlenecks they needed to remove (between 13:13 and 14:00).



This has since been mirrored in other game developers' comments. I expect that once developers stop caring for the old console generation, and start using DirectStorage on PC, a slow SSD means you will have to live with reduced detail or increased object pop-in.
 
Logic and reason and comments from developers actually designing the system and developing games won’t work on him, chithanh . He’s in his own little world.
 
That is because LTT tested games that were designed to run from spinning disks. Once the disk is no longer the bottleneck, very quickly something else becomes the bottleneck. Mark Cerny explained this very well in the Road to PS5 presentation why they need a fast SSD (between 8:43 and 9:30), and which bottlenecks they needed to remove (between 13:13 and 14:00).



This has since been mirrored in other game developers' comments. I expect that once developers stop caring for the old console generation, and start using DirectStorage on PC, a slow SSD means you will have to live with reduced detail or increased object pop-in.


In general pop in is more related to performance. Seldom do we see pop in from loading, unless you're using a crappy game engine. UE3 and the ID Tech version used in Wolfenstien The New Order come to mind.

Pop in is there to save frame rates.
 
Seldom do we see pop in from loading,
I can promise you that going from a spinning disk, to SSD, to NVME, that pop in ABSOLUTELY happens due to disk load speeds. This is much, much more obvious in open world game engines.
As someone who mostly relies upon cache for game loading, the difference in pop-in between the first load (uncached) and the second load (cached) is night and day. I'm talking about the difference between shitty 16x16 textures for 30+ seconds vs full res, high res def textures instantly.

I've spent hours tweaking .ini load-in settings to deal with whatever the current storage medium I had at the time was. When I moved to NVME I basically had to stop doing that and worrying way more about VRAM limits.

If there was some sort of way to benchmark this that didn't require a complete restructuring of my entire storage array i'd show ya.
 
In general pop in is more related to performance. Seldom do we see pop in from loading, unless you're using a crappy game engine.
This is mostly true for the traditional approach (loading assets into system RAM during a loading screen / corridor area / elevator ride / etc. as explained in the Road to PS5 presentation). But with the new console SSDs, developers can use asset streaming. For that to work, the storage needs to be both fast enough and support arbitration, in order to prioritize important over less important game content. Microsoft themselves say that DirectStorage requires a sufficiently fast NVMe SSD: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/
 
Console vs. PC should have its own thread, after which off topic console vs. PC talk should be an automatic derailment infraction.
 
I can promise you that going from a spinning disk, to SSD, to NVME, that pop in ABSOLUTELY happens due to disk load speeds. This is much, much more obvious in open world game engines.
As someone who mostly relies upon cache for game loading, the difference in pop-in between the first load (uncached) and the second load (cached) is night and day. I'm talking about the difference between shitty 16x16 textures for 30+ seconds vs full res, high res def textures instantly.

I've spent hours tweaking .ini load-in settings to deal with whatever the current storage medium I had at the time was. When I moved to NVME I basically had to stop doing that and worrying way more about VRAM limits.

If there was some sort of way to benchmark this that didn't require a complete restructuring of my entire storage array i'd show ya.

That isn't untrue, I am just saying that most of the pop in we see from games is due to poorly designed game engines or games. There are a lot of games that came out when SSDs were still new and many used HDDs for all their programs. Even on a modern SSD, they still have horrid pop in because the engines/games weren't designed properly.

Going forward with new engines that can properly take advantage of the hardware we'll see this become less common. Hopefully.
 
That isn't untrue, I am just saying that most of the pop in we see from games is due to poorly designed game engines or games. There are a lot of games that came out when SSDs were still new and many used HDDs for all their programs. Even on a modern SSD, they still have horrid pop in because the engines/games weren't designed properly.

Going forward with new engines that can properly take advantage of the hardware we'll see this become less common. Hopefully.

New hardware and engines just mean different compromises. It’s always going to be much easier for developers to make games that look and run just a bit worse than they “should.”
 
Despite all the bugs, Cyberpunk 2077 was designed to load off SSD and the load time is so quick. Usually only around 5 or 10 seconds max, and the world is huge.

Compare that to something like GTA V, the load time (even just to get to the title screen) is crazy.
 
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