Dirt 5's Load Times Described As 'Blisteringly Fast' On Xbox Series X

I absolutely hated the loading times on forza. So much I gave up on it. This is welcomed.

@sixrings that’s largely why I’ve now decided to go all-SSD next gen. i had planned to get a 5TB HDD for BC, but now plan to get a 2TB SATA SSD. Not as fast as the internal SSD, but way faster than what I’m used to on the 1S.

@AJDarkstar I was hoping some of the coverage would cover more of the loading times of 360 and OG Xbox games from various drives.

From the two clips I have seen the loading times for old games are already really low and it barely seems worth getting an SSD for the majority of them.

I'm considering a tiered system: - Internal and at some stage expansion card for Series X games, external sata SSD (2tb) for xbox one and the old mechanical drive for older games that I don't play much, if at all and the loading times will be low whatever they are stored on.

@Medic_Alert I plan on storing mostly X1 games on the external SSD. DF’s video shows massively improved load times on those. FFXV goes from over a minute to around 12 seconds, for example. I’ll still have my old 1TB HDD drive, so if I need the space for OG or 360 games, perhaps I’ll put those on there.

@AJDarkstar Yeah I've seen it. It's funny that without velocity architecture the results are very similar to a PC and no one seemed to see that coming.

But yeah, I used that video to design my tiered system of storage for XSX.

I just wish Sony had given the same information....

@Medic_Alert I personally expected the SSD to be very PC-like for games not optimised for it. Sony at least support 10Gbps on the rear USB ports, so I’ll use an external NVMe for PS4 games. I expect it’ll be much the same with PS4 games, and although some games will get some PS5 updates, I wonder whether they’ll still run from external drives, as they may not get updated to fully support the SSD. The raw speed of the onboard SSD may make things faster than XSX, but perhaps not dramatically so.
On XSX, I wonder whether we’ll be prompted to choose which drive we wish to install games to, or choose based on console generation, so we don’t have to keep changing the install location.

I'm curious what you guys will be using for external SATA. I still have my 8TB spinners loaded with X1 bulk storage, almost maxed out, but I'd consider adding an SSD if it works out much cheaper than the nvmes.

That's pretty cool to be down to such low numbers. According to the Ori director, the big differences between PS5 and XSX will come down mostly to the PS5 having shorter load times, around half the time, and the ability to effectively get rid of loading screens entirely, making "loading" a seamless thing, while the XSX will have better 4k performance overall, and hit 4k more often. Makes sense....so the choice of "do I get game X on PS5 or on XB (if you can stomach Sony's horrible library handling and business practices to buy a multiplat there at all) comes down to "do I want to play this game without the concept of any loading at all, or do I want to play this game with pretty good loading times and better running performance/res".

@NEStalgia I’m planning on getting a Samsung 870 SATA 2TB and external 3.0 enclosure for XSX, and an NVMe and 3.1 enclosure for PS5. I have a 1TB HDD connected to X1S and it’s almost full, so had been planning to get a 4-5TB external HDD, but would much prefer SSD, especially for X1 games. I plan on having fewer games installed at once, but can upgrade or add more storage in the future if necessary.

@NEStalgia I would be going with the same drive that Richard Leadbetter used in the Digital Foundry video.

Because any software that isn't velocity architecture ready gets bottlenecked anyway, there is little reason to use an external NVMe drive for gaming and a sata drive is much better value in general.

This one is an internal drive but it makes no difference with SSDs you just need a decent USB 3.1 to sata cable for it: -

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B089R1C9HV/?coliid=IBVMAL80ECB07&colid=1F1VICJCUT7IY&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

@Medic_Alert @NEStalgia yeah, NVMe isn’t enough of a boost on XSX due to the 5Gbps USB ports, but I expect to see a bigger boost on PS5, as 10Gbps can reach up to 1,250MB/sec, and some NVMe drives don’t cost much more than SATA ones. The NVMe will probably be faster than the USB can handle, but slower NVMe isn’t much cheaper, if you can find it at all (everything seems to be 3,000MB/s and up).

@NEStalgia if I didn't dislike the practices of Sony I'd probably go with the shorter loading times. Well that and don't like the Sony controller.

@AJDarkstar It may still not give as much of a boost as you hope on the faster USB ports though. Unless Sony have pulled some wizardry to allow direct access to the storage - i.e. what the native setup is in PS5 and the velocity architecture is in XSX - then the external NVMe will bottleneck anyway.

I don't expect to see any real difference in the load times on back compat games on PS5 NVMe or not.

@Medic_Alert we’ll see. Even NVMe gives a bit of a boost on XSX, it’s just massively limited by that USB 3.0 connection. I expect external NVMe on PS5 to hit 1GB+ per second, so a 10-12 second load on XSX should be around 5-6 seconds on PS5 on comparable games. The Zen 2 CPU really does much of the work here, so I expect it to be handled by the system just as well.
Note: the bottleneck on both systems is the USB port, but XSX is limited to 625MB/s, whereas PS5 is 1,250MB/s.

@AJDarkstar It's not just the USB port. The reason the internal drive of the XSX is no faster than than the external one with backwards compatibility is because they don't use velocity architecture which as I understand it effectively gives the GPU direct access to the SSD.

Without that direct access you get limited to not much more than the speed of a sata drive which is why you see those limits on PC too with internal NVMe drives.

This video gives a good idea of what I'm talking about: -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA&ab_channel=LinusTechTips

@Medic_Alert I was so hyped for backward compatible games and then this digital foundry video disappointed me. I'm hoping the microsoft games like sea of thieves and forza can get series updates which includes load times. Otherwise these consoles might be able to play them but I'll likely have very little interest in revisiting them.

@Medic_Alert hopefully we’ll get a DF video on it soon so we can see whether it makes as much of a difference as I’m hoping. Sony seem to have done a good job with the engineering on PS5, which I think should translate well to SSDs, particularly NVMe speeds, especially given how little boost they provided on PS4 Pro.

@AJDarkstar oh I hope I'm wrong and the PS5 can provide a real difference across the board.

I think it is a really interesting piece of engineering in lots of ways and while I think MS have taken a more sensible approach to next gen I am more excited to see how good the PS5 is!

@sixrings I get that too. I think there has been a little over promising with load times probably due to marketing.

I mean quick resume is a great example. It is an OK feature and it is obviously quicker to change games but it is no where near instantaneous also if you play physical discs it doesn't work in any meaningful way at all because you still need to swap the disc.

But yes I was pretty underwhelmed too all told.

@sixrings I noticed in earlier videos that XSX loads weren’t as fast as many were hoping. Only on PS5 have I seen near-instant loading, though I doubt PS4 games will load as fast. Still, even 8-10 second loads is a vast improvement over X1.

@Medic_Alert I think Sony has the more sensible cooling solution, even if it does make the console a monster. It’s just weird that MS chose that one massive fan, but there’s not really any room on the PSU side of the split mobo for airflow. Very much looking forwards to getting both systems though.

@AJDarkstar the vapour chamber and the wide open top to bottom air flow is very simple and easy in my view and I admire the simplicity in design and while I think Sony's cooling is interesting I do think it is over engineered. It is a very aggressive cooling solution and I wonder if this may have been a reaction to problems in early development or just a reaction to the Pro. For the record I'm sure it works well now.

We only have MS' numbers for reference but they are saying it cools quickly and has been tested in 'oven rooms'.

I don't have any concerns about either to be honest.

@Medic_Alert the PS5 solution is simply because the GPU is overclocked, but as suggested in the teardown video, it was made that large to have the same performance as a vapour chamber, but probably costs considerably less. Given the size of the rear vent, I wonder whether the air coming out will feel especially warm. But backlash over the Pro noise, especially on launch machines like mine, undoubtedly played a part in making it as quiet as possible. Reports suggest the XSX runs rather hot - within safe limits, but hot nonetheless. I’m curious to see how both run in my home. As long as they’re both quiet and no overheating issues arise, I’ll be happy.

@AJDarkstar @Medic_Alert If that conversation with those 2 devs on PS that you and I have been involved in is anything to go by, yeah, Sony Still went full overkill with the cooling (not a bad thing necessarily) but much of it is based on the idea that the PS5 remains in that "overclocked" mode basically permanently and thus will throw some serious heat it needs to expel fast, but that the cooling is designed to keep it expelling that heat.

But I do think it's overengineered, and if they were going with the expense of liquid metal and an absurd amount of raw copper by weight, why didn't they just use a vapour chamber rather than trying to get an equivalent performance from raw copper? It's not a problem for users but it just makes me wonder "why?" Unless the idea was covering as much surface area as possible to get that whole IO unit under the sink. They also may simply not have been as willing to change their form factor as radically as MS did with the cube, and that was the compromise.

The conversation with those guys has been very interesting. On one hand they're very clearly grizzled old veterans in the industry, not your typical just-out-of-school with a head full of partial knowledge, so what they say should be very reliable. OTOH, they obviously are more involved in the Sony side of projects and thus can't really offer much of an insight from the MS implementer perspective of advantages on this side, so everything ends up becoming a pro for Sony.

The gist I'm overall getting is that devs looove PS5 and their SDK and the rapid memory access from the SSD. And I can see where a Sony centric project would be great with that. What I'm less sure of is how that translates from a Windows project that's already using DX12. At best, XSX just ports right over from Windows without significant effort, while PS5 will be easy to make a few adjustments and use its strengths as well. At worst PS5 is Cell reborn and nothing will use its strengths unless it's a Sony target project. And at REALLY worst, PS5 will be seen as the mass market choice and everything will be designed around its strengths so that XSX suffers in comparison and PC hardware will have to go overblown like it's running Crysis to keep up.

@AJDarkstar I'm not sure if it would cost that much less than a vapor chamber. Vapor chambers cost a lot to produce, but copper has become pretty price as a metal and is moving into semi-precious status. If that thing is really several pounds of copper per unit, I can't imagine there's a cost savings. If not a loss compared to a custom vapor chamber. It's a really, really odd choice. Or just an example of "We didn't invent it here Syndrome"

Between the OC GPU and the custom IO, I can't imagine the exhaust temps aren't somewhat exceptional. MS has said the XSX isn't much different from 1X, which is notably warm as well. But I do wonder how hot that PS5 exhaust will be. Can't be worse than my old FX series nVidia cards with the leaf blower fans. But I'm a bit worried about those things blowing at the front of my BD player and Roku

@NEStalgia it’s worth noting that the heatsink in the XSX has a massive copper plate too. The plate and pipes are copper on PS5, but the fins look to be aluminium, which likely reduces the cost somewhat. But even if Sony had gone with a vapour chamber, the liquid metal would probably have still been the better choice, as it’s there specifically to get the heat away from the SOC much faster, and liquid metal makes CPUs in PCs run considerably cooler than traditional thermal paste, especially on overclocked chips (some older versions required re-application after just a couple of years, but this version Sony is using should be much more reliable). There will be a lot of heat coming from the PS5 SOC, but spread over such a large heatsink, I expect the heat coming out the back won’t be quite so bad, but we’ll see. I’ll be curious to put a hand behind it while it’s running. The Pro kicks out a fair bit of heat, but it’s not too bad. What I also find curious is that MS’s fan approach draws heat out of the system, while Sony’s is focused on pushing cool air in.
I have shelves on my TV cabinet that required adjustment for the new machines. It has an open front and back, with the back having a strip across the middle for support. The XSX will be on the bottom, and the width of the shelves is about 59cm wide, and about 38cm deep, so plenty of room for ventilation. My only slight concern is the PS5: it’ll be on the middle shelf, with that strip behind it. However, the console has a good 15cm of space behind it, with an inch-wide gap all along the top of the strip, beneath the top shelf, and a little clearance below, too (and there’s basically empty space behind the cabinet), so the warm air shouldn’t build up to any worrying degree.

@AJDarkstar technically in a closed system, positive vs negative displacement shouldn't have a difference. At least not at the distances involved. Running a ventilation duct 2600ft is a little different with the bends, restrictions, and outlets factoring in (or requiring boosters.). But at under a foot, it really shouldn't matter at all, and probably had more to do with where space is available and shielding emi from the motor from various parts.

Do we have any kind if idea what wattage these things draw? That would mostly tell us where the thermals would be. I'm somewhat frightened to find out.

@NEStalgia only that they have 350 watt PSUs. I think DF estimated around 200 watts for XSX, but given the 7nm chip process it could be a touch lower. I believe the Pro drew around 145-165 watts max, so I’m hoping it won’t be much more than that. The XSX will likely be higher, since MS claim it runs at full clock all the time, which seems wasteful to me. I hope standby mode consumes less power, as it’s often handy when downloading big files.
Edit: some sources say 300 watt PSU for XSX, DF teardown says 315 watts.

@AJDarkstar not so bad then. My threshold is the 400w+ my pcs drew.

Supposedly ps5 may run full clocks most of the time as well. Maybe more power efficient depending on what they're doing with variable clocks, but it sounds like
default is full speed, slowing only if it's more idle.

I think they did say standby consumes less power. That's part of the quick resume. It shouldn't need to keep vram active anymore since save states are written to disk.

@NEStalgia I hope so, I was always baffled by the high power consumption in rest mode on PS4 & X1. Even movie playback uses far more power than it should. I really want smaller games to only sip at the power. Better energy efficiency can only be a good thing.