Former Naughty Dog Technical Director Explains SSD’s Importance for Rendering After PS5 Presentation

Today Sony provided an extensive technical presentation about the PS5, and the SSD was one of the main points. Andrew Maximow explains why it's relevant.

Giuseppe Nelva

Published: Mar 18, 2020 05:49 pm

This article is over 4 years old and may contain outdated information

Today Sony Interactive Entertainment provided an extensive technical presentation about the PS5, and the SSD storage was one of the main points.

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While it’s easy to understand how a solid-state drive would influence things like loading times, the impact on more abstract concepts like rendering is perhaps a bit more obscure.

Enter Andrew Maximov, Promethean AI founder and former Naughty Dog technical director, who has played a significant role in making games like Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End look as good as they do.

Maximov is known for some very interesting technical talks at events like GDC, and he provided on Twitter some interesting insight on what we can expect from the implementation of SSDs on consoles.

The jump in quality between the 2 is quite staggering yet both utilized identical graphics hardware. Tons of work went into improving the look by the graphics engineers and the artists, but all of this has to be facilitated by managing a lot more data fast.
— Andrew Maximov (@_ArtIsAVerb) March 18, 2020

Even with current gen hardware we can render most single objects at lifelike detail. Every hair in Drakes stubble was a triangle.
We can render vast spaces by using smart LoD systems.
But we can't store all of the super detailed high res versions for all objs in memory at once.
— Andrew Maximov (@_ArtIsAVerb) March 18, 2020

Now producing all of this content at this level of fidelity is an extremely complicated issue of it's own, but we are working on it 🙂 @PlayStation – happy if this helps share the excitement. Keep it up!
— Andrew Maximov (@_ArtIsAVerb) March 18, 2020

It’ll be interesting to see just how far developers will be able to push this feature, loading really detailed assets into memory quicker than we can actually get them into the screen’s frame, and then unloading them just as quickly to make room for the next batch as we move around a game.

For the moment, we haven’t seen next-gen native games, and it’s actually quite possible that we won’t see this feature fully utilized for a while even after the PS5 and the Xbox Series X launch. That being said, it’s still an exciting perspective.

The PS5 is expected to launch during this year’s holiday season, same as the Xbox Series X from Microsoft.

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Author

Giuseppe Nelva

Proud weeb hailing from sunny (not as much as people think) Italy and long-standing gamer since the age of Mattel Intellivision and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Definitely a multi-platform gamer, he still holds the old dear PC nearest to his heart, while not disregarding any console on the market. RPGs (of any nationality), MMORPGs, and visual novels are his daily bread, but he enjoys almost every other genre, prominently racing simulators, action and sandbox games. He is also one of the few surviving fans on Earth of the flight simulator genre.