Final Fantasy XVI Director is 'Blown Away' by the Speed of the PS5 SSD - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 April 2023 / 5,006 Views
Final Fantasy XVI director Hiroshi Takai in an interview with PlayStation Blog was asked about his impressions of the power and technology of the PlayStation 5 and he said he was "blown away" by the speed of the the SSD and the size of the memory.
"The two main things that struck me were the size of the memory and the speed of the SSD," said Takai. "I’ve worked with a lot of different hardware over the years, and many have failed to strike the right balance between the capabilities of the hardware and the size of the memory.
"However, the PS5 is different—it comes with enough memory installed to take full advantage of the hardware. As for the SSD, as we were building the game, I was simply blown away by how fast it was."
Takai added the team wanted Final Fantasy XVI to have the best possible graphics by focusing on the fine details, as well as the quality of lighting and shadows.
"Naturally, we wanted the graphics to be the best that they could be, so we put a lot of focus on the fine details of the character and environmental models, as well as the quality of the lighting and the shadows, to really make them shine," said Takai.
"It’s really resource-intensive just to render these models on screen, and the lighting and shadow effects are then layered on top of that. We’re only able to do this thanks to the size of the PS5’s memory. Clive, the protagonist of FFXVI, can unleash a wide range of attacks, and the animations and effects for them can all fit in the memory, too. And the way that the game seamlessly flows between resource-intensive gameplay to equally intensive cutscenes and back again wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the speed of the SSD."
Final Fantasy XVI will launch for the PlayStation 5 on June 22, 2023.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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to bad cant compare on the X series. i do know that the PS5 SSD is faster.
I think a big issue is people don't seem to understand that random transfers aren't increasing linearly with sequential transfers as SSD speeds increase.
Lots of small files, the Xbox Series X and the Playstation 5 will be roughly the same... But if a developer optimizes it's assets so that they can be batch loaded into DRAM, then the Playstation 5 will be a significant step ahead. - And that simply isn't going to happen due to the nature of video games.
We are seeing this with PC drives, where the user experience between PCI-E 3.0/4.0 and 5.0 drives are roughly the same, PCI-E 5.0 drives can have 4x the throughput as a 3.0 PCI-E drive in the real world, but once you bog them down with random reads/writes, then it's mostly a wash.
There are PC SSD's that are more than twice the speed as a PS5 SSD, but in gaming? It's mostly irrelevant.
Compression isn't actually accelerating random reads/writes.
The shifting of that data isn't a bandwidth limitation, it's an access-time limitation. - Every time you go to search for a piece of data, it takes time. - The more random tiny files you have in need of searching, with or without compression, the longer it takes.
It can sometimes take longer to find the data you want, than it takes to transfer it.
The PS5 also doesn't have "GPU" memory, it has "System memory". - It's integrated graphics remember, it shares it's memory with the entire system.
Loading data directly into memory on a per-needs basis has been a technique used for years, before the PS4 even existed.
Just like the SX power advantage, no one in the public really cares till they see it on screen or loads noticeably faster. I'm one of those who are not impressed by speeches
