With New Year just around the corner, game lovers are super excited and highly anticipating for the next year as it is expected to be the year for all gamers. This news is not restricted to only the PC Gamers, a PlayStation aficionado, or an Xbox core-boy, the news says that the entire gaming platform is planning to undergo a huge revolution with a whole an entirely new generation of consoles which is set to be available in the market in less than 12 months.
Irrespective of what the gamers feel about the consoles, any PC gamer would find it impossible to ignore the impact which these boxes would have on PC in general. If somehow they intend to ignore the fact, it would simply mean that they are denying the reality which instead they should face head-on.
The Next Generation New SSDs could be the end of next-generation PC Game Ports. Moreover, about what is going to be dropping on these new game boxes, the SSD is probably going to have a significant impact on PC gaming, good or bad is not yet known.
The installation of new components may not create a huge impact because the solid states have been driving in the gaming PCs for years now. The fact that the console-first development strategy of using a considerable amount of game developers on all platforms can also be considered.
Another fact that can be considered is the leverage of the game developers due to which the gamers across all the platforms can now be able to enjoy much better speed and responsiveness of a top-notch SSD.
All these could possibly turn out to be suitable for the PC gamers who have been consistently enjoying solid states for quite some time now, but at the same time it could turn out that the rounds of consoles are making a mockery of the poor old PC like an ancient device.
Therefore, it has been declared that both Xbox series and PlayStation 5 will come with an SSD and a fast NVMe PCIe- based which would be integrated into the mainboard itself. And, as for the Series X’s SSD, Microsoft hasn’t revealed much detail on whether it is planning to integrate the chip or not.
However, it is well assured that the Next Generation SSD will virtually discard and eliminate lags, load times. And also offer players brand new gaming which would be world faster than they could ever imagine.
This is what has been assured by the Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer. On the other side, Sony Mark Cerny has announced that it is planning for new releases instead of updates and also added that it has a bandwidth which is higher than any SSD in the market for PCs. Therefore the introduction of the SSF would only be the lighthouse for the next generation consoles and games.
Sony went ahead to display the potential of its new bandwidth by citing a direct comparison of a PS4 Pro and an early beta of PS5 dev kit with SSF. In the process, Sony tested with PlayStation exclusive Spider-Man and the results did show that Sony had a reduction in load times from 15 seconds on the PlayStation 4 Pro to just 0.8 seconds with the early bet dev kit.
Cerny also stressed that the raw speed is a vital factor and that the details of the I/O mechanisms and the software stack are currently on the top of them. He also added that when an SSD was inserted in the PlayStation 4 Pro, the speed got only one third faster and the cost was as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro.
This means that the same thing could get repeated for the Microsoft Xbox Series X side, with the company focusing on the same semi-custom AMD silicon for its console. This also means that the developers who are building the games will now have a higher quota for minimum storage performance required for their games.
This also means that it would lead to a more realistic visual with greater detail in open-world games, with almost no lagging or loading into areas. With such new considerations, the games built for these new consoles will undoubtedly stream seamlessly with assets as the player moves through the world regardless of their speed when moving around.
For those using NVMe SSFs in their PCs, this could mean that they can enjoy the same set of visuals and performance.
The downside comes in for those who are still depending on their hard drives, and es[ecially those who are suing SATA based SSDs in their PCs. They won’t be able to meet with the standards in the open-world gaming that the next generation consoles would bring.
It can, however, benefit those with SSD users on PC, as the extra efficiency will be accessible to the developers with the knowledge that the target platform would be suing SSDs instead of the spinning platters. Moreover, Cerny has shown his support for this fact by saying that rather than treating these games as a huge block of data, they would be creating finer-grained access to the data.
The developers can now work on the install sizes since they would be aiming for SSD rather than the hard drives. Currently, the developers duplicate the game data across the install; therefore it is quicker and more comfortable for reading the data from a spinning platter (hard drive). But with SSD, that thing would be unnecessary.
Therefore from the next-generation consoles, the games and install sizes would look significantly different from those which have been created for the previous-gen consoles.
Even with the drop in the price of the SSD, there’s still a ton of hard drives available in the PC world. This also means that a lot of cross-platform game developers would always be focusing to build games for those who spin platters. This is largely possible because hard drives not going to be extinct anytime soon.
This being said, it could easily become an issue for PC being compatible with the next-gen games which would leave the developers with no other option but to target the bottom part in the game industry. These could also mean that the PC version of the game is similar to the Xbox One or PS4 of the same game but not the top-notch Series X or PS5 visuals.
The saving grace would come in if both the SSD and HDD get installed in the PC, as this feature would demand a lot from the developers but with some unknown expectations. Only time can reveal the true outcome.
