What Sony said about their SSD was that it enabled game developers to not duplicate assets like they did for rotating storage. One specific example I recall in Sony's presentation was the assets for a mailbox used in a Spider Man game, with hundreds of copies of that mailbox duplicated on disk because the game divided Manhattan into chunks and tried to have all the assets for each chunk stored more or less contiguously.

If the Helldivers devs were influenced by what Sony said, they must have misinterpreted it and taken away an extremely exaggerated impression of how much on-disk duplication was being used for pre-SSD game development. But Sony did actually say quite a bit of directly relevant stuff on this particular matter when introducing the PS5.

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Dylan16807 4 days ago | parent [-]

Weird, since that's a benefit of any kind of SSD at all. The stuff their fancy implementation made possible was per-frame loading, not just convenient asset streaming.

But uh if the devs didn't realize that, I blame them. It's their job to know basics like that.

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wtallis 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

By far the most important thing about the PS5 SSD was the fact that it wasn't optional, and developers would no longer have to care about being able to run off mechanical drives. That has repercussions throughout the broader gaming industry because the game consoles are the lowest common denominator for game developers to target, and getting both Xbox and PlayStation to use SSDs was critical. From the perspective of PlayStation customers and developers, the introduction of the PS5 was the right time to talk about the benefits of SSDs generally.

Everything else about the PS5 SSD and storage subsystem was mere icing on the cake and/or snake oil.

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creshal 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. Sony was extremely deceptive in how they marketed the PS5 to devs, and the Helldivers dev don't want to admit how completely they fell for it.

	▲	Dylan16807 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's incompetence if they "fell for" such basic examples being presented in the wrong context. 5% of the blame can go to Sony, I guess, if that's what happened. And on top of any potential confusion between normal SSD and fancy SSD, a mailbox is a super tiny asset and the issue in the spiderman game is very rapidly cycling city blocks in and out of memory. That's so different from helldivers level loading.