Next Gen Gaming
PS5 and the Xbox Series X/S have been released, and you can even buy one - if you can find it in stock! That can only mean one thing; we are entering into the age of the next generation of games.
Every generation of consoles has focused and improved on many things. The Xbox One and PS4 were the media centres. Not only could you play games on them, but you had the possibility of streaming videos. PS4 also acted as a Blu-Ray player, which was also a reason why non-gamers bought it.
(Photo by JESHOOTS.com from Pexels)
This time around, however, the focus seems to be on 4k @ 120 FPS and seamless switching between games.
The SSDs on the new consoles are so fast that their CPUs can use them as buffers. That means it can literally offload some data. This allows for seamless switching in between titles. You can potentially open up a few games and switch between them in just a few clicks, without waiting for minutes.
One of the main reasons why these ultra-fast SSDs were brought into the picture is because the type of video games we play are getting more and more complicated. The resolution keeps going up. The detail keeps going up. The worlds that are built and developed are extremely complicated and full of tons of things. Traditional hard disks can take ages to load all of these things, which is why players may experience slow load times if their games are stored on HDDs.
You can watch this astonishing video on Linus Tech Tips' YouTube channel about hard disks!
Check out this amazing playlist on the new game consoles (PS5, Xbox Series X/S) by Austin Evans, where he compares the load times of the old and new consoles and talks about many practical points.
This issue is only going to get worse as we build bigger and better worlds. For now, though, it seems to have been solved. The loading times of the new Xbox Series X are way faster than the older consoles for newer games. Red Dead 2 manages to load a full minute faster!
(Photo by thiago japyassu from Pexels)
Watch the video version of this here (and if you do, don't forget to like, share and subscribe)