DF Weekly: Testing Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on the worst PS5 SSD money can buy
There's an embarrassment of riches in the 136th edition of DF Direct Weekly, spread across almost two hours of 'content…
www.eurogamer.net
- 0:00:00 Introduction
- 0:01:05 News 01: Modern Warfare 3 campaign launches in early access
- 0:20:28 News 02: Apple announces M3 line of Mac chips
- 0:36:58 News 03: Gran Turismo 7 updated with new track, cars, 4-player splitscreen
- 0:43:36 News 04: How does Spider-Man 2 work on the slowest PS5 SSD?
- 0:53:16 News 05: Super Mario RPG previewed!
- 0:58:11 News 06: Switch OLED: does it burn in?
- 1:05:59 News 07: EA WRC: problematic PC performance
- 1:18:31 Supporter Q1: What OLED would you recommend to someone who enjoys both new and old games?
- 1:26:31 Supporter Q2: What are your hopes for the Max Payne remakes’ use of Northlight?
- 1:35:32 Supporter Q3: For retro themed games and collections, what can developers do to improve low-res visuals?
- 1:40:49 Supporter Q4: Some people seem to be rejecting graphical improvements - what are your thoughts?
- 1:49:39 Supporter Q5: Do you think Metroid Prime 4 will skip the current Switch and ship only on the upcoming Switch?
- 1:53:22 Supporter Q6: Is there a market for publishers to release older games without upgrades?
There are two further elements of the PS5's I/O system that should be highlighted and only one is actually to do with the SSD itself - the fact that there are no moving parts. This means that, unlike a mechanical hard drive, there is no head moving around the surface of the disk, seeking out required data. With an SSD, there's effectively instant access to any part of the drive. And perhaps with the kind of data being streamed by the Insomniac engine, massive levels of bandwidth aren't required. Many smaller chunks of data are far more likely to be required as opposed to larger chunks.
The other crucial element is the fact that PlayStation 5's Kraken decompression blocks seem to be doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting for the new console. Compressed data is streamed from storage, then decompressed via hardware with no real CPU impact whatsoever. We know for sure that Insomniac does a lot of work in optimising its systems to make as much use of this hardware as possible.
So, I was expecting something to break with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 running on an SSD with this poor of a spec, but ultimately, everything seemed to work just fine and I played a couple of hours through with no issues. However, while I suspect that most games will run just fine on just about any kind of PCIe Gen 4 SSD you add to your PlayStation 5, we've now reached the point where drives that meet Sony's required specifications are very, very cheap. There's no need to opt for something cheap and cheerful when drives that meet the 5500MB/s bandwidth requirement are also inexpensive - and with Black Friday just around the corner, expect to see another deluge of deals.
