Insomniac's Spiderman was made with a 25MB/s throughput limit 🤯

[WoolleyGamer]

Hey guys, last week on The Worldwide Company Of Gamers we had John Draisey, a relatively new but insanely clever talent in the game development sphere, sit down with us and talk about his upcoming game and more.

Being a very learning centric listener and reader, he actually paid attention to Insomniac Games' GDC talk - where they revealed some insane revelations about how they made Spiderman.

They took into account non proprietary HDD's a ps4 owner might buy, the slowest being 25MB/s, and built Spiderman around that threshold!

Now imagine what is possible with 100x that being the absolute bare minimum?

We aren't ready. Spiderman 2 could be truly next level. Let me know your thoughts! It's blown my mind tbh. 25MB/s and they managed to create Spiderman's open world and traversal around that. What's possible with that ceiling removed? Insane. I imagine the new bottleneck is CPU. That aside the sky is the limit....

This ties back into my previous Thread 'Imagine a game...' https://icon-era.com/threads/imagine-a-game.411/ )


Link to the clip:

Link to full episode:

 

[mansoor1980]

people still underestimate the asset streaming capabilities of the ps5.
spiderman 2 will be glorious

 

[Papacheeks]

people still underestimate the asset streaming capabilities of the ps5.
spiderman 2 will be glorious

I just want to do the Spider-Man sling shot from 2004 Spider-Man 2 to get like insane air or traverse a huge distance momentum wise.

And watch buildings whiz by as I fly at high speeds through the air.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

The power of the Solid State Dick.

 

[Retro]

Was a great interview to be fair, John was a fountain of knowledge, was an enjoyable episode.

 

[WoolleyGamer]

I just want to do the Spider-Man sling shot from 2004 Spider-Man 2 to get like insane air or traverse a huge distance momentum wise.

And watch buildings whiz by as I fly at high speeds through the air.

Facts. And actual Web physics this time!!! Spiderman 2 from 2004 is still the best spiderman imo. Its untouched when it comes to accurate physics and momentum based swinging. Even webs caught corners of buildings, wrapped around trees and lampposts etc. Incredible

 

[Sircaw]

Thanks, @WoolleyGamer, that is extremely interesting and incredible to think about.

This is why we need to move away asap from cross-over games asap.

25 meg vs what, a couple of hundred times that in comparison at a bare min, damn.

 

[Bryank75]

I just want to do the Spider-Man sling shot from 2004 Spider-Man 2 to get like insane air or traverse a huge distance momentum wise.

And watch buildings whiz by as I fly at high speeds through the air.

Has to be in the next game.

Plus a Venom side-game.

 

[Shmunter]

I like your moxie, subscribed

 

[Sircaw]

Has to be in the next game.

Plus a Venom side-game.

Spiderman is cool and all but just give us a Venom ps5 exclusive game, and a Carnage DLC.

 

[Lord Mittens]

I'll take 10!

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

people still underestimate the asset streaming capabilities of the ps5.
spiderman 2 will be glorious

Well TBF we haven't had many games yet to really need that throughput because there's been so many cross-gen games.

But since Spiderman 2 will be PS5-only, they're definitely going to flex the advantages of the SSD I/O (which aren't just in terms of fast data loading, but also essentially letting more of the RAM be freed up from acting as a persistent cache since the streaming & latency features of the I/O are so good) to levels that aughta surpass the UE5 2020 demo IMO, with that speed at similar fidelity (if not better).

Things are gonna get pretty interesting in that regard.

I'll give that dev video in the OP a watch sometime over the week; haven't gotten to watching a lot of dev interviews but right now I'm watching a Virtua Cop doc with dev interviews and realize how insightful those kind of things actually are, and how lucky we are today that more fans can talk with developers about the process at deeper levels. Definitely some good vibe stuff.

 

[Old Gamer]

Spiderman 2 will be PS5-only, they're definitely going to flex the advantages of the SSD I/O (which aren't just in terms of fast data loading, but also essentially letting more of the RAM be freed up from acting as a persistent cache since the streaming & latency features of the I/O are so good) to levels that aughta surpass the UE5 2020 demo IMO, with that speed at similar fidelity (if not better).

Things are gonna get pretty interesting in that regard.

I disagree. By the time Spidey 2 is out, DirectStorage will be available on PC, and the engine will likely use it in the PC port.

 

[KickNamesTakeAss]

Its exciting stuff indeed.
Of all the hardware upgrades over last gen CPU, GPU, RAM its the ridiculous I/O capabilities of PS5 and its affect on game design that excites me the most going forward.

Insomniac already made huge leaps upgrading the engine for Ratchet with super fast loading of detailed levels, streaming data when turning the camera, swapping between worlds near instantly.

I can't wait for the next Spiderman game and how Insomniac push the hardware. To reference Cerny's Road to PS5 a little Insomniac will go from:
PS4 Streaming up to 25MB of data per second and RAM containing the next 30 seconds of gameplay.
PS5 Streaming up to 22GB of data per second and RAM containing the next 1 second of gameplay.

The data streaming is amazing, but combine it with latency so low RAM need only contain assets for the next second of gameplay really blows my mind thinking about it, especially in an open world game. Anything can be dynamically loaded in at any time.
Far more detailed and dynamic city, more detailed textures and variety, more variety of detailed pedestrians and vehicle types, more mocap data, more detailed interiors, you name it.

Game design wise Insomniac and first party studios in general must be licking their lips at the pretty much limitless potential PS5 offers. Basic stuff like a GTA5 style character swap between Peter & Miles while done before could be cool quickly traveling through Manhattan everything whizzing by at high speed to the other character. Big events or set pieces could be loaded in at anytime.

Hoping the old rumour about Spiderman 2 is true with a possible appearance of Dr Strange (haven't heard much since so huge pinch of salt). But IF its true his abilities mesh extremely well with PS5 hardware.

 

[ParaSeoul]

Spiderman is cool and all but just give us a Venom ps5 exclusive game, and a Carnage DLC.

Make it play like Prototype,not that Arkham shit and we have something.

 

[Shmunter]

I disagree. By the time Spidey 2 is out, DirectStorage will be available on PC, and the engine will likely use it in the PC port.

Needs to be, or we’ll be forever speculating what’s holding what back in a game

 

[ethomaz]

I disagree. By the time Spidey 2 is out, DirectStorage will be available on PC, and the engine will likely use it in the PC port.

I think you meant GPU decompression part of DirectStorage.
When that will happen?

I mean it said MS is working on it but no date/roadmap was given.
nVidia said MS DirectStorage will use RTX IO for GPU Decompression (so it will be limited to RTX 3000 in nVidia side) but nothing more was talked since 2020.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

I disagree. By the time Spidey 2 is out, DirectStorage will be available on PC, and the engine will likely use it in the PC port.

Don't really know what DirectStorage has to do with Spiderman 2 or PS5; it's technically available now IIRC, but it looks like adoption by games is pretty slow. Wider adoption tends to take a while anyway considering many games coming out now have been in development for 4+ years and quickly rewriting the file I/O system just isn't feasible without incurring some big delay.

But as far as Spiderman 2 being a good flex of PS5's I/O, I think that should just be expected at this point. Miles Morales already made great use of it in terms of load times and some asset streaming, but that was just scratching the surface. Spiderman 2 won't be limited by being cross-gen like that game was. I also feel if HFW were not cross-gen then we'd already have a large-scale game at UE5 2020 demo's level (in terms of visual fidelity) with speed segments pushing that level of fluidity and fidelity...right now. In 2022.

I think you meant GPU decompression part of DirectStorage.
When that will happen?

I mean it said MS is working on it but no date/roadmap was given.
nVidia said MS DirectStorage will use RTX IO for GPU Decompression (so it will be limited to RTX 3000 in nVidia side) but nothing more was talked since 2020.

Feels like Nvidia have been way more focused on the RTX 40 series and pumping up the processing scope, maybe they are also redesigning some aspects of RTX I/O for the new GPUs? Updates have been really glacial though, that much is true.

I think AMD are leveraging DirectStorage so maybe when the RDNA 3 GPUs are officially revealed (or the upcoming Zen processors), we may get some updates on DirectStorage through those. Hopefully.

 

[Kokoloko]

Spiderman is cool and all but just give us a Venom ps5 exclusive game, and a Carnage DLC.

I think they are just gonna make him playable/ have his own story missions in Spiderman 2 or 3

 

[Sircaw]

I think they are just gonna make him playable/ have his own story missions in Spiderman 2 or 3

would be the dream