One’s opinion: farewell, lengthy downloads
For a long time, I held off on purchasing a PS5, despite the fact that there was a global chip scarcity at the time.
While the DualSense controller and 3D audio are nice additions, the PS5’s 825GB solid-state drive is the console’s biggest feature, and I’ve finally beaten the resupply game due to a wonderful package offer from mobile operator EE (SSD).
My main issue with console gaming was solved by the PS5’s SSD, which almost completely eliminated the time spent waiting for games to load and software upgrades to be installed. That has shown to be a great help to me in the past. Even while some of the top PS5 games, like the recently released Gran Turismo 7, have stunning visuals, my time is more valuable.
The ability to read at a faster rate
One of the PS5’s many advantages is that its eight-core Zen 2-based CPU and RDNA 2 GPU make every new game release seem stunning and almost impossible to differentiate from real life. The PS5 SSD, on the other hand, represents a huge step forward in terms of technology.
A proprietary PCIe 4.0 SSD on the PS5 can transfer uncompressed data to the CPU and GPU at a pace of up to 5.5GB per second, to put things in perspective. This is almost 100 times quicker than the PS4’s 50-100MB per second output rate.
With these features, the PS5 SSD is the most significant enhancement to the console’s quality of life. So rapid are the PS5’s boot times, even with visually taxing Triple-A titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, that you’ll be web-slinging across the New York cityscape in no time.
However, Epic Games had to rework sections of Unreal Engine since the PlayStation’s SSD is more powerful than the Xbox’s, making the PS5 load significantly faster than the Xbox One’s.
The PS5’s new SSD isn’t the only reason Epic Games has made improvements to its games. To prevent players from being disoriented as a result of the PS5’s reduced in-game loading times, Horizon Forbidden West’s game director Mathijs de Jonge explained recently that the PS5 forced the developers to “artificially slow them down.”
Bye-bye, ruined nights.
With the PS5 SSD, you won’t have to go through long software upgrades, allowing you to focus on the gaming itself. As much as I enjoyed my PS4, I found it difficult to keep track of how much time I had to spend downloading and installing games. As it is, fitting in time for video games is difficult for someone who works upwards of 55 hours a week on a regular basis.
It’s easy to avoid long waits for updates by planning ahead or setting up your PS4 to automatically download and install fixes. I’ve found that the latter approach is more unstable, since I frequently have to manually update my console in order to access to the online services of PlayStation. This appears to be a widespread problem, as seen by a short Internet search.
Since purchasing the PS5, I’ve been able to download and play a digitally-purchased game from the PlayStation Store in a matter of minutes. For Horizon Forbidden West, which requires an 80GB download and installation, my old-man PS4 would take at least 65 minutes while utilising an ethernet wire linked to my fibre optic broadband to download and install the game. Thanks to my PS5, I can now do this in roughly 15 minutes flat.
Upgrade for what?
SSDs are not a new technology. Hard disc drives (HDDs) have been available for over 30 years and have long since been supplanted as the preferred storage medium for high-end desktop and laptop computers. Even in 2008, Apple included them in its MacBook Air lineup.
Until recently, gaming consoles were lagging behind, but Sony and Microsoft have now included SSDs in their latest generation of products. For the reasons stated above, this very modest improvement represents a crucial stride forward in the history of console gaming.
Even if you’re not convinced, consider this: Earlier this week, Sony unveiled a makeover of PlayStation Plus that aims to position the service as a competitor to Xbox Game Pass. Moreover, the PS5 SSD will demonstrate its power when players have to download and install new games on a regular basis.