DF Weekly：在最差的 PS2 SSD 上测试漫威蜘蛛侠 5

由柏拉图重新发布

关注： 0

There’s an embarrassment of riches in the 136th edition of DF Direct Weekly, spread across almost two hours of ‘content’. We discuss the good and the bad points of the Modern Warfare 3 campaign and EA’s WRC, we spend time talking about how impressive the Switch port of Super Mario RPG is and share impressions on Apple’s newly announced M3 processor line-up. However, for this Eurogamer blog, I’m going to talk about what it’s like to run Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on the slowest, quantifiably worst PCIe Gen 4 SSD ‘upgrade’ money can buy.

Long-time readers/viewers of Digital Foundry may recall that back in the day, when the PS5’s M.2 bay was enabled, 我们将内部存储解决方案与当时最好和最差的 PCI Gen 4 SSD 结合起来. The Western Digital SN750 SE 250GB is a bit of a stinker to be honest. At just 3200MB/s of bandwidth, it falls well short of the 5500MB/s demanded by Sony, not to mention the 7000MB/s recommended by Mark Cerny when the PS5 was first revealed. It also lacks any kind of DRAM cache, which isn’t helpful. Even so, while slower at transfers, the drive still performed well. It could even run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart just fine. Clearly, we needed to up the ante.

最新的 DF Direct Weekly，为您的观看乐趣而嵌入

0:00:00 介绍
0:01:05 新闻 01：《现代战争 3》战役抢先体验启动
0:20:28 新闻 02：苹果宣布推出 M3 系列 Mac 芯片
0:36:58 新闻 03：Gran Turismo 7 更新了新赛道、汽车、4 人分屏
0:43:36 新闻04：蜘蛛侠2如何在最慢的PS5 SSD上运行？
0:53:16 新闻05：超级马里奥RPG预览！
0:58:11 新闻06：切换OLED：会烧屏吗？
1:05:59 新闻 07：EA WRC：PC 性能有问题
1:18:31 支持者Q1：您会向喜欢新旧游戏的人推荐什么OLED？
1:26:31 支持者 Q2：您对《马克思佩恩》翻拍版中使用北极光有何期望？
1:35:32 支持者 Q3：对于复古主题游戏和合集，开发者可以采取哪些措施来改善低分辨率视觉效果？
1:40:49 Supporter Q4: Some people seem to be rejecting graphical improvements – what are your thoughts?
1:49:39 支持者 Q5：您认为《银河战士 Prime 4》会跳过当前的 Switch 而只在即将推出的 Switch 上发售吗？
1:53:22 支持者Q6：发行商发布旧游戏而不升级是否有市场？

This is where backers of the DF Supporter Program stepped in, pointing out that the rubbish SN750 SE could be limited still further, by physically taping up a selection of the pins on the PCIe interface, reducing PCIe x4 to x1 bandwidth. Remarkably, the drive still works in the PlayStation 5. According to the PS5’s internal benchmark tool, this gives the console just 1782MB/s of bandwidth to work with, suggesting that the drive ‘might not be fast enough’ to play PS5 games seamlessly.

Enter Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Insomniac uses the I/O set-up of the PlayStation 5 to facilitate much faster traversal than prior titles and while I won’t spoil the specifics, an earlier mission sees the studio bring back the portal technology of Ratchet and Clank, with a segment that sees Miles Morales not only travelling through New York at full pelt, but also switching between locations using portals. In a kind of ghoulish way, I was curious to see how Insomniac’s systems may fail when its challenging technology meets a piece of hardware that’s nowhere near the required specifications.

But here’s the thing: it still works just fine in the content I tested, the only noticeable difference coming from ultra-fast loading times losing a second or two when starting the game, with some in-game segments heavy on storage lagging a few frames behind – but with no signs of any actual performance drops.

Not only the worst PCIe Gen 4 drive we’re aware of, but we’ve also taped off most of the pins to restrict its bandwidth. On the right there, the PS5 attempts to warn us of our folly. Click on the thumbnails for higher resolution images.

Put simply, even with already curtailed bandwidth savagely cut back, what we saw with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 mirrored the results seen in Rift Apart – and it’s at this point that we should probably put solid state storage into context of the entire I/O system within the PlayStation 5 because the amount of bandwidth available to the system is just one component of the entire set-up. We see it all the time on PC, where in games, even SATA SSDs can hold up relatively well against NVMe alternatives in many applications – and where it’s often tough to tell the difference between PCIe Gen 3 and PCIe Gen 4 SSDs in the general run of play.

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.

要查看此内容，请启用定位cookie。

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.

要查看此内容，请启用定位cookie。