( upbeat music)
- I was recently involved in some drama
with Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games,
best known for titles like Adventure Math and Xargon,
but you also might have heard
of one of their more recent projects ,those guys.
The easiest thing for me to do at this point would
be to roughly add up how many people are mad
at me for slinging a false accusation based
on my own arrogance and ignorance.
Conclude that it's probably not worth the PR damage
of drawing any further attention to this and move on.
But if I'm interpreting this response correctly,
and I think I am, I have just been taken to school.
So Mr. Sweeney, I have no idea if you'll feel watch this,
but the only action left from me right now is to issue
my apology in full view of the million
or millions of people who watch this video
and show you that even though I was careless
and disrespectful, I do still know how to do my homework
and correct misconceptions about technology
even if in this case, I was the one who shred them.
So here we go.
( bright upbeat music)
The worst part of making this video
is already over fortunately, but it was going back
and watching past Linus his performance
on the Wan Show after a week where he clearly
hadn't found the time to watch the excellent look
into the PlayStation 5 Development and Hardware
by Mark Cerney, okay.
But then ran his mouth anyway.
You know why does someone like Tim Sweeney?
Like how many billions of dollars is he worth?
Like what does he need to say stuff
that's just like demonstratively false?
You know, this is an SSD that is not only
as fast as the PlayStation 5 SSD,
but it's actually 15,000 megabytes
a second double the speed.
What a funny thing would you look at that, not funny.
Why do you need to sell out to Sony to just say stuff
that's just not true at all? Holy.
My second mistake was relying
on second hand information about what Mr. Sweeney
said about the SSD in the first place.
I'm an experienced enough social media user
that I should have known that the jousting back and forth
between fanboys of either Console or PC
would contain half-truths and misquotes.
He never said," fastest", which is open to interpretation.
He said," best- in- class".
My final mistake by far the worst one
was slinging a personal attack.
I honestly doubt that he cares
that I called the thing he never said a stupid thing to say.
He never said it.
So it's probably a little bit like, you know, 640 K
of Ram should be enough for anybody.
You know that quote that Bill Gates
has denied ever even saying,
"this is annoying, but it's not worth losing sleep over".
Maybe the real problem is that I got caught up doing
a bit boasting about how Moses D computer Eurest is D
that was frankly speaking mostly intended
to mock fanboy behavior in general,
but ended up coming off as though I
was speaking completely in earnest,
and doing it, I suggested that he was being paraded
out to misrepresent the PS 5 technology
for money or some other kind of gain.
And this is all based on a quote he never said,
"what the hell was I thinking"?
I know from personal experience how much it hurts
to be called a shill or a sellout when all you were doing
was giving your honest take and amplifying this insult
was the PC fanboys who bothered him on Twitter talking
about how you suck soar the PS 5 SSD.
- SSD SSD SSD is...
- A product that by the way isn't even available yet.
So we can't know for sure is compared
to PC Master Race or whatever malarkey.
So for those of you who participated in that,
if you're watching this, you can go ahead, blame it on me,
but please send your own separate apology
to @TimSweeneyEpic after you finished watching this video
to fill in the gaps in your own knowledge
about the PS 5 storage.
As we've discussed on this channel before,
one of the main reasons we don't do SSD reviews
is that we know enough to know
that we don't know enough about them.
The reason that raw sequential bandwidth gets bandied
about soo much in marketing materials
is only because it's easily digestible,
big number good, small number bad,
but in a PC or Current Gen Console for that matter,
the presence and capacity of the DRAM Cache ,
the features, and performance of the controller
on the drive, the type of NAND flash in use ,
clever use of high-speed SLC caching
on slower multi bit per cell net.
Any of those one things could affect real world performance,
more meaningfully than ideal conditions
sequential read and write specs.
And there's a major factor that I've mostly ignored
over the years because I just didn't think about it.
As a PC gamer, I'm basically stuck
with whatever Microsoft will give me.
And that's the effects of software
and how the device can interact
with the rest of my hardware
because that is what Mr. Sweeney was talking about.
That's why he said ,"best in class," not fastest.
And he's obviously not wrong about this.
We even showed recently that on a fast gaming PC,
upgrading from a SATA SSD all the way to a state
of the art PCI Express , Gen 4 SSD
a theoretical increase in performance
of over five X would not affect your experience
as a PC gamer , because you run up against
some of the problems that Sony set out to solve here.
First is the inaccessibility of data.
The conventional wisdom is that storage does not improve
the image quality settings that you can use,
or the FPS that your game will run at.
And that's because conventional game design assumes
that any asset the player might need say a model or texture
they might whip over and look at,
needs to be in memory, or it's going to take forever
to pop in as it's streamed off of a hard drive
or ,heaven forbid, an optical disk.
Will the PS 5 changes this by shipping
with such a high performance SSD
that pertinent data can be pulled off it,
while the player is moving around,
enabling developers to create
much higher fidelity environments
without tricks like strategically placed elevator rides
to mask background asset loading.
This will enable new environments and experiences
that weren't possible without this approach.
Although, you might only see
them in PlayStation exclusive titles.
The second is slow loading times.
I remember first diving into this when I went back to play
some ancient game on a PC that I had recently upgraded
only to realize that even though my hardware,
including an SSD was many times faster,
the game still took a long time to load.
The reason for that is that there are a ton
of potential bottlenecks both in software and hardware
between raw ones and zeros coming off an SSD.
And it being in a form and place
that your program can actually use it.
And the faster your SSD becomes,
believe it or not, the more painful
these bottlenecks become.
We encountered this when we built our new
high-speed NBME video editing server, even on Linux,
- Hey
- Going from just a simple data streaming benchmark
to adding just file system overhead,
cut our throughput down to a fraction
and was enough to bring a 24-Core Epic Server CPU
to its knees requiring us to upgrade it.
Windows didn't even make it that far.
So new solution was to create their own controller
for the SSD that interfaces via PCIE Gen 4
with their main custom chip with much finer control
over the priority of data access requests.
This allows the game to say, "hey, yeah, that stuff
you were doing, I know you're gonna be done soon,
but I really need something right now, get it to me".
That's pretty cool all on its own.
When you consider how few players there are left
in the SSD controller space, let alone
how few of them are making high performance controllers.
The real secret source though is in the main custom chip
whose IO complex contains hardware to ensure
that only the necessary data is loaded in memory,
allows the game to shuffle data directly
to where it needs to go,
cutting out middle steps and bottlenecks
and, this is a really cool one, hardware level support
for high speed decoding
of compressed data stored on the SSD.
That turns the five and a half gigabytes per second
of raw throughput into,
according to Mark Sunni's presentation,
- Eight or nine gigabytes,
- or even as much as 22 gigabytes per second of data.
And the best part about it is that instead of needing
an x86 processor that could cost hundreds of dollars
just dedicated today to decompression
in every single PlayStation,
they're doing this with minimal CPU overhead
by using fixed-function hardware.
On the subject of compression,
a third benefit of Sonia's new approach
is that games will get smaller.
One of the little tricks that game developers use
to minimize hard drive seek times
is to store the data needed
for a given area of the player might explore
in contiguous chunks to avoid fragmentation
and data seeking.
The problem is that any asset that appears many times
in the game like a stop sign for example.
- Look
- Needs to be stored in basically every one of those chunks
or you end up seeking around for it.
That wastes a lot of space.
Now arguably, this one is a benefit of any SSD
where there is no seek time.
But because both new gen consoles will use SSDs,
it's something game developers won't have to worry
about for the first time.
That is unless they're also releasing on PC,
watch out guys because after all the moaning
the PCs Elliot's have done
about inferior console's limiting game advancement.
The PC might be about to become
the lowest common denominator here,
unless the powers that be all come together
to make it happen.
Bottom line, Mr. Sweeney probably knows things
that we don't, but even based on what we can see
for ourselves, if what Sony is saying is true,
he wasn't shilling for the PS 5.
Don't take my word for it.
Watch this great tape from the channel reacting
to Mark Sunni's presentation.
Besides I don't Mr.Sweeney cares
much what platform you play on.
As long as developers are using unreal engine
and making great games that lots of people buy.
And if anything, I think about this Epic Games
has more to gain by pushing the PC to new heights
because now they've got a separate branch
of their business charging even developers
who don't use unreal engine
for distribution on the Epic Games Store.
To imagine that he's got
some kinda agenda against PC is ridiculous.
In summary, I still have a lot more to learn
and questions that I'd like answers to like,
how much of the PCs problems STEM
from OSTP Colonel bottlenecks versus GPU driver ones?
Whether a powerful enough CPU
could make up for those shortfalls today
or how direct storage could change things
for the PC going forward?
But understandably, Mr. Sweeney didn't want to answer
my questions at this time and I get it.
So that can wait for another day.
All that's left to say then is just
to say sorry to a number of people.
First, I'm sorry to myself
for not wearing steel toed boots on May the 15th.
It would have been a lot less painful when I pointed
the gun at my foot and pulled the trigger (groans ).
Number two is I'm sorry to my staff who fly under my banner.
I like to think that usually they get to share my successes,
but today they had to shoulder follow up from my mistake.
This was an entirely avoidable own goal
and you guys deserve better .
Three, I'm more sorry to my viewers.
I have a responsibility to guys to spread knowledge
and understanding not the opposite.
I sent some of you on the wrong path.
It was a breach of our trust and I can do better.
And then finally, once more I'm especially sorry
to Mr.Sweeney, who might not give a hoot
about my brander or my apology,
and I would understand that,
But who still had the class
to take time out of his very busy life
to respond to me in a professional manner.
And this is after I called his statement
he never made stupid and carelessly clogged up
his notification with nonsense tweets that he's had to waste
his time responding to, rather than focusing
on what we all would prefer that he do,
enabling groundbreaking gaming experiences for us to enjoy
Thank you for the lesson sir.
I hope I have completed it to your satisfaction
and we can move past this.
I do have a writing staff and it wouldn't be easy
to assume that I enlisted their help to prepare
this given the stark difference
between my past behavior and what I'm saying today.
But I didn't because I felt it was important
for you to hear this in completely my own words.
Not expecting a response,
but I'm still gonna throw it out there that,
if you guys have something cool in the pipe,
I'm still not too old or too jaded to learn the patience
and humility to be part of the solution
rather than part of the problem,
when it comes to helping gamers better understand
the technology that brings us all soo much joy.