Loading screens are actually good

[wndrbr]

Devs deciding that loading screens are "unimmersive" and must be eliminated at all costs have dealt a serious damage to videogames. You can't remove a loading screen, you can only hide it or move it somewhere else.

Don't you love it when you're forced to watch an unskippable animation of your character slowly opening a door, removing some wooden boards by hand, or squeezing through a tight gap? Isn't it immersive when you see a huge and empty corridor inbetween locations, definitely not put here by the level designers to disguise a loading screen?

- Thief: The Dark Project. You press "load", the game loads instantly because of your powerful modern computer.
- Th*ef 2014. You can't walk for more than five minutes without having to watch some ****** canned animation of Garrett slowly opening a window with a prybar, slowly pushing wooden planks away from the door, or slowly crawling through some crevice.

- KOTOR. You interact with a door, the game instantly loads the next location.
- Mass Effect. You are trapped in an elevator and forced to listen to your companions' awkward banter for minutes.

- Demon's Souls. You watch a loading screen for a few seconds after teleporting from the Nexus. No loading screens after that.
- Dark Souls - you are forced to constantly traverse the various bridges/tunnels/elevators that are empty and were only put here as a disguised loading screen.

Muh seameless transitions. If anything, these hidden loading screens only make games feel more "gamey".

[rusty_shackleford]

What, you don't like seeing everything at low resolution while the full resolution asset is being streamed in the background?

[GhostCow]

Don't you love it when you're forced to watch an unskippable animation of your character slowly opening a door, removing some wooden boards by hand, or squeezing through a tight gap? Isn't it immersive when you see a huge and empty corridor inbetween locations, definitely not put here by the level designers to disguise a loading screen?

How is this worse than a loading screen if it takes the same amount of time?

One thing I'm really thankful for is that I've seen a couple of games lately take a while to compile all the shaders on the first run. That's such a better solution than compiling them on the fly and causing stutter.

[wndrbr]

Don't you love it when you're forced to watch an unskippable animation of your character slowly opening a door, removing some wooden boards by hand, or squeezing through a tight gap? Isn't it immersive when you see a huge and empty corridor inbetween locations, definitely not put here by the level designers to disguise a loading screen?

How is this worse than a loading screen if it takes the same amount of time?

The disguised loading screen means that in the future your advanced computer won't be able to load it in less than a second like old games can be loaded now.

Plus the normal loading screens don't require you to mash buttons.

[Goth-Girl-Supremacy]

Transitional/disguised loading screens do significantly up my chances of saying "**** this" and closing a game. Tiresome animations that get repeated or going down a long tunnel are **** decisions and don't immerse me, they bore me.

Some loading screens can be cool too. Like it saying "LOADING" in Project Overkill as blood drips from the letters and slowly fills up the bottom half of the screen.

[Emphyrio]

This explains that stupid vent-prying minigame in Batman.

[KnightoftheWind]

People want the instant gratification without realizing the kind of sacrifices that have to be made. I remember how many games used Unreal Engine 3 and how many of them suffered from texture pop-in due to the lack of proper load screens. I suppose the issues you brought up could be mitigated with the mass adoption of SSDs, but I think there will always be some form of "masking", if a dedicated loading screen isn't used.

I think some games actually benefit from loading a lot. The old Resident Evil games come to mind, where they serve as a transition from one room or area to the next and build suspense for the coming horrors you must face. If every door just opened seamlessly, like in the modern remakes, something is lost. The feeling of suspense is no longer there, and it becomes more like a glorified obstacle course rather than a tense horror experience.

[rusty_shackleford]

There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather have a loading screen than stutters, texture/LOD popin, or fake loading screens that take significantly longer than they require on fast machines. Just work on optimizing the loading times themselves rather than trying to hide it and nobody will care.

[1998]

I don't know, some game(s) had pong during loading. Was fun for the first 2.5 times.

[KnightoftheWind]

There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather have a loading screen than stutters, texture/LOD popin, or fake loading screens that take significantly longer than they require on fast machines. Just work on optimizing the loading times themselves rather than trying to hide it and nobody will care.

I believe the trend towards "cinematic" games was the catalyst for the industry wide shift away from loading screens. Immersion and realism became top priorities, as well as the marketing of new consoles as "next gen". After all you couldn't brag about how heckin' ADVANCED your game or console is if it still has cumbersome old loading screens. So texture pop-in and LOD issues were swept to the side completely.

It may also have to do with how bloated games are nowadays. I doubt you could load most games in a second or two even if you had the fastest M.2s available. Far too many high poly models, 8K uncompressed textures and lossless audio. You certainly couldn't expect impatient gamers to wait a full minute or two while your highly detailed game world loads, so they choose to hide it via long-winded sections and slow animations.

[rusty_shackleford]

Consoles using hard drives rather than SSD until very recently probably has a lot to do with this tbh.

[The_Mask]

I like the loading screens to Witcher 1 a lot.

[GhostCow]

Consoles have faster loading times than PCs now because they have dedicated hardware for texture decompression

[rusty_shackleford]

Consoles have faster loading times than PCs now because they have dedicated hardware for texture decompression

GPUs have had hardware-accelerated texture decompression for about two decades now.

[GhostCow]

Consoles have faster loading times than PCs now because they have dedicated hardware for texture decompression

GPUs have had hardware-accelerated texture decompression for about two decades now.

Not the same thing. The hardware that consoles have lets them load stuff directly from the SSD, skipping RAM and I think the CPU. We are getting this on PC with directstorage, but directstorage is a purely software solution and not as good.

[J1M]

Consoles have faster loading times than PCs now because they have dedicated hardware for texture decompression

GPUs have had hardware-accelerated texture decompression for about two decades now.

Also if any time at all was spent on PC optimization it might change the equation.

[rusty_shackleford]

Consoles have faster loading times than PCs now because they have dedicated hardware for texture decompression

GPUs have had hardware-accelerated texture decompression for about two decades now.

Not the same thing. The hardware that consoles have let them load stuff directly from the SSD, skipping RAM and I think the CPU. We are getting this on PC with directstorage, but directstorage is a purely software solution and not as good.

From looking over the documentation, the main benefit seems to be that it streams to the GPU which does on-demand deflate decompression. I was correct in my initial assessment that they are using the same lossy texture compression, however:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gamin ... cpack_mode
The codec it's referencing is just S3TC.
(
'directstorage' is the name used for both the console and window's PC technologies btw: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gamin ... e-overview

This topic provides an overview of the DirectStorage APIs for Xbox Series X|S consoles only. Please see DirectStorage on Desktop for DirectStorage on Desktop details.

)
It just uses deflate on top of that, along with deflate for non-texture assets.
It isn't free, and console GPUs are weak. Having them perform another task, especially one that's meant to happen while playing(that is, decompressing streamed textures), circles back to the point I originally made. Less GPU power for actually rendering graphics because people demand 'seamless' games.


Nothing is stopping someone from making a compute shader that does decompression on the GPU. You could even do the same with opencl, but the interop with vulkan is probably much easier just using compute shaders. The main benefit here is the reduced PCIE bandwidth required. I maintain that the overall savings would be rather small, until proven otherwise.

[GhostCow]

I didn't know that Microsoft is calling it directstorage on the buttsexbox. I'm more familiar with the Playstation, which has the same thing but doesn't call it that.

[rusty_shackleford]

S3TC is designed to be extremely simply to 'decompress' such that it's done during texture fetches, btw. It's not similar to any standard compression algorithm due to this, and S3TC-encoded files still benefit heavily from any standard compression algorithms.
Deflate is a strange choice, however. Unsure why they went with that considering it's so old rather than say, zstd which has largely displaced deflate over the last half-decade. Ease of implementation on the GPU, perhaps?

[GhostCow]

Ok, looking a little deeper into it, maybe the Playstation has hardware that the xbox doesn't? Check out this link: https://www.techspot.com/community/topi ... es.269342/

From a comment in that thread:

What‘s special is that PS5 has dedicated hardware decompression that‘s equivalent to about 9 (!) Zen 2 cores for that task.

[GhostCow]

Also found another comment somewhere else that was a bit more detailed than your explanation:

Your textures are compressed with dxtc/s3tc/bcn. These are a family of algorithms for different texture types. They are directly usable by graphics cards and are used to save on VRAM, but as a trade-off can't compress as well. So games typically recompress these textures to save even more storage space on your disk, often using zip/zlib/deflate. Deflate uncompresses with only a few hundred MB/s per core, which is slow compared to the 2.4GB/s of the SexBox SSD or the even faster PS5. This is what the x CPUs cores is all about. This decompression is normally done by the CPU on PCs, which decompresses into a buffer in memory which then gets copied into VRAM. Additionally deflate is a very old algorithm and newer stuff like lzma or zstd creates smaller files and/or is faster. PS5 has Rad's Oodle Kraken which is kinda like lzma, and XBox has zlib (=deflate). Further they use optimized texture encoders and pre-processing (RDO) of the texture data to get even more efficient compression by lzma/zlib, eg Xbox has something called BCPack and PS5 can use Oodle Texture. Also note that in the console case this hardware decompression can also be used for general data, as it's all on a single chip, while for PCs any decompression hardware will just be on the GPU.

Take the next bit with a pinch of salt, as I don't remember all the details, but DirectStorage is just a way for the GPU to access your SSD directly without having to go through the CPU, which is currently has to for legacy reasons. RTX IO extends this a bit and also claims to do hardware decompression, but they werent straightforward at the announcement and also announced Turing support so there might not actually be any dedicated decompression block either on the current GPUs, but just done via shaders. Both techs were just announced and will only be released next year, so not everything is known yet.

[rusty_shackleford]

Ok, looking a little deeper into it, maybe the Playstation has hardware that the xbox doesn't? Check out this link: https://www.techspot.com/community/topi ... es.269342/

From a comment in that thread:

What‘s special is that PS5 has dedicated hardware decompression that‘s equivalent to about 9 (!) Zen 2 cores for that task.

Looks like a bunch of marketing material, I'd need to see some whitepapers to understand it.
There are(and have been, for a long time) storage devices that store data compressed and have a builtin decompression processor. They also tend to not be that cheap and used for enterprise purposes. I'd have trouble believing that Sony could fit one in their console budget.
Additionally, since the PS5 seemingly lets users use an external storage device, that would nix the idea of dedicated, compressed storage devices. Therefore, that leaves us with two options:
Filesystem with builtin compression
Sony has a format for their games that includes compression, which would be something they could easily control.

Again, checking what (very little) information Sony provides and extrapolating from that, I'm going to go with the latter option. It does not seem to have a choice to use a proprietary filesystem and instead seems to recommend exFAT. So, the games are just stored as a (presumably) compressed blob and they likely have some co-processor on board specifically for decompressing that is inbetween the on-board GPU and storage which reduces both storage and bandwidth requirements.

Again, all guesswork.

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm curious as to what benefit this would actually make on PC since games rarely make use of more than a few cores such that throwing decompression at a modern CPU(which tends to have excess, unused processing power while gaming) would probably make no discernible difference. I suspect it again comes down to reducing PCIE bandwidth by doing the decompression on the GPU. Would this even be a net win though? Not sure. I suspect it's negligible.

[GhostCow]

I'm curious as to what benefit this would actually make on PC since games rarely make use of more than a few cores such that throwing decompression at a modern CPU(which tends to have excess, unused processing power while gaming) would probably make no discernible difference. I suspect it again comes down to reducing PCIE bandwidth by doing the decompression on the GPU. Would this even be a net win though? Not sure. I suspect it's negligible.

In the few games out that support directstorage on PC, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference. They are all bad ports though so I'm not sure if that tells us much yet.

https://www.pcgamer.com/forspoken-direc ... -rtx-4090/

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm curious as to what benefit this would actually make on PC since games rarely make use of more than a few cores such that throwing decompression at a modern CPU(which tends to have excess, unused processing power while gaming) would probably make no discernible difference. I suspect it again comes down to reducing PCIE bandwidth by doing the decompression on the GPU. Would this even be a net win though? Not sure. I suspect it's negligible.

In the few games out that support directstorage on PC, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference. They are all bad ports though so I'm not sure if that tells us much yet.

https://www.pcgamer.com/forspoken-direc ... -rtx-4090/

Forspoken DirectStorage on test: Contrary to reports, there's no GPU performance hit on an RTX 4090

But weirdly, you will see higher fps on a hard drive if you're willing to wait

video game """journalists"""

[GhostCow]

I'm curious as to what benefit this would actually make on PC since games rarely make use of more than a few cores such that throwing decompression at a modern CPU(which tends to have excess, unused processing power while gaming) would probably make no discernible difference. I suspect it again comes down to reducing PCIE bandwidth by doing the decompression on the GPU. Would this even be a net win though? Not sure. I suspect it's negligible.

In the few games out that support directstorage on PC, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference. They are all bad ports though so I'm not sure if that tells us much yet.

https://www.pcgamer.com/forspoken-direc ... -rtx-4090/

Forspoken DirectStorage on test: Contrary to reports, there's no GPU performance hit on an RTX 4090

But weirdly, you will see higher fps on a hard drive if you're willing to wait

video game """journalists"""

SATA SSDs also got lower frame rates than the HDD as well and you can't use directstorage with a SATA SSD, so I don't think that's the culprit

[Atlantico]

- Mass Effect. You are trapped in an elevator and forced to listen to your companions' awkward banter for minutes.

I liked that! Felt immersive

[Tweed]

This is all because of consolefags and their tiny penised machines.

[Roguey]

I like the loading screens to Witcher 1 a lot.

I hate the sound effect that goes with them and it doesn't look like there's a mod that gets rid of it.

[J1M]

Ok, looking a little deeper into it, maybe the Playstation has hardware that the xbox doesn't? Check out this link: https://www.techspot.com/community/topi ... es.269342/

From a comment in that thread:

What‘s special is that PS5 has dedicated hardware decompression that‘s equivalent to about 9 (!) Zen 2 cores for that task.

PlayStation always pretends it has magic hardware as part of its marketing. Goes all the way back to claiming CDROM equals better graphics and that the Emotion Engine will make their highly aliased characters into real people.