PS5 launch title Spider-Man: Miles Morales takes just two seconds to load from its main menu.

That’s according a video posted on Imgur showing the Insomniac title’s incredibly fast load times in action. According to the video, booting Miles Morales from the PS5 home menu takes around eight seconds.

Speed of access is one of the flagship features of PlayStation 5, with the console’s high-bandwidth SSD able to achieve access speeds of 5.5GB/s. It also has a hardware unit dedicated to decompressing files, which should result in even faster loading.

In a PlayStation 5 hardware presentation earlier this year, PS5’s architect Mark Cerny claimed the SSD – which is said to be able to load 2GB of data in one quarter of a second – could affect not just loading times, but fundamentally change how game developers build their game worlds.

Instead of hiding environments behind scenery or lengthy corridors designed to mask loads, PS5 developers will be able to create far more expansive and detailed environments without fear of memory issues, it’s claimed.

Xbox Series X also has a custom SSD, however its raw throughput performance is said to be half that of PS5’s.

In August God of War director Cory Barlog singled out PlayStation 5’s “amazing” SSD when asked what most excites him about the next-gen console during a recent interview.

Appearing on Animal Talking, SIE Santa Monica Studio’s creative director said the developer has previously had to go to “great lengths” to mask loading times in the God of War series – something which won’t be necessary on PS5.

“It’s pretty exciting actually, there’s a lot of stuff that we’ve been messing around with and seeing, especially for me the SSD is just amazing,” he said.

“I’m impatient and I don’t like any kind of load times. We’ve gone to great lengths in this series, like all the way back to the PS2, of trying to hide any kind of loading so that you never really feel like you’re having that artificial layer of the game break you out of it – we let the menus do that and all the upgrading and stuff.”

Posted: Nov 02, 2020 11:44 am
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/ps5-video-shows-spider-man-miles-morales-loading-in-2-seconds/