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, we stacked up the internal storage solution with the best and worst PCI Gen 4 SSDs of the time. 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.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:05 News 01: Modern Warfare 3 campaign launches in early access0:20:28 News 02: Apple announces M3 line of Mac chips0:36:58 News 03: Gran Turismo 7 updated with new track, cars, 4-player splitscreen0:43:36 News 04: How does Spider-Man 2 work on the slowest PS5 SSD?0:53:16 News 05: Super Mario RPG previewed!0:58:11 News 06: Switch OLED: does it burn in?1:05:59 News 07: EA WRC: problematic PC performance1:18:31 Supporter Q1: What OLED would you recommend to someone who enjoys both new and old games?1:26:31 Supporter Q2: What are your hopes for the Max Payne remakes’ use of Northlight?1:35:32 Supporter Q3: For retro themed games and collections, what can developers do to improve low-res visuals?1:40:49 Supporter Q4: Some people seem to be rejecting graphical improvements – what are your thoughts?1:49:39 Supporter Q5: Do you think Metroid Prime 4 will skip the current Switch and ship only on the upcoming Switch?1:53:22 Supporter Q6: Is there a market for publishers to release older games without upgrades?
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.