The PS5's SSD is fast, no question, but a new technology now ensures that it receives a further boost and can almost double its speed.
RAD Game Tools introduced a new series of compression techniques known as Oodle Kraken and Oodle Textures. Speeds of 8-9GB/s based on 1.5:1 compression can be increased to 2:1 compression most of the time, and up to 15GB/s with a peak compression of 3:1.
The technology has been licensed by Sony for all PS5 and PS4 games, giving Sony access to a technology that is likely to be by far the fastest in the mass market in terms of speed. Attached. a small excerpt, which describes the technology:
"Kraken compression acts as a multiplier for I/O speed and disk capacity, storing more games and loading faster relative to the compression ratio. Sony has already confirmed that the SSD supports 5,5 GB/s and a decompressed bandwidth of 8 to 9 GB/s, based on measurements of average game compression ratios between 1,5 and 1. While Kraken is an excellent generic compressor, it has struggled to find usable patterns for a crucial type of content: GPU textures, which make up a large portion of game content."
Since then, we've made great strides in improving the compression ratio of GPU textures. Oodle Texture encodes them in such a way that the subsequent Kraken compression finds patterns it can utilize. As a result, we expect the average compression ratio of games to be much better in the future, closer to 2:1.
It's all pretty technical stuff that the average user probably won't be able to do much with. Nevertheless, the PS5, which is primarily designed for speed, doesn't seem to have reached its full potential by a long shot.
