The Last of Us Remastered patch drastically cuts load times

[the-pi-guy]

Patch 1.11 of TLOU made it so loading screens are basically non-existent on PS4. This is for both ssd and hdd. Sections load in asap and I can save almost 18 seconds in the David fight. Everyone go and check. Was this the patch's intention? @Naughty_Dog @BadData_ @arnemeyer

— Anthony Calabrese (@AnthonyCaliber) October 24, 2020

[Xevross]

Perhaps they removed all bottlenecks so that the SSD can be instant loading and this improved PS4 loading too.

[kitler53]

Patch 1.11 of TLOU made it so loading screens are basically non-existent on PS4. This is for both ssd and hdd. Sections load in asap and I can save almost 18 seconds in the David fight. Everyone go and check. Was this the patch's intention? @Naughty_Dog @BadData_ @arnemeyer

— Anthony Calabrese (@AnthonyCaliber) October 24, 2020

clearly SSDs are unessissary and we should all be mad that lazy devs are pushing costly hard drives on us this gen instead of optimizing their games. 

[the-pi-guy]

[the-pi-guy]

These load time improvements are literally on the scale of the ones that Series X's SSD brought to last gen games.  ~75%+

On PS5, maybe we will see less than 3 second loads.

[the-pi-guy]

clearly SSDs are unessissary and we should all be mad that lazy devs are pushing costly hard drives on us this gen instead of optimizing their games.

Here seems to be the reason:

The slow HDs in current-gen HW hid a lot of inefficient IO paths that are now gonna stick out like a sore thumb, and the first year of this console cycle is gonna be devs fixing those, not drag-racing SSD speeds against each other.

— Fabian Giesen (@rygorous) September 22, 2020

[BananaKing]

If these games could load so fast. Why haven't they been made to so before? Its quite baffling once you think about it

[the-pi-guy]

If these games could load so fast. Why haven't they been made to so before? Its quite baffling once you think about it

It's a lot easier to see these kinds of issues when a bottleneck is gone.

You could have a potential bottleneck from your software or you might be reaching the limits of the hardware.

Now we move to new hardware and we find we are only loading 4x faster instead of 100x faster.  This tells us that the bottleneck probably wasn't the HDD, but in the way the CPU was fetching data from the HDD.

In this way, SSD helped discover bottlenecks, and allowed older hardware to take advantage of that.