 I was recently involved in some drama with Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, best known for titles like Adventure Math and Zargon, but you also might have heard of one of their more recent projects. Those guys. The easiest thing for me to do at this point would be to roughly add up how many people are mad at me for slinging a false accusation based on my own arrogance and ignorance, conclude that it's probably not worth the PR damage of drawing any further attention to this, and move on. But if I'm interpreting this response correctly, and I think I am, I have just been taken to school. So, Mr. Sweeney, I have no idea if you'll watch this, but the only action left for me right now is to issue my apology in full view of the million, or millions, of people who watched this video and show you that even though I was careless and disrespectful, I do still know how to do my homework and correct misconceptions about technology, even if in this case I was the one who spread them. So here we go. The worst part of making this video is already over, fortunately, but it was going back and watching past Linus' performance on the WAN show after a week where he clearly hadn't found the time to watch the excellent look into the PlayStation 5's development and hardware by Mark Cerny. Okay. But then ran his mouth anyway. You know, why does someone like Tim Sweeney? Like, how many billions of dollars is he worth? Like, why does he need to say stuff that's just, like, demonstrably false, you know? This is an SSD that is not only as fast as the PlayStation 5's SSD, but is actually 15,000 megabytes a second, double the speed. What a funny thing. Would you look at that? Isn't that funny? Why do you need to sell out to Sony to just say stuff that's just not true at all? Holy s***. My second mistake was relying on secondhand information about what Mr. Sweeney said about the SSD in the first place. I'm an experienced enough social media user that I should have known that the jousting back and forth between fanboys of either console or PC would contain half-truths and misquotes. He never said, fastest, which is open to interpretation. He said, best in class. My final mistake, by far the worst one, was slinging a personal attack. I honestly doubt that he cares that I called the thing he never said a stupid thing to say. He said it. So it's probably a little bit like, you know, 640K of RAM should be enough for anybody. You know, that quote that Bill Gates has denied ever even saying. It's annoying, but it's not worth him losing sleep over. No, the real problem is that I got caught up doing a bit boasting about how my SSD can beat up your SSD. That was, frankly speaking, mostly intended to mock fanboy behavior in general, but ended up coming off as though I was speaking completely in earnest, and during it, I suggested that he was being paraded out to misrepresent the PS5's technology for money or some other kind of gain. And this is all based on a quote he never said. What the hell was I thinking? I know from personal experience how much it hurts to be called a shill or a sellout when all you were doing was giving your honest take. And amplifying this insult was the PC fanboys who bothered him on Twitter talking about how, you know, Soxor, the PS5's SSD. SSD SSD SSD is so fast. A product that, by the way, isn't even available yet, so we can't know for sure, is compared to PC Master Racer, whatever malarkey. So for those of you who participated in that, if you're watching this, you can go ahead, blame it on me, but please send your own separate apology to at Tim Sweeney Epic after you finished watching this video to fill in the gaps in your own knowledge about the PS5's storage. As we've discussed on this channel before, one of the main reasons we don't do SSD reviews is that we know enough to know that we don't know enough about them. The reason that raw sequential bandwidth gets bandied about so much in marketing materials is only because it's easily digestible. Good number good, small number bad. But in a PC, or current gen console for that matter, the presence and capacity of the DRAM cache, the features and performance of the controller on the drive, the type of NAND flash-in use, clever use of high speed SLC caching on slower multi-bit per cell NAND, any of those one things could affect real world performance more meaningfully than ideal conditions, sequential read and write specs. And there's a major factor that I've mostly ignored over the years because I just didn't think about it. As a PC gamer, I'm basically stuck with whatever Microsoft will give me. And that's the effects of software and how the device can interact with the rest of my hardware. Because that is what Mr. Sweeney was talking about. That's why he said best in class, not fastest. And he's obviously not wrong about this. We even showed recently that on a fast gaming PC, upgrading from a SATA SSD all the way to a state of the art PCI express Gen 4 SSD, a theoretical increase in performance of over 5X would not affect your experience as a PC gamer because you run up against some of the problems that Sony set out to solve here. First is the inaccessibility of data. The conventional wisdom is that storage does not improve the image quality settings that you can use or the FPS that your game will run at. And that's because conventional game design assumes that any asset the player might need, say a model or texture they might whip over and look at, needs to be in memory or it's going to take forever to pop in as it's streamed off of a hard drive or heaven forbid, an optical disc. Well, the PS5 changes this by shipping with such a high performance SSD that pertinent data can be pulled off of it while the player is moving around, enabling developers to create much higher fidelity environments without tricks like strategically placed elevator rides to mask background asset loading. This will enable new environments and experiences that weren't possible without this approach. Although you might only see them in PlayStation exclusive titles. The second is slow loading times. I remember first diving into this when I went back to play some ancient game on a PC that I had recently upgraded only to realize that even though my hardware, including an SSD was many times faster, the game still took a long time to load. The reason for that is that there are a ton of potential bottlenecks, both in software and hardware between raw ones and zeros coming off of an SSD and it being in a form and place that your program can actually use it. And the faster your SSD becomes, believe it or not, the more painful these bottlenecks become. We encountered this when we built our new high speed NVMe video editing server, even on Linux. Hey. We used a simple data streaming benchmark to adding just file system overhead, cut our throughput down to a fraction and was enough to bring a 24 core epic server CPU to its knees requiring us to upgrade it. Windows didn't even make it that far. Sony solution was to create their own controller for the SSD that interfaces via PCIe Gen4 with their main custom chip with much finer control over the priority of data access requests. This allows the game to say, Hey, yeah, that stuff you were doing, um, I know you're going to be done soon, but I really need something right now. Get it to me. That's pretty cool all on its own when you consider how few players there are left in the SSD controller space, let alone how few of them are making high performance controllers. The real secret sauce though is in the main custom chip whose IO complex contains hardware to ensure that only the necessary data is loaded in memory allows the game to shuffle data directly to where it needs to go, cutting out middle steps and bottlenecks. And this is a really cool one hardware level support for high speed decoding of compressed data stored on the SSD that turns the five and a half gigabytes per second of raw throughput into according to Mark's presentation, eight or nine gigabytes or even as much as 22 gigabytes per second of data. And the best part about it is that instead of needing an X86 processor that could cost hundreds of dollars just dedicated to data decompression in every single PlayStation, you're doing this with minimal CPU overhead by using fixed function hardware. On the subject of compression, a third benefit of Sony's new approach is that games will get smaller. One of the little tricks that game developers use to minimize hard drive seek times is to store the data needed for a given area the player might explore in contiguous chunks to avoid fragmentation and data seeking. The problem is that any asset that appears many times in the game, like a stop sign for example, needs to be stored in basically every one of those chunks or you end up seeking around for it. That wastes a lot of space. Now arguably this one is a benefit of any SSD where there is no seek time, but because both new gen consoles will use SSDs, it's something game developers won't have to worry about for the first time. That is unless they're also releasing on PC. Watch out guys, because after all the moaning the PC zealots have done about inferior consoles, limiting game advancement. The PC might be about to become the lowest common denominator here. Unless the powers that be all come together to make it happen. Bottom line, Mr. Sweeney probably knows things that we don't, but even based on what we can see for ourselves, if what Sony's saying is true, he wasn't shilling for the PS5. Don't take my word for it. Watch this great take from the Cherno reacting to Mark Sweeney's presentation. Besides, I doubt Mr. Sweeney cares much what platform you play on as long as developers are using Unreal Engine and making great games that lots of people buy. And if anything, think about this, Epic Games has more to gain by pushing the PC to new heights because now they've got a separate branch of their business charging even developers who don't use Unreal Engine for distribution on the Epic Games store. To imagine that he's got some kind of agenda against PC is ridiculous. In summary, I still have a lot more to learn and questions that I'd like answers to. Like how much of the PC's problems stem from OS kernel bottlenecks versus GPU driver ones. Whether a powerful enough CPU could make up for those shortfalls today or how direct storage could change things for the PC going forward. But understandably, Mr. Sweeney didn't want to answer my questions at this time and I get it. So that can wait for another day. All that's left to say then is just to say sorry to a number of people. First, I'm sorry to myself for not wearing steel toed boots on May the 15th. It would have been a lot less painful when I pointed the gun at my foot and pulled the trigger. Number two is I'm sorry to my staff who fly under my banner. I like to think that usually they get to share my successes, but today they had to shoulder fall out from my mistake. This was an entirely avoidable own goal and you guys deserve better. Three, I'm more sorry to my viewers. I have a responsibility to you guys to spread knowledge and understanding, not the opposite. I set some of you on the wrong path. It was a breach of our trust and I can do better. And then finally, once more, I'm especially sorry to Mr. Sweeney who might not give a hoot about my blunder or my apology and I would understand that, but who still had the class to take time out of his very busy life to respond to me in a professional manner. And this is after I called his statement. He never made stupid and carelessly clogged up his notifications with nonsense tweets that he's had to waste his time responding to rather than focusing on what we all would prefer that he do, enabling groundbreaking gaming experiences for us to enjoy. Thank you for the lesson, sir. I hope I've completed it to your satisfaction and we can move past this. I do have a writing staff and it wouldn't be easy to assume that I enlisted their help to prepare this given the stark difference between my past behavior and what I'm saying today, but I didn't because I felt it was important for you to hear this in completely my own words. I'm not expecting a response, but I'm still going to throw it out there that if you guys have something cool in the pipe, I'm still not too old or too jaded to learn the patience and humility to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem when it comes to helping gamers better understand the technology that brings us all so much joy.