> If a frame is 16ms, and the best consumer SSDs are around 2GB/s, You can only load 33MB of assets in a one frame in a best-case scenario.
I think page faulting can work a lot better for graphics assets (= textures) than for general purpose computing, because the system has special knowledge about data and can avoid processing pauses by (temporarily) using lower fidelity mipmap levels.
1) All of those assets aren't present in the current frame. 33 MB might cover the whole scene anyways.
2) Texture aware page fault mechanism can transfer low lower detail mipmap levels first. Two detail levels lower mipmap is just 1/16th of data, but is still going to be good enough for those few tens of milliseconds until better LoD can be loaded.
3) So in 3 frames (5ms) you have 100 MB. This probably covers current scene pretty well.
So everything will just appear to be there. Eyes won't have time to focus in time it takes to load all full quality assets for current scene, even if your SSD can load just 500 MB/s.
Remember, with page fault mechanism you don't need to load all assets, just those that are actually visible in the current scene. So initially there's less data to transfer.
But it doesn't change anything. Lower LoD mipmap level is going to be less data with or without compression. Each lower level data size is just 25% of previous.
I think page faulting can work a lot better for graphics assets (= textures) than for general purpose computing, because the system has special knowledge about data and can avoid processing pauses by (temporarily) using lower fidelity mipmap levels.
1) All of those assets aren't present in the current frame. 33 MB might cover the whole scene anyways.
2) Texture aware page fault mechanism can transfer low lower detail mipmap levels first. Two detail levels lower mipmap is just 1/16th of data, but is still going to be good enough for those few tens of milliseconds until better LoD can be loaded.
3) So in 3 frames (5ms) you have 100 MB. This probably covers current scene pretty well.
So everything will just appear to be there. Eyes won't have time to focus in time it takes to load all full quality assets for current scene, even if your SSD can load just 500 MB/s.
Remember, with page fault mechanism you don't need to load all assets, just those that are actually visible in the current scene. So initially there's less data to transfer.