The ninth-generation home consoles released in November 2020 — Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S — both broke decisively with the long-standing convention of treating storage I/O as a software-bound, CPU-mediated problem. Both platforms ship with custom solid-state drives (SSDs) attached to dedicated, fixed-function decompression silicon. This silicon offloads what used to be a multi-core CPU burden onto purpose-built blocks capable of feeding the game engine compressed asset streams at multiple gigabytes per second of effective throughput. For an open-world title of the scope of Rockstar Games' forthcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, this hardware paradigm shift is not merely a quality-of-life convenience: it is foundational to the streaming density, world detail, and elimination of traversal loading that the studio has signalled in early trailer material (Rockstar Games, 2023).
This report covers three areas: (1) the Kraken/Oodle decompression path on the PS5, (2) the BCPack + zlib path baked into the Xbox Velocity Architecture, and (3) the expected practical advantages that GTA VI is likely to extract from both, including streaming budgets, asset variety, and load-time elimination.
Sony's storage architecture was the centrepiece of the system's March 2020 "Road to PS5" presentation by lead architect Mark Cerny. The PS5 contains 825 GB of flash directly soldered to the motherboard with a 12-channel interface yielding 5.5 GB/s of raw bandwidth (Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2020; Wikipedia, 2025a). The flash memory is paired with a custom I/O complex containing several discrete coprocessors: two dedicated DMA controllers, an SRAM-backed I/O coherency engine, a cache scrubbing unit, and — most relevant here — a dedicated hardware decompression block.
The decompression unit natively supports two formats: the open zlib (Deflate) standard, and RAD Game Tools' proprietary Oodle Kraken codec. Kraken was chosen because it produces decompression ratios competitive with LZMA but at decode speeds orders of magnitude higher; in practice the PS5's decompressor delivers typical throughputs of 8–9 GB/s of decompressed data, peaking at approximately 22 GB/s for highly compressible content (Wikipedia, 2025a; Leadbetter, 2020). Sony reports that performing the same decompression in software would require roughly nine Zen 2 CPU cores running at full tilt — a budget the console simply does not have, given only eight cores are physically present and one is reserved for the OS.
In April 2020, RAD announced an additional layer atop Kraken called Oodle Texture, which re-encodes BCn block-compressed GPU textures so they remain GPU-readable while becoming substantially more compressible by Kraken downstream. Sony licensed Oodle Texture for all PS5 developers at no cost (Epic Games / RAD, 2021). The combination — Oodle Texture on disk, Kraken decompression in hardware on load — is the practical pipeline most PS5 titles use today.
Microsoft markets its equivalent stack as the Xbox Velocity Architecture (XVA), which Microsoft itself defines as having four components: a custom NVMe SSD, a hardware decompression block, the DirectStorage API, and Sampler Feedback Streaming (Tuttle, 2020). The Series X ships with a 1 TB custom NVMe SSD delivering 2.4 GB/s of raw I/O via a PCIe 4.0 x2 link (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The decompression block supports two codecs. The first is industry-standard zlib, which provides a compatible baseline. The second is a Microsoft-proprietary codec called BCPack, specifically optimised for the statistical structure of BCn (DXT/BC1–BC7) GPU texture data — exactly the asset class that dominates open-world game installs. Microsoft quotes a combined compressed throughput of as high as 4.8 GB/s when both blocks are active (Tuttle, 2020; Wikipedia, 2025b). Microsoft estimates that doing this decompression in software would consume "more than three CPU cores" of overhead, an overhead which the hardware block reduces to effectively zero.
The architectural philosophy diverges slightly from Sony's: where Sony selected a single general-purpose codec (Kraken) plus zlib and let Oodle Texture handle texture-specific gains in pre-processing, Microsoft built BCPack as a hardware-recognised, texture-specific codec from day one. The result is that both consoles converge on roughly the same place — extremely cheap, high-throughput texture streaming — by different design choices.
The DirectStorage API, layered on top, exposes this capability to developers in a way that mirrors the GPU's batched submission model rather than the traditional Win32 ReadFile path, eliminating per-I/O CPU overhead (Tuttle, 2020). Sampler Feedback Streaming further amplifies effective bandwidth by loading only the mip levels and tiles actually sampled by the GPU.
Rockstar's open-world streaming engine has historically been one of the most aggressive in the industry. Grand Theft Auto V (2013) was engineered to stream contiguously from a 7,200 RPM HDD, then a 5,400 RPM HDD on base PS4/Xbox One, and the team developed elaborate compression and asset-ordering schemes to make this work. The first GTA VI trailer (Rockstar Games, 2023) shows dense urban streetscapes, large simulated NPC populations, deformable vegetation, and beach/water content at fidelity levels that imply both higher polygonal density and dramatically larger texture sets than GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2.
Three concrete advantages follow from the new decompression hardware. First, install-size and streaming-budget: with BCPack and Oodle Texture/Kraken halving or better the on-disk and in-flight size of texture data, GTA VI's Vice City and its surroundings can ship far more unique textures within a comparable installation footprint. Second, elimination of traversal pop-in: at 8–9 GB/s effective throughput on PS5 and ~4.8 GB/s on Series X, an entire 16 GB of RAM could in principle be refilled in roughly two to four seconds, meaning even an extreme view-distance change (e.g., fast-travel in a helicopter) can be serviced without the deferred-loading artefacts familiar to GTA V players. Third, CPU liberation: prior generations spent multiple cores on decompression. Eliminating that overhead frees those cores for the simulation tasks (traffic AI, pedestrian behaviour, physics) that have always been Rockstar's signature.
There remains an important caveat: Series S, with 4 TFLOPs of GPU compute, only 10 GB of RAM (8 GB fast), a 512 GB SSD, and the same XVA decompression block, is widely viewed as the platform most likely to constrain GTA VI's design ceiling, and developers including some Xbox-aligned voices have pointed to it as a long-term anchor for cross-generation ambition (Wikipedia, 2025b).
Both consoles solved the same problem — moving compressed assets from flash into VRAM faster than CPU cores can decompress them — with broadly similar but technically distinct hardware. The PS5 is faster in raw and decompressed throughput; the Series X has a tighter API story via DirectStorage and SFS. For GTA VI, the practical result on either platform is the same: an engine that can finally treat the storage device as an extension of memory, enabling a denser, more varied, and more seamlessly streamed Vice City than any GTA before it.
Epic Games / RAD Game Tools (2021) Oodle is now free for all developers using Unreal Engine. Available at: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/oodle-is-now-free-for-all-developers-using-unreal-engine (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Leadbetter, R. (2020) 'Inside PlayStation 5: the specs and the tech that deliver Sony's next-gen vision', Eurogamer / Digital Foundry, 18 March.
Rockstar Games (2023) Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Sony Interactive Entertainment (2020) The Road to PS5 [Online presentation by Mark Cerny], 18 March.
Tuttle, W. (2020) 'Defining the Next Generation: An Xbox Series X|S Technology Glossary', Xbox Wire, 16 March. Available at: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/03/16/xbox-series-x-glossary/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) PlayStation 5. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_5 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Xbox Series X and Series S. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Series_X_and_Series_S (Accessed: 14 May 2026).