“It's the textures above all, and nothing is going to stop them.”
October 11, 2019 1:13 PM   Subscribe

PC Game Install Sizes Are Ballooning And I'm Scared [Kotaku] “Earlier today, I was reading over the PC hardware specifications for the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and, when I reached the hard drive space requirement, did a double-take. 175 GB. For one game. My hard drive currently has less than half that space free for all games. And Modern Warfare is far from alone in its Galactus-like hunger for hard drive space. The PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, will not stop until it has callously conquered 150 GB of your PC’s storage. This continues an upward trend seen in other recent heavyweight kingpins like the PC versions of Gears of War 4, Gears 5, Halo 5, and Final Fantasy XV, all of which clock in at over 100 GB when you add high-res texture packs (the latter even without improved textures). PC gaming has always been characterized by a little extra pain in the name of optimal pleasure, but this is reaching preposterously bonkers proportions.”

• How game sizes got so huge, and why they'll get even bigger [PC Gamer]
“Game sizes have always been limited by their delivery medium—Myst was famously made possible by the introduction of the CD-ROM drive—but in 2004, when dual-layer DVDs were introduced, it was already too late for the PC game shelves at retailers. Steam launched around the same time, and as broadband snaked further into the suburbs and beyond, no physical medium could keep up with downloading. Games were allowed to grow, and grow, constrained only by users' bandwidth and hard drive space. That's resulted in 100GB-plus games that wouldn't even fit on a Blu-ray disc, never mind a dual-layer DVD. That's causing grief for players who don't have access to speedy internet connections, or who haven't recently upgraded their storage in a pricey SSD market. [...] For PC gaming to get better for those with poor internet service, either games will have to get smaller (or at least stop growing), or our selection of ISPs will have to get better, providing quality, uncapped service to more customers. After speaking to a few game developers, I can say confidently that the former isn't going to happen. The upper limit of game sizes is only going to increase.”
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare assaults your hard drive with the biggest install size ever on PC [Tech Radar]
“Both games could be a serious worry for those looking to install the titles on an SSD, if it’s a smaller solid-state drive that is (which some older models certainly are). Or indeed these sort of sizes could be problematic for anyone running short on drive space in general, of course. As mentioned, this is the biggest installation size we’ve ever seen, beating out the aforementioned RDR2, and the likes of Final Fantasy 15 which managed to eat up 148GB (although that’s with the high-res texture pack included, the base install is a ‘mere’ 85GB). As we discussed in our Red Dead Redemption 2 specs piece earlier on, large install sizes are an increasing trend with PC games, with a number of titles in recent times coming in at (or fairly close to) the 100GB level (Forza 7 needs 100GB, Gears 5 has an 80GB install, and indeed previous Call of Duty outings have been hard drive hogs on PC). These massive installation sizes are being pushed further and further upwards by high quality, high-resolution textures in the main (although high-quality audio can bulk things up too).”
posted by Fizz (81 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have honestly wondered to myself, after installing a game under 30GB, if I'm really getting my money's worth.
posted by Brocktoon at 1:18 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


You'd think that bandwidth for distribution would eventually start eating into profits... Maybe efforts like this could help; I'm guessing there's a lot in these game systems that just hasn't been approached with compression in mind.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:19 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


I have an aging gaming PC with 3 drives (two SSD and one HDD). The one only contains Windows 10 and other more utility type of programs, the other two are exclusively devoted to gaming, torrents, downloads, etc. All combined I have 3 TB and I still find myself struggling to balance various installs when a new game comes out.

I have never uninstalled the following games: Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, Doom, Fallout 4, & The Witcher III. They'd eat up at least an entire day and a half of download time, plus all the bandwidth in our house. It's just too annoying, so I just keep them permanently installed, just in case I want to go back and re-play them (even though I've beat them all many years ago).
posted by Fizz at 1:24 PM on October 11, 2019


What would be the performance hit if you installed a 175 GB game on something other than a SSD? Would it just increase loading times and necessitate more RAM? I mean, is it going to be necessary to have an SSD going forward?

Sorry if that's a dumb question -- I used to be a computer game guy, but that was 20 years ago. I remember the first time a game gave me the option of installing everything to the hard drive, instead of loading some assets on the fly from the disc. It seemed like this insane power-user move at the time. And then they started requiring it.

I mean, jeez, I remember when Duke Nukem 3D took up like 30 MB, and THAT was a lot. Back in the ol' DOS prompt days.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:26 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


I suspect this is a sinister part of the live services push- if storing/downloading games is ones, you're more likely to pick one game and play it (and spend on microtransactions and provide value by adding to the game's population) rather than move between various games.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:30 PM on October 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


i was just cleaning out my ps4 the other day (dumped 135gb of overwatch highlights) and ac odyssey is 127gb, which seems completely insane. i can't even imagine what a nightmare pc gaming must be. i've been thinking about upping the hd from 2tb to, idk, whatever is next. 5tb? christ.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:30 PM on October 11, 2019


I'd argue it's necessary to have an SSD for gaming now. I see so many loading time complaints from folks still using HDDs.

It's just so strange to me that games are shipping with textures that are supposed to look good at, like, 4k resolutions when there's basically no hardware on the planet that can push 4k at 60+ fps.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:30 PM on October 11, 2019 [10 favorites]


SSDs don't actually have a huge impact on loads on a modern PC. The biggest impact is to have your OS on the SSD; you can then have your game binaries on a HD. This is what I do and my loads are still vastly better than on a PS4. My SSD is only 128gb but it doesn't matter since I only have Windows 10 on it.

Games don't actually saturate drive speeds pulling data from the binaries directory in most cases.
posted by selfnoise at 1:33 PM on October 11, 2019 [8 favorites]


That's causing grief for players who don't have access to speedy internet connections, or who haven't recently upgraded their storage in a pricey SSD market.

What idiot wrote this? You get change from $60 buying value brand 500GB drives. $75 for a 500GB 860 EVO.

That's literally less than the game itself.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 1:34 PM on October 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


What idiot wrote this? You get change from $60 buying value brand 500GB drives. $75 for a 500GB 860 EVO.

That was an older article from early last year: February 9, 2018. The market has definitely changed.
posted by Fizz at 1:36 PM on October 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


I wish all game installers had a "I will never play this at 4K, so go easy on the textures" option. They're just driving me to choose console games instead.

The only drive in my new computer is a 1TB SSD.

Noita and Slay the Spire only need 1 GB each and are way more fun than a CoD game could ever be for me...
posted by Foosnark at 1:37 PM on October 11, 2019 [12 favorites]


If you like those games try Dicey Dungeons. It’s got a unique twist on the rogue like card gene and an adorable art style.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 1:39 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


SSDs don't actually have a huge impact on loads on a modern PC.

They don't always, but they certainly can. I noticed much faster load times for some things even going from an older BX100 SSD to the cheapest NVMe SSD I could find. There's no way I would go back to a magnetic hard drive at this point for anything I wanted to run frequently.
posted by Foosnark at 1:40 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


That was an older article from early last year: February 9, 2018. The market has definitely changed.

Every year is “SSD pricing hits new lows” since they’ve been introduced.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 1:41 PM on October 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


SSDs don't actually have a huge impact on loads on a modern PC. The biggest impact is to have your OS on the SSD; you can then have your game binaries on a HD. This is what I do and my loads are still vastly better than on a PS4.

This. The only time I've seen an SSD impact in-game performance is with PUBG, and that's because the game had a bug where if it couldn't load the game map quickly enough, you'd have to fight people in horrible low-detail bizarro world.

Load times are improved a bit with SSD, but it's not a dramatic difference most of the time.
posted by neckro23 at 1:48 PM on October 11, 2019


I have a data cap that I'm perpetually butting up against. If a game is 150 GB, it probably means that I'm not going to consider buying the game. If I'm up against at my data cap, 175 GB would be an extra $40 to the price of the game due to the overage fees.

I get that it's my ISP's fault for the data cap, not Activision Blizzard or whatever, but that's the situation I'm dealing with.
posted by No One Ever Does at 1:48 PM on October 11, 2019 [7 favorites]


"It's just so strange to me that games are shipping with textures that are supposed to look good at, like, 4k resolutions when there's basically no hardware on the planet that can push 4k at 60+ fps."

It's also not even the sort of thing I'd look forward to. My current oldass monitor from 10 years is still too high of definition as far as I'm concerned, I would have been satisfied with a much worse monitor. 60fps, sure, that's something you can notice as you play but for fuck's sake, 99.99% of the time I'm playing a game, I'm looking at UI elements or my character or some other narrow area of focus to the point sometimes I think the graphics are just there to look good in screenshots. In other cases it's unclear what they're even aiming for because there isn't any art direction besides loading the game full of as high res textures as it can manage. Could you tell a Call of Duty screenshot apart from one today, cause I sure as fuck couldn't. The demands of these games outpaces their benefit, we've been seeing diminishing returns on realism for a decade. Most great looking games today are ones with an actual art style, not the ones pushing hard for realism.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:53 PM on October 11, 2019 [9 favorites]


Man, how is it possible that PC gaming got worse
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:58 PM on October 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


Forces at work off the top of my head:
- Proliferation of 4K and not being able to leave it off the disk or download as an option because cert team’s going to want the fewest possible permutations (in most games you won’t ever see for-4K textures if Textures aren’t set to “Ultra” in options: that phrasing is deliberate)
- Modern GPUs having comparatively enormous amounts of RAM
- Physically based rendering and/or heavily stylized art direction requiring more lighting-specific texture channels or new varieties of masking textures, some of which look *really* shitty with DXT5 so they’re shipped raw RGBA
- Consumer apathy (Larger drives standard / SSDs standard / Broadband proliferation)
- Shifting priorities in the pre-cert tech art perf optimization pass: tighter schedule margins vs diminishing returns from reduced texture usage in the modern era of 6~11GB GPU RAM.

Basically with the days of 512MB RAM consoles (PS3/360) long over, we have gigabytes of texture memory to play with across all the major platforms. While minimizing texture usage is still pretty heavily linked with generally increased performance it’s no longer quite as direct or dire as it used to be. I started to write a whole bunch here about minimizing GPU state change, shader templates and virtual texturing but time is short and anyway it’s ultimately down to the state of modern hardware memory pricing vs increasingly insane schedule margins negating optimizing things that aren’t runtime performance vs what the market will bear.
posted by Ryvar at 2:07 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


The worst are the game installers that download every outdated copy of .NET that they've ever touched in the build process so that you not only get to install the game, but 6 patches to .NET after too.

And here I just want to play Wilmot's Warehouse which needs me to allocate 100MB of space.
posted by msbutah at 2:14 PM on October 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


I remember X-Wing took 8 megs, which was a full 8% of my 100M disk drive, which felt pretty extravagant at the time. So this seems like the status quo?
posted by Horkus at 2:14 PM on October 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


I have never uninstalled ... They'd eat up at least an entire day and a half of download time, plus all the bandwidth in our house.

Steam lets you copy installed games to local backup archives, which you can stash on external drives etc.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:15 PM on October 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


I wonder if they could just install the big payload in a data center, and code only the position data locally?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 2:19 PM on October 11, 2019


SSDs don't actually have a huge impact on loads on a modern PC. The biggest impact is to have your OS on the SSD; you can then have your game binaries on a HD. This is what I do and my loads are still vastly better than on a PS4. My SSD is only 128gb but it doesn't matter since I only have Windows 10 on it.


Oh but they do. In game, maybe not. But unless you like to go make yourself a drink between clicking on a game's icon and actually playing the game, putting the game itself on an SSD makes a difference.
posted by thecjm at 2:21 PM on October 11, 2019


Look, you have to understand: they HAVE to have those huge space-hogging textures and effects, because they'll never match the sheer fun of a cartoony game about an evil goose.
posted by happyroach at 2:25 PM on October 11, 2019 [36 favorites]


Just from occasionally reading game news on Reddit I assume this is driven by the market segment who will slander your studio on their YouTube channel and send death threats to your family if they can’t play in 4K 60fps while watching hentai on their fourth monitor.
posted by uncleozzy at 2:43 PM on October 11, 2019 [12 favorites]


SSDs don't actually have a huge impact on loads on a modern PC

What are you playing? Because running Skyrim or FO4 off a SSD is a vastly different experience than running it off a spinning disk.
posted by nathan_teske at 2:44 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


One thing that intrigues me about the limited info on the PS5 we have so far is the ability to choose what parts of a game you want to install - the example given was opting to download a game’s multiplayer campaign but not the single-player.
posted by skycrashesdown at 2:48 PM on October 11, 2019


I don't see how the multi- vs singleplayer stuff would work for most games that have both, since they tend to use the same assets and levels in both.
posted by Dumsnill at 2:51 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


Obviously a lot of single player games already allow you to start the game before you have downloaded all of it, but if you progress to fast you hit an install wall.
posted by Dumsnill at 2:53 PM on October 11, 2019


I was just thinking I'm going to need to get more drive space soon; partly because of this issue and partly because of other storage needs. What's the best way to mirror an old drive on to a new bigger one so that everything works right?
posted by backseatpilot at 2:54 PM on October 11, 2019


SSDs don't actually have a huge impact on loads on a modern PC

What are you playing? Because running Skyrim or FO4 off a SSD is a vastly different experience than running it off a spinning disk.


Have you tried what I'm talking about? that is, running the OS on SSD and game binaries on HD. I think we are talking at cross purposes here.

Skyrim shouldn't have long load times on anything, that game is almost eight years old.

I've been playing AC Origins and Forza Horizon 4 in the last six months and load times on either are not particularly significant.

I wish I could find it, but someone actually tested this in the last year or so on a tech site and in most cases, game calls to the SSD/HD were not saturating the bandwidth available even to a 6Gb/s SATA HD.
posted by selfnoise at 3:12 PM on October 11, 2019


Well. I just checked my disk space with WizTree, and it turns out Dirt Rally 2.0 -- pretty much the only "big" game I have installed on the new machine -- is consuming 83.8GB of disk space.

The shitty part is it includes at least 14.1 GB of DLC locations that I haven't paid for and can't use, which were downloaded in version updates without asking me or notifying me.
posted by Foosnark at 3:19 PM on October 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


I’m mostly puzzled by the fact that this only affects PC gamers. If you’re playing the newest graphics-intensive monster on your console, you’re probably projecting it onto a 60+ inch display in 4K. Lossy textures are going to look a whole lot worse on a giant display than they are on a smaller monitor, yet the console versions of these games are an order of magnitude smaller. Hell, the latest generation of consoles ship standard with 1 TB... ain’t no way they’re storing all those assets on the local HDD, and the latency from loading them remotely would completely destroy gameplay. Why are PC assets so much more space-intensive?
posted by Mayor West at 3:30 PM on October 11, 2019


Why are PC assets so much more space-intensive?

They aren't. Halo 5 for example is like 90GB on Xbox One IIRC. Fallout 4's install is larger IIRC on console than PC.

This has been a console generation of people buying external drives so they can have more games installed. Sony (or was it MS?) actually patched better functionality for that kind of install in because there was such a demand for it.
posted by selfnoise at 3:36 PM on October 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


I recall the days of game installations requiring over a dozen floppy disks, and later up to 8 cds, which was time consuming to install, but at least the onus was on the publisher to provide the storage medium. With digital distribution, there is little incentive to optimize their install size.

CoD has (or at least had, it's been a while) a straightforward rule that it must run at 60fps across the board. Assets and scenes are developed with a high level of detail and then optimized until they will run at the desired rate on the targeted hardware. PC users get the higher resolution version of those assets, because their hardware can be more powerful than consoles and often having a title that challenges their machine is part of the appeal.
posted by subocoyne at 3:37 PM on October 11, 2019


My recollection is that this trend felt like it started around 2013, when PCs really started to pull ahead of consoles in terms of raw power, and at a time when multi-platform releases became the norm.

To help consoles out, devs started storing audio in uncompressed form to reduce the overhead of decompressing audio on the fly. A particular offender at the time was Titanfall, a whopping 48GB, of which a whole 35GB was uncompressed audio, something completely stupid and unnecessary (in my view).
posted by xdvesper at 3:43 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


By the way, Sony has said that they will be allowing more control over what exactly you install when you install a game on the upcoming PS5.

Hopefully it's not one of those things where they build in the functionality but publishers don't bother to actually use it.
posted by selfnoise at 3:43 PM on October 11, 2019


Titanfall, a whopping 48GB, of which a whole 35GB was uncompressed audio

Ugh.

On the opposite, but still wrong side: 1998 commercial failure CyberStrike 2. I wrote relatively short loops of music for the menu/hub areas of the single-player part of the game (as well as scripting the animation for mission briefings and some other minor stuff).

I provided nice stereo 44.1kHz audio, like you do. The lead programmer, who may be somebody you might have heard of in the industry but not one of the "big" names, chose not to use any off-the-shelf audio compression codecs, and for the sake of shrinking the installer a bit, smashed my files into 8kHz mono WAVs.

I recall screaming. I also recall having used layered detuned stereo synth voices that sounded pretty damned amazing before, and like ass after. He didn't care, the producer didn't care, the publisher didn't care, and I enjoy not working in the game industry these days.
posted by Foosnark at 4:05 PM on October 11, 2019 [14 favorites]


That's a lot of floppy disks.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:19 PM on October 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


On the flipside, games like RDR 2 are absolutely beautiful. If it takes 135GB to make that a reality, bring it on!

There's an awkward moment with home PC stuff right now though between spinning drives and SSDs. You can't count on a fast SSD to make load times being there. So they still do elaborate texture pre-caching and streaming in case the disk is slow. OTOH if the gamer has an SSD then storage space is still relatively expensive and 135 GB is asking a lot.

I don't understand why textures don't compress better though. H.265 is an amazing technology for compressing video; at 720p a decent video bitstream is only twice the bandwidth of the audio. Video compression is why game streaming works so well. Why doesn't some similar fancy compression work for textures? It's no like they have to be 100% lossless uncompressed; by the time the texture is projected and rendered it's gonna be degraded anyway.
posted by Nelson at 4:35 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


I’m sure that the fault of all of this some how comes down to the Agile process.
posted by MysticMCJ at 4:38 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


H.265 is an amazing technology for compressing video; at 720p a decent video bitstream is only twice the bandwidth of the audio. Video compression is why game streaming works so well. Why doesn't some similar fancy compression work for textures?

Textures are static images, and so can't take advantage of the huge space savings from not needing to store areas that are the same across adjacent frames (to put it very simply).
posted by Dysk at 4:44 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


One more reason why I'm perfectly happy (for the moment) to make storing and running modern AAA games Nvidia's problem and reserve my PC for old stuff and indie games.
posted by wierdo at 4:50 PM on October 11, 2019


What Dysk said, plus in many cases what goes out the door is effectively a lightly zipped version of the DXT5-compressed texture. DXT5 is a fantastic tradeoff in terms of size vs lossiness vs *how quickly the GPU can lookup arbitrary pixel values*, but it’s nowhere near what can be achieved by compression not burdened by that third aspect.
posted by Ryvar at 4:52 PM on October 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


something completely stupid and unnecessary (in my view).

Oh good lord yes Ogg decompression is plenty fast enough - even if you did need the extra speed intelligent caching of the decompressed assets would get you there.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:27 PM on October 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


I remember when I brought an xbox home for the weekend a few years ago and I thought I'd rent a game from redbox. It took the entire weekend to download the game's latest patch over my adequate for everything but downloading game patches internet connection. FML.
posted by srboisvert at 5:30 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


To be fair, it's not the game developers' fault we are all using ancient filesystems that lack support for transparent compression with one of the so-fast-as-to-be-better-than-free compression algorithms in common use in modern storage formats.
posted by wierdo at 5:30 PM on October 11, 2019


First thing I thought of was mipmaps, but that’s not the issue. Right, it’s about volume required for textures. I’d think it’d be more useful to handle this up front: the installer gathers the rig’s specs and curates an installation package of appropriately sized textures. The matrix would represent full, half, low resolution with an option to accept the recommendation or allow user’s choice.

FYI: I don’t play games anymore so I don’t know if this is already a thing. But I do know about rendering and the inputs required like texture, bump, displacement, specular, normal maps, et al.
posted by lemon_icing at 6:02 PM on October 11, 2019


To be fair, it's not the game developers' fault we are all using ancient filesystems that lack support for transparent compression with one of the so-fast-as-to-be-better-than-free compression algorithms in common use in modern storage formats.

Transparent compression all but stopped existing because all the stuff we were downloading and the stuff we needed the most space was already compressed to hell and back. Why would someone need transparent compression when a huge chunk of the media is MP3 and AVC anyway.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:06 PM on October 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


The last five games I've played took up 900 MB, 600 MB, 4.3 GB, 900 MB, and 500 MB respectively. I've netted 350 hours of game time collectively across the five.

Ever get the feeling that other people are doing it wrong?
posted by belarius at 6:22 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


Transparent compression all but stopped existing because all the stuff we were downloading and the stuff we needed the most space was already compressed to hell and back. Why would someone need transparent compression when a huge chunk of the media is MP3 and AVC anyway.

Because a huge chunk isn't, and those chunks can be read and written much more quickly when they are reduced in size by 25-50%. Besides, it stopped existing because the algorithms in use at the time running on the CPUs of the time caused meaningful load. Any (x86_64) system built in the past 10 years, on the other hand, has more than enough cycles to spare that are otherwise being wasted waiting for I/O.

Not everyone's hard drives are full of compressed audio, video, and pictures, and even if they are, the algorithms are fast enough that storage is slower anyway.

(A couple of months ago, I would have been arguing against this view, but recent experience has shown me just how outdated my assumptions were)
posted by wierdo at 6:32 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


(Indeed, if decompression is faster than disk access, and the compression ratio is somewhat less than 1, compressed storage should actually speed up disk read speed...)
posted by kaibutsu at 7:07 PM on October 11, 2019


ancient filesystems that lack support for transparent compression

Aren't we all running Stacker on our 286s? Call my BBS and go to the warez section
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:16 PM on October 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


Wierdo: LZ4 that changed your mind? Something else?
posted by Ryvar at 7:39 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


No, belarius, people that like and play games that are different from the ones you like and play aren't "doing it wrong."
posted by ElKevbo at 9:02 PM on October 11, 2019 [9 favorites]


Ever get the feeling that other people are doing it wrong?

I'm getting the feeling that "I only play relatively small-footprint games" is the new "I don't even own a TV."
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:19 PM on October 11, 2019 [7 favorites]


On a positive note, I have now learned that RDR2 is finally coming to PC
posted by exogenous at 9:37 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


Stacker (and DoubleSpace/DriveSpace) exemplify the other big reason we quit using compression. Implementations designed for the constraints of DOS and pre-Pentium Ii (ish) systems tend to amplify data loss. In at least one famous case, to the point of making it an all or nothing affair.

Modern disks are a lot less likely to spew single bit errors that corrupt an entire compression block, and modern filesystems are (often) smart enough to notice and recover gracefully if they do. The disks themselves are also far more likely to detect (and correct) such errors as well. They all can, but firmware limitations prevent many consumer disks from handling errors as well as they might.

(Every modern spinning rust disk encodes the bitstream committed to disk with multiple levels of ECC and FEC. They couldn't possibly work with the insanely high bit density they have these days if they didn't.)
posted by wierdo at 10:27 PM on October 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


Was doing some disk cleanup today and noticed that while AutoCAD 2015 is 462MB, Acrobat Reader is 469MB, my mouse driver is 229MB, lan driver 369MB and Motorola Device Manager is 8.55GB. I don't need my cell to talk to my laptop that bad *plonk*. And what the hell is a driver doing with all that space? AutoCAD is a huge complicated program. A LAN driver is providing a little hardware shim.

A lot of the disk bloat is laziness; disk efficiency isn't one of the priority targets so size on disk is ever expanding. I wouldn't be surprised to learn those huge drivers include 16 different language versions including uncompressed help animations. What the hell else could they be doing with all that space.

I'm getting the feeling that "I only play relatively small-footprint games" is the new "I don't even own a TV."
A Nethack install is only 10MB.
posted by Mitheral at 10:31 PM on October 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


Surely that 8GB included some backups of whatever device you had connected?
posted by wierdo at 11:49 PM on October 11, 2019


Looks like "Battle for Wesnoth" is still in the Canonical repos . . .
posted by aspersioncast at 4:25 AM on October 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


I mentioned above that this would be a lot of floppy disks. Up through the mid-eighties, PC games were installed on 360 Kb floppy discs. The larger games today would require one million floppy disks.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:20 AM on October 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


And the games would be so expensive only the five richest kings of Europe could an them.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:24 AM on October 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


It is Parkinson's Law, nothing else.
I dug out an old game called Tanks that was written during the Falklands War.
It fitted on a single 1.44 floppy and is the best shooting game I have ever seen.
The object was to capture President "Galtihairy"???
posted by Burn_IT at 5:48 AM on October 12, 2019


bloat is bitmaps, and audio mostly
posted by inpHilltr8r at 7:21 AM on October 12, 2019


Surely that 8GB included some backups of whatever device you had connected?

Probably, but that isn't something I asked for. In order to transfer files from the phone to my laptop via USB I had to install the driver (which also Why? my last two phones seamlessly presented as USB drives). If I'd had any thought that the driver would chew up a 1/100th of my drive space it wouldn't have been installed. But the development team said "hey, a device back up feature might be used by users and it'll only cost disk space so let's add it".
posted by Mitheral at 9:33 AM on October 12, 2019


FWIW Windows has had compression for NTFS filesystems forever. Most consumer PCs right now can compress files. I don't think it's frequently turned on. (MacOS also used to support compression but didn't add it to APFS, I don't think. Linux supports it.)

The tradeoff is CPU time and memory cache vs disk speed and capacity. With spinning drives it did used to be that for many workloads, it was faster to load small compressed data and decompress it. But with SSDs I suspect that turns on its head and it's faster to store stuff uncompressed again, or at least not any slower. OTOH now SSDs care about capacity again.

Disk sizes are funny things. One pleasant surprise switching from an iPhone to Android is how much smaller the Android binaries are. Facebook is a 450 MB download on iOS, and only 50 MB on Android. Crazy! Apparently it's partly the size of the code binary itself, and partly that iOS apps tend to include pixel-perfect raster images of all the art for a bunch of screen sizes whereas Android apps tend to include vector art.

What really matters to me these days is download size. 50 GB is a lot to siphon through a connection. Particularly if you have a slow rural connection; 50 GB takes 9 hours at my rural Internet speeds. Also for folks dealing with low data caps it can be expensive. And forget downloading something that big on a cellular link.
posted by Nelson at 9:35 AM on October 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


What's the best way to mirror an old drive on to a new bigger one so that everything works right?

Macrium Reflect.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 9:45 AM on October 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


I still have my original 6 discs of Baldur's Gate 1.
Now we have Blu-Ray on Consoles and apparently that's not enough.
Are we going to require 6 Hard Drives for a game installs in the future?

This is fucking absurd. Especially since like 90% of these games are just multiplayer focused with minimal attention to single player which shoudl require more assets (i know COD and others DO have single player, but almost everyone is doing multi anyways).

I don't have an SSD, and I have like 1.5 TB of storage, and only about 250 gigs are currently devoted to games (though my actual collection on steam is much larger, the installed ones are fewer)...

I mean it's nice we no longer have to have the discs in the drive to run them anymore, but ... maybe we need to go back to that? Sure it's slower, but... damn.
posted by symbioid at 11:51 AM on October 12, 2019


What's odd about Android and Apple is that I ended up on iPad after having been Android since 2012 and the speed at which an Apple app installs on that seems SOOOOOOOO much faster and I wonder why.
posted by symbioid at 12:07 PM on October 12, 2019


The classic example of a game being so big people said WTF is Time Zone on the Apple ][, a graphical adventure by the great Roberta Williams. It took 6 double-sided disks. And since you had to flip disks manually back in the day, every time you moved from zone to zone it was a hunt for which of 12 discs you had to swap in to load next. It sold for $100, double what other games sold for, and was also proportionately hard to pirate. I think the game did use compression for the images, but state of the art in that era was run length encoding, there were no GIFs or JPGs.

I just happened to be using Steam Library Manager; I finally gave up and bought a second hard drive just for Steam and this tool helps you move games. It also includes an option to compress installed Steam games. Unfortunately you have to uncompress them to play them again, so that's pretty awkward.

Another option is to use Windows 10 Compact function; it's a more advanced form of OS compression than what NTFS does. You can compress individual apps, it uses fancier algorithms, etc. You can run compacted apps. CompactGUI is a tool to use it easily.

They have a table of compression results for games. Compression ratios are all over the place. FWIW Grand Theft Auto 3 compresses 44%, but GTA4 and GTA5 both compress under 10%; Rockstar must have already squeezed the life out of it. GTA 5 is a 75GB install! Total War: Warhammer is the big winner; it compacts from 54GB to 34GB.
posted by Nelson at 12:26 PM on October 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


A Nethack install is only 10MB.

DCSS webtiles might leave a few kb in your browser's cache?

(Offline Console is about 8MB, Tiles is around 15)
posted by porpoise at 10:08 PM on October 12, 2019


I have honestly wondered to myself, after installing a game under 30GB, if I'm really getting my money's worth.

I tend to wonder the opposite; 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a huge and beautiful open world game (IMO far more beautiful than RDR2) with the best physics engine in gaming and only takes up 13.4GB. If a game is over 30GB I therefore start wondering how much polish they really put into the game and therefore how much it holds up in other ways.
posted by Francis at 1:18 AM on October 14, 2019 [2 favorites]


Breath of the Wild is cel-shaded, which I believe greatly reduces the cost of textures. Pushing the aesthetic of video games closer to animation (and further from realism) goes a long way...
posted by kaibutsu at 12:14 PM on October 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


kaibutsu:
Kind of. Here's what Breath of the Wild looks like without the 'toon shader post-process. Obviously still a fair amount of texture memory being consumed. The real answer is that it's highly variable depending on implementation. Guilty Gear Xrd comes to mind as a case where there's still significant texture usage (and 3~4x higher polycount), but the textures would see extremely high compression ratios from simple RLE relative to most games.
posted by Ryvar at 6:12 AM on October 15, 2019


Also, Breath of the Wild had only a tiny amount of voice acting, which greatly reduced the amount of space needed for audio files.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:02 AM on October 15, 2019


A good game shouldn't need to be this overwrought; when will these gaming companies consider the environmental impact of pushing 4k textures at 60fps?
posted by gorgor_balabala at 12:19 PM on October 15, 2019


Have there been any games that go the other way and run at 24fps to try and be "cinematic"?
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:30 PM on October 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


Here's a video with some side-by-side comparisons.

A couple things that jump out at me:

* Video games tend to use more first-person perspectives, meaning that the cameras are moving much faster and more often than cameras in movies typically are. That means that you get a lot of very noticeable jerkiness in large objects moving quickly relative to the camera that you don't typically have to worry about with movies.

* In old-school film cameras, at least, there's a period of darkness between the frames. Via persistence of vision, the brain literally fills in the blanks. My guess is that a naive implementation, without the blank space in between, still won't look as filmic, and frame-to-frame jerk may be more pronounced. (I'm unsure if that has carried over to modern digital projectors. Maybe this whole point is bollocks.)
posted by kaibutsu at 2:15 PM on October 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


That video is very useful, and it's pretty clear that while a lot of character/vehicle animations are noticeably less "smooth" in 24 fps the first-person cameras are particularly disorienting at the lower frame rate. I wonder how much the on-by-default motion blur a lot of games have these days would cover that up, though.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:53 PM on October 15, 2019


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