Why have game install sizes gotten so large?
- Thread starter Doogles
- Start date
This. Pretty clear really that as the quality of sound and video increases, then so does the installation size...
I just don't see the amount of improvement to the size, maybe it is a bit of both? Less compression + the extra sound and textures etc?
Associate
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One of the biggest things is 1080p FMV cutscenes, these are monsters, and no company wants that huge investment looking artifacty (a real word) by trying to slim off a couple of gig using a heavy handed codec. That and massive amounts of in game textures.
lazy devs
+1
I am serious considering it takes me overnight to download them, max payne 3 taken me a whole 20 hours to download, worth it but annoying as hell.
Wait until UHD takes off then we will have 300GB game downloads lol.
If you look at something like Ryse Son of Rome the game biniaries and engine takes up about 200mb. Yet the graphics, videos and objects etc takes up about 22gb.
Quite often the actual game, ie the program is quite small.
Quite often the actual game, ie the program is quite small.
Soldato
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I thought it was cut scenes?
Our game client is 15MB, but when you add in all the models, textures, sounds (etc), that increases almost 6GB.
Textures is the killer for us.
Texture size is the reason I would expect and uncompressed audio?
It is progress.
Imagine what 4k would look like with textures from 5 years ago.
Consoles also play a part as they were limited to 4.5/9GB for a LONG time.
They now have Blue Ray media which is 25/50GB.
Quality will increase, especially as their render resolution has also increased.
It is progress.
Imagine what 4k would look like with textures from 5 years ago.
Consoles also play a part as they were limited to 4.5/9GB for a LONG time.
They now have Blue Ray media which is 25/50GB.
Quality will increase, especially as their render resolution has also increased.
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Caporegime
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Uncompressed audio and textures, people say it's video without actually looking at video file sizes which are usually small with a large portion of games having in game rendered videos for a lot of the parts you can't control.
Thief is 24GB almost 2GB of movie files. Maps are 11GB, not much in audio but by a guess at folder names it's got only 500MB of audio which are likely those random conversations you can overhear. Shadow or Mordor is 45GB movie folder is < 6GB, audio is < 4GB, the main folder has almost 34GB of texture asset files.
Unity is 40GB, it has over 5GB of audio files but less than 2GB of video data. 1080p pre-rendered video is not that large, it's no where near bluray quality. More and more cutscenes are done via in game rendering and just some scripting to direct characters... it's why so many in game cutscenes are buggy as hell these days. Sure it looks daft when you have some armour on and the cutscene has you wearing something else entirely, but is it any less immersive than say in Dragon Age when your party members end up standing infront of the camera blocking it, or your characters face is clipping through the collar on your coat(which happens a hell of a lot). Video really isn't the issue with increasing game size.
It probably used to be that you have graphics cards with 100-150gb/s at the top end, 20gb/s at the low end(be that console or a igp). At that stage low texture settings would require say 500mb of data installed but you also install the 1GB medium setting textures and 2GB of high setting textures.
Now with the low end and high end scaled up it's more like 3GB low settings, 6GB medium settings, 12GB high settings. Added up you end up with a vast amount of texture data. One possibility, depending on how textures are swapped out for lower IQ in distance, is to give the user the option to not install low/medium textures at all so rather than 21GB you would end up installing 12GB.
A little bit of sense in terms of intelligent install which tells you how much vram you need for which setting and to let you choose not to install whatever settings you don't want with an ingame option of should you chose a setting for which you don't have the textures installed it gives you a confirmation box saying it requires installing X GB's more from disc to enable setting. Maybe another option in game to remove texture settings as you may want to test which settings work best for you then have it be easy to free up the hdd space once you're happy with a specific setting.
In fact the game size isn't really an issue, we had 10gb installs when 500GB drives weren't that cheap, now it's 50gb installs at the top end when 4TB drives aren't that cheap.
The big issue here is that SSD's happened, if we were all spending £100 on 3-4TB hdd's then we'd laugh at 50GB requirements, but now it's £100 for 256GB SSD and with the OS and some other programs you can only have 3-4 big games on there before you're out of space and you want to keep a fair amount free for performance/lifespan of the drive.
5 years ago I probably had a couple 500GB drives in raid for OS/games and a couple of 1TB drives. Without SSD's I'd have 2x1tb drives in raid and a 4TB back up/storage/video drive, instead I hav a 256gb OS SSD, I have 2x128gb ssd's(not raided) as they were cheap to have further space for games and then a 2TB drive for downloading crap onto and storing videos/backup stuff.
Thief is 24GB almost 2GB of movie files. Maps are 11GB, not much in audio but by a guess at folder names it's got only 500MB of audio which are likely those random conversations you can overhear. Shadow or Mordor is 45GB movie folder is < 6GB, audio is < 4GB, the main folder has almost 34GB of texture asset files.
Unity is 40GB, it has over 5GB of audio files but less than 2GB of video data. 1080p pre-rendered video is not that large, it's no where near bluray quality. More and more cutscenes are done via in game rendering and just some scripting to direct characters... it's why so many in game cutscenes are buggy as hell these days. Sure it looks daft when you have some armour on and the cutscene has you wearing something else entirely, but is it any less immersive than say in Dragon Age when your party members end up standing infront of the camera blocking it, or your characters face is clipping through the collar on your coat(which happens a hell of a lot). Video really isn't the issue with increasing game size.
It probably used to be that you have graphics cards with 100-150gb/s at the top end, 20gb/s at the low end(be that console or a igp). At that stage low texture settings would require say 500mb of data installed but you also install the 1GB medium setting textures and 2GB of high setting textures.
Now with the low end and high end scaled up it's more like 3GB low settings, 6GB medium settings, 12GB high settings. Added up you end up with a vast amount of texture data. One possibility, depending on how textures are swapped out for lower IQ in distance, is to give the user the option to not install low/medium textures at all so rather than 21GB you would end up installing 12GB.
A little bit of sense in terms of intelligent install which tells you how much vram you need for which setting and to let you choose not to install whatever settings you don't want with an ingame option of should you chose a setting for which you don't have the textures installed it gives you a confirmation box saying it requires installing X GB's more from disc to enable setting. Maybe another option in game to remove texture settings as you may want to test which settings work best for you then have it be easy to free up the hdd space once you're happy with a specific setting.
In fact the game size isn't really an issue, we had 10gb installs when 500GB drives weren't that cheap, now it's 50gb installs at the top end when 4TB drives aren't that cheap.
The big issue here is that SSD's happened, if we were all spending £100 on 3-4TB hdd's then we'd laugh at 50GB requirements, but now it's £100 for 256GB SSD and with the OS and some other programs you can only have 3-4 big games on there before you're out of space and you want to keep a fair amount free for performance/lifespan of the drive.
5 years ago I probably had a couple 500GB drives in raid for OS/games and a couple of 1TB drives. Without SSD's I'd have 2x1tb drives in raid and a 4TB back up/storage/video drive, instead I hav a 256gb OS SSD, I have 2x128gb ssd's(not raided) as they were cheap to have further space for games and then a 2TB drive for downloading crap onto and storing videos/backup stuff.
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It's the same with everything. Standard to DVD was a huge jump then to BluRay then to UHD, etc.
HD's gradually become cheaper and then storage isn't an issue, network connections become faster, etc. it's all moving parts.
I guess some would call it progress.
M.
HD's gradually become cheaper and then storage isn't an issue, network connections become faster, etc. it's all moving parts.
I guess some would call it progress.
M.
Soldato
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You may laugh, but there was a story a few months ago of titanfall releasing with 35GB worth of uncompressed audio. The developers explanation was that uncompressed audio is cheaper in CPU performance and therefore reduced the minimum specs a considerable amount. The example they gave is that on a low end two core machine one of the cores would be using the majority of its processing power for audio decompression if compressed audio was used
Whaaaaaat! The crew which is a 20GB file took me a whole 6 hours to download using my iphone as a modem and 3G. Think average download speed was 1.3mb with peaks of upto 2mb