Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

richg42.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 267 posts

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#32

Post by sroussey »

sudosysgen wrote: post #27
taeric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels wrong. In that, I'd be surprised if they are not using compression. I think folks are just drastically underestimating how many resources are under discussion. And how big they are. Heck, just the geometry is probably far larger than folks anticipate.

It's true. I've seen tons of games use basically uncompressed audio, badly compressed textures, etc... People often repack video games, making programs to compress and decompress them so they are easier to pirate. It's not uncommon to see a 2-3x reduction in size, for bit-identical results.

Textures are not compressed for size on disk, they are compressed to the format that can be directly loaded into the GPU.

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#33

Post by ok_dad »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #16
MrFoof wrote: post #12

The Moore's Law is Dead podcast recently did a podcast with an Infinity Ward award-winning effects artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmfHxJT1I3I . The crazy thing he mentioned is that if there was zero compression, the latest COD games genuinely had over 1 terabyte of uncompressed assets.

But why?

Have you played a modern game? they have amazing levels of detail in the tiniest places. One game I play, Gran Turismo 7, claims that a single car model start to finish takes months to model for a single modeler. Some of the details in those cars that you can see in VR you can absolutely not see in-game normally, such as the door lock controls or the key-hole for the driver's door being exactly like on the real car, even for something so rare as a McLaren F1 longtail. There is so much waste of time and space dedicated to this stuff, but I love it personally!

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#34

Post by sudosysgen »

sroussey wrote: post #32
sudosysgen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true. I've seen tons of games use basically uncompressed audio, badly compressed textures, etc... People often repack video games, making programs to compress and decompress them so they are easier to pirate. It's not uncommon to see a 2-3x reduction in size, for bit-identical results.

Textures are not compressed for size on disk, they are compressed to the format that can be directly loaded into the GPU.

Yes, that's the problem. You can compress them for size at download time, and recompress them to a GPU-optimal format at the time of installation. You may even be able to do it at runtime with modern hardware, shortening loadtimes and sometimes even improving performance indirectly.

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#35

Post by topspin »

bick_nyers wrote: post #4

Faster internet and cheaper storage is the answer :) Or at the very least just offer two different downloads of the game, one with lossless textures and one with lossy textures...

Guild Wars 2 and others solve this with progressive downloads. You may start playing after a fraction of the content is downloaded. There is effectively no downside: new players can't access most of the content anyhow. It also applies to updates: you can start playing after a big update with a partial download. The background process can be safely interrupted and resumed without glitches.

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#36

Post by ricardobayes »

terafo wrote: post #5

He completely misses the point. Games don't take hundreds of gigs because they have sub-optimal compression. They take hundreds of gigs because they don't use ANY compression. Jedi Survivor takes 139 gigs on Series X and mere 44 gigs on Series S. It didn't come out yet, but I'm 99.99% certain that this difference is just from inclusion of 8k textures into Series X version. That kind of scaling means that they don't u…

I remember Fallout New Vegas was almost 50 GB because it was a parallel install of all language/localization files. Once you manually deleted the languages you didn't want it went back to like 10 GB.

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#37

Post by nijave »

sudosysgen wrote: post #25
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they ACTIVELY duplicate their assets on disk so they load a bit faster on HDD How does that work?

Shorter seek times because the bits are likely to be on the same or nearby tracks.

Yup, basically converting random IO to sequential IO

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#39

Post by taeric »

marcellus23 wrote: post #29
taeric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels wrong. In that, I'd be surprised if they are not using compression. I think folks are just drastically underestimating how many resources are under discussion. And how big they are. Heck, just the geometry is probably far larger than folks anticipate.

Maybe not for that particular game, but a lot of games have been shown to use uncompressed assets. It's not just speculation.

Even for transferring the game to local?

I can see some benefits to having uncompressed assets in that it would help with asset loading. I'd still be surprised to not have any form of compression at all happening. I'd also be curious to know just how much the assets could be compressed.

Post reply on HN