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Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

tomshardware.com

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Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#71

Post by Cthulhu_ »

root_axis wrote: post #65
snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

Optimizing for disk space is very low on the priority list for pretty much every game, and this makes sense since its very low on the list of customer concerns relative to things like in-game performance, net code, tweaking game mechanics and balancing etc.

Apparently, in-game performance is not more important than pretty visuals. But that's based on hearsay / what I remember reading ages ago, I have no recent sources. The tl;dr was that apparently enough people are OK with a 30 fps game if the visuals are good.

I believe this led to a huge wave of 'laziness' in game development, where framerate wasn't too high up in the list of requirements. And it ended up in some games where neither graphics fidelity or frame rate was a priority (one of the recent Pokemon games... which is really disappointing for one of the biggest multimedia franchises of all time).

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#72

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

bilekas wrote: post #6
rwmj wrote: post #4

23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!

In this day and age it's a gift to only be ~23GB.. I'm reminded of the old days when you literally didn't have the space so had to get creative, now any kind of space optimization isn't even considered.

Not true at all on my PlayStation. Just a few games with 100GB+ install size can quickly put you into a space juggling scenario.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#76

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

WreckVenom wrote: post #54
fleabitdev wrote: post #28

Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher. In other words, t…

From the story: > Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect. It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and p…

SSD or HDD?

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#77

Post by WreckVenom »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #76
WreckVenom wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the story: > Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect. It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and p…

SSD or HDD?

SSD. Prices got reasonable sometime last year for 2TB NVME/SSD

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#78

Post by dv_dt »

CafeRacer wrote: post #29

In other news - "Call of Duty installer now takes additional 131GB of space on the disk"

I stopped playing CoD mainly because I was tired of juggling disk space to try to play it even casually. It's surprising to me that game publishers have ignored this as some checklist requirement to stay below.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#79

Post by jeroenhd »

deng wrote: post #59
ga2mer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0]) [0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/

You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... ). I still find these things…

Steam update durations depend on compression + CPU performance + SSD I/O. Things will be harder when the disk is almost full and live defragmentation kicks in to get free space for contiguous files. Some SSDs are fast enough to keep up with such a load, but a lot of them will quickly hit their DRAM limits and suddenly that advertised gigabyte per second write speed isn't all that fast. Bonus points for when your SSD doesn't have a heatsink and moving air over it, making the controller throttle hard.

Patching 150GiB with a compressed 15GiB download just takes a lot of I/O. The alternative is downloading a fresh copy of the 150GiB install file, but those playing on DSL will probably let their SSD whizz a few minutes longer than spend another day downloading updates.

If your SSD is slower than your internet capacity, deleting install files and re-downloading the entire game will probably save you some time.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#80

Post by mikepurvis »

NBJack wrote: post #69
snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

The game is released on both PC and PS5, the latter of which was designed (and marketed) to take advantage of SSD speeds for streaming game content near real time. The latest Ratchet and Clank, the poster child used in part to advertise the SSD speed advantage, suffers on traditional hard drives as well in the PC port. Returnal is in the same boat. Both were originally PS5 exclusives.

Noting in particular that the PS5's internal storage isn't just "an ssd", it's a gen 4 drive that can sequential-read at up to 5500 MB/s.

By comparison a SATA III port caps out at 6Gbps (750 MB/s), and first generation NVMe drives ("gen 3") were limited to 3500 MB/s.

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