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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

#131

Post by mrec »

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…

> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month

Where are you getting this number from? Not necessarily arguing with it, just curious.

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

#132

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

it's not cost to them. The cost is paid by consumers and platforms.

Also if goal was to improve things for small minority they could've just pawned it off to free DLC, like how some games do with 4k texture packs

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

#133

Post by pavel_lishin »

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…

> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month

Out of curiousity, how do you come up with a number for this? I would have zero idea of how to even start estimating such a thing, or even being able to tell you whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers.

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

#134

Post by unixnight »

It was legit faster to delete and redownload this game than update it since steam considered my SSD too full (WITH 200 GIGS FREE) to download the files to said SSD, instead opting to use my SLOWEST HDD as the cache drive for the download.

It would then proceed to download the update in 5 minutes and spend 8 HOURS UPDATING.

A full download of the game? 10 minutes.

Glad to see this update. I hope more games follow suit

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

#135

Post by superkuh »

deng wrote: post #31
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…

11% still play HD2 with a spinning drive? I would've never guessed that. There's probably some vicious circle thing going on: because the install size is so big, people need to install it on their secondary, spinning drive...

It is no surprise to me that people still have to use HDD for storage. SSD stopped getting bigger a decade plus ago.

SSD sizes are still only equal to the HDD sizes available and common in 2010 (a couple TB~). SSD size increases (availability+price decreases) for consumers form factors have entirely stopped. There is no more progress for SSD because quad level cells are as far as the charge trap tech can be pushed and most people no longer own computers. They have tablets or phones or if they have a laptop it has 256GB of storage and everything is done in the cloud or with an octopus of (small) externals.

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

#136

Post by thunderfork »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #113
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…

Why not offer 2 versions for download and let the user choose, whether they want to block their whole disk with a single game, or accept a bit longer loading times? Or let the user at installation time make an informed decision by explaining the supposed optimization? Or let the user decide before downloading, what resolution (ergo textures) they want as the highest resolution they will play the game at and only down…

[dead]

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

#137

Post by PunchyHamster »

jeroenhd wrote: post #122
account42 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

23 GiB can be cached entirely in RAM on higher end gaming rigs these days. 154 GiB probably does not fit into many player's RAM when you still want something left for the OS and game. Reducing how much needs to be loaded from slow storage is itself an I/O speedup and HDDs are not that bad at seeking that you need to go to extreme lengths to avoid it entirely. The only place where such duplication to ensure linear rea…

They used "industry data" to make performance estimations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... > These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not.

Instead of y'know, running their own game on a hdd.

It's literally "instead of profiling our own app we profiled competition's app and made decisions based on that".

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

#138

Post by thunderfork »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #120
haritha-j wrote: post #75

I recently downloaded Hunt showdown. I think it was around 70 gigs. About a month later, I had to update it. The download was the same size. I think they literally just overrode the entire game because they were too lazy to update it properly.

I observed this too with some other games. Really annoying, when you need to redownload tens of gigabytes , because they cannot be arsed to put a proper updater. Things that were solved by most games way before Steam became even big.

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

#139

Post by the_af »

jeroenhd wrote: post #122
account42 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

23 GiB can be cached entirely in RAM on higher end gaming rigs these days. 154 GiB probably does not fit into many player's RAM when you still want something left for the OS and game. Reducing how much needs to be loaded from slow storage is itself an I/O speedup and HDDs are not that bad at seeking that you need to go to extreme lengths to avoid it entirely. The only place where such duplication to ensure linear rea…

They used "industry data" to make performance estimations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... > These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not.

But if I read it correctly (and I may be mistaken) in actual practice any improvement in load times was completely hidden by level generation that was happening in parallel, making this performance improvement not worth it, since it was hidden by the other process.

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

#140

Post by Capricorn2481 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #46
bombcar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the moral behind "premature optimization is the root of all evil" - you could say preconceived just as easily.

> you could say preconceived just as easily Would have saved us from all the people who reject any sort of optimization work because for them it is always "too early" since some product team wanted their new feature in production yesterday, and users waiting 5 seconds for a page load isn't considered bad enough just yet.

Premature optimization doesn't mean "We have an obvious fix sitting in front of us that will definitely improve things."

It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway."

So it doesn't save us from anything, it potentially delays launching and gives us the same result that product team would have given us, but more expensive.

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