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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

#151

Post by PunchyHamster »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #140
embedding-shape wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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."

the problem is that it doesn't say that directly so people without experience take it at face value.

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

#152

Post by PunchyHamster »

mikepurvis wrote: post #80
NBJack wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the speed is one thing but seek times are just orders of magnitude different too.

SSD on SATA is still "not bad" for most games, but HDD can be awful if game does not do much sequential

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

#153

Post by jjmarr »

jeroenhd wrote: post #93
afavour wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consum…

If this is a common issue in industry why don't game devs make a user visible slider to control dedup?

I have friends who play one or two games and want them to load fast. Others have dozens and want storage space.

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

#154

Post by PunchyHamster »

jsheard wrote: post #34
Ekaros wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the cost is often offloaded to the "greedy" Valve... So there is less pressure to optimize their own CDN use.

Yeah, I don't think any of the stores charge developers in proportion to how much bandwidth they use. If that changed then the priorities could shift pretty quickly. Publishers do have to care somewhat on the Switch since Nintendo does charge them more for higher capacity physical carts, but a lot of the time they just sidestep that by only putting part (or none) of the game on the cart and requiring the player to do…

it's not really all that big of a cost, serving few hundred GBs costs pennies, despise what prices of S3 storage and bandwidth might led some people to believe.

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

#155

Post by embedding-shape »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #140
embedding-shape wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, you and me understand that quote, probably mostly because we've both read all the text around the quote too, not just the quote itself. But there is a lot of people who dogmatically follow things other's write about without first digging deeper, and it's these people I was talking about before. Lots of people seemingly run on whatever soundbites they can remember.

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

#156

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

"having one less game installed on your SSD" isn't exactly same as cost per TB, it's just slight wasted convenience at worst

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

#157

Post by panja »

miohtama wrote: post #38

AFAIK Helldivers 2 runs some really old engine which was discontinued many years ago. Not "state of the art." It's also a title that shows you can have a really good game without the latest tech.

To be fair, they started working on the game before it was discontinued. I'm sure someone made a decision that it made more sense to continue on without support rather than start from scratch.

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

#158

Post by PunchyHamster »

unixnight wrote: post #134

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

I remember how pre-loading some games turned out to be slower for me because downloading it at launch meant decrypting it directly from the network, but decrypting files on drive that are already encrypted doubled the IO and that was too much random access for my hard drive

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

#160

Post by ghurtado »

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.

>In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not.

Never trust a report that highlights the outliers before even discussing the mean. Never trust someone who thinks that is a sane way to use of statistics. At best they are not very sharp, and at worst they are manipulating you.

> We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.

Ok, now that's absolutely ridiculous and treating the reader like a complete idiot. "We took the absolute best case scenario reported by something we read somewhere, and doubled it without giving a second thought, because WTF not?. Since this took us 5 seconds to do, we went with that until you started complaining".

Making up completely random numbers on the fly would have made exactly the same amount of sense.

Trying to spin this whole thing into "look at how smart we are that we reverted our own completely brain-dead decision" is the cherry on top.

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