I recall a lot of hype more than a decade ago about all the textures going away and being replaced with math formulas to generate everything on the fly. Games were supposed to get dramatically smaller. What ever happened to that?
Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
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Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#12The 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.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#13Richg42 is great & his pieces are fun to read. I do think in this case he misses a bit of the point, goes too far: > They are designed for fast loading and streaming off SSD's. Who cares about saving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD? Most games will have only one two or three downloads over the user's lifetime, and it'll never be instant, will always…
That can be solved on first load with a texture cache. Shader caches are pretty universal at this point. Texture caches aren't (afaik), but I think they should be.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#14He 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…
At least for steam all chunks of a game download are compressed and encrypted.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#15If users hate large file sizes, they should just stop buying them. Unfortunately, hitting the bottom line is really the only way to get this resolved.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#16The 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?
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#17Cloud gaming is.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#18I recall a lot of hype more than a decade ago about all the textures going away and being replaced with math formulas to generate everything on the fly. Games were supposed to get dramatically smaller. What ever happened to that?
Economics. Supply and demand. To create good procedural art you have to hire software engineers with artistic talent, which are more expensive than the texture and model artists you can find by the hundreds coming out of art schools.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#19Richg42 is great & his pieces are fun to read. I do think in this case he misses a bit of the point, goes too far: > They are designed for fast loading and streaming off SSD's. Who cares about saving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD? Most games will have only one two or three downloads over the user's lifetime, and it'll never be instant, will always…
That can be solved on first load with a texture cache. Shader caches are pretty universal at this point. Texture caches aren't (afaik), but I think they should be.
So now we would have faster download & faster load, but we'd have significantly bugger hard drive space usage than we have? That also seems like a concern.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#20He 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…
If you compress data, it will be smaller and require less i/o to load, so it will load faster. That's ESPECIALLY true on HDDs, but even on SSDs there are decompression algos that run faster than SSD bandwidth. The uncompressed asset cargo cult is hurting everyone who plays their games, no matter what kind of disk they use.