Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by throw0101c » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

jasomill wrote: post #149

throw0101c wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day: > 3-D Hardware Accelerator (with 16MB VRAM with full OpenGL® support; Pentium® II 400 Mhz processor or Athlon® processor; English version of Windows® 2000/XP Operating System; 128 MB RAM; 16-bit high color video mode; 800 MB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files (Minimum Install), plus 300 MB for the Windows swap file […] * https://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/Return_to_Castle_Wol... * ht…

For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year. The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me: Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space. Rough featur…

Further there is PDF software (read, write) that often does the same things that is much less heavy.

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

#202

Post by hinkley » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #175

ghurtado wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Are you a working software engineer? I'm sure that whatever project you're assigned to has a lot of optimization stuff in the backlog that you'd love to work on but haven't had a chance to visit because bugfixes, new features, etc. I'm sure the process at Arrowhead is not much different. For sure, duplicating those assets on PC installs turned out to be the wrong call. But install sizes were still pretty reasonable f…

I’m a working software developer, and if they prove they cannot do better, I get people who make statements like GP quoted demoted from the decision making process because they aren’t trustworthy and they’re embarrassing the entire team with their lack of critical thinking skills.

When the documented worst case is 5x you prepare for the potential bad news that you will hit 2.5x to 5x in your own code. Not assume it will be 10x and preemptively act, keeping your users from installing three other games.

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

#203

Post by mikepurvis » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #152

mikepurvis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My understanding is that optimizing for sequential read is a big reason for historical game install bloat; if you include the common assets multiple times in the archive, then loading a level/zone becomes one big continuous slurp rather than jumping all over the place to pick up the stuff that's common to everything. Obviously this didn't matter with optical media where the user wasn't impacted, but it's annoying on PC where we've had a long period of users who invested in expensive, high-performance storage having to use more of it than needed due to optimizations geared at legacy players still on spinning rust.

I expect that low-latency seek time is also pretty key to making stuff like nanite work, where all the LODs for a single object are mixed together and you need to be able to quickly pick off the disk the parts that are needed for the current draw task.

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

#204

Post by jandrese » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #197

loeg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSDs did not "stop getting bigger a decade plus ago." The largest SSD announced in 2015 was 16TB. You can get 128-256TB SSDs today. You can buy 16-32TB consumer SSDs on NewEgg today. Or 8TB in M.2 form factor. In 2015, the largest M.2 SSDs were like 1TB. That's merely a decade. At a decade "plus," SSDs were tiny as recently as 15 years ago.

But the mainstream is still at 500GB-2TB ranges, so...

The mainstream drives are heavily focused on lowering the price. Back in the 2010s SSDs in the TB range were hundreds of dollars, today you can find them for $80 without breaking a sweat[1]. If you're willing to still spend $500 you can get 8TB drives[2].

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/659879/inland-platinum-1...

[2] https://www.microcenter.com/product/700777/inland-platinum-8...

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

#205

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

panja wrote: post #159

gethly wrote: post #56

if your game takes 154 GB of space, you should never be able to touch a computer ever again.

I agree more can be done to shave game sizes but space is cheap these days so that's probably why it hasn't been a focus.

The same argument gets used when concerning CPU performance when writing software with 10+ levels of abstraction and now your CPU gets pegged when on a semi-active Discord channel.

Who cares that it takes a million clock cycles to process a single message? People are running 5 Ghz CPUs, so that's only 200 ms, right?

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

#206

Post by __david__ » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

loeg wrote: post #174

superkuh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

SSDs did not "stop getting bigger a decade plus ago." The largest SSD announced in 2015 was 16TB. You can get 128-256TB SSDs today. You can buy 16-32TB consumer SSDs on NewEgg today. Or 8TB in M.2 form factor. In 2015, the largest M.2 SSDs were like 1TB. That's merely a decade. At a decade "plus," SSDs were tiny as recently as 15 years ago.

Perhaps my searching skills aren’t great but I don’t see any consumer ssds over 8TB. Can you share a link? It was my understanding that ssds have plateaued due to wattage restriction across SATA and M.2 connections. I’ve only seen large SSDs in U.3 and E[13].[SL] form factors which I would not call consumer.

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

#207

Post by justsomehnguy » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

snet0 wrote: post #25

code_for_monkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think certain games dont even bother to optimize the install size so that you cant fit other games on the hard drive, I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs

I've often seen people mention that one reason for games like Call of Duty being so enormous is optimising for performance over storage. You'd rather decompress textures/audio files at install-time rather than during run-time, because you download/install so infrequently.

It's amusing we had a 2x-10x compression and negligible perfomance hit on 486 with DBLSPACE yet in 2020+...

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

#208

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #187

JohnBooty wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time. But this means that before they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing how their game performed with and without it? Maybe they didn't test it with their game because their game didn't exist yet, because this was a decision made fairly early in the development process. In hindsight, yeah... it was the wrong call. I'm j…

Go figure: people are downvoting me but I never once said developers must be stupid or lazy. This is a very common kind of mistake developers often make: premature optimization without considering the actual bottlenecks, and without testing theoretical optimizations actually make any difference. I know I'm guilty of this! I never called anyone lazy or stupid, I just wondered whether they blindly trusted some stats wi…

    premature optimization

One of those absolutely true statements that can obscure a bigger reality.

It's certainly true that a lot of optimization can and should be done after a software project is largely complete. You can see where the hotspots are, optimize the most common SQL queries, whatever. This is especially true for CRUD apps where you're not even really making fundamental architecture decisions at all, because those have already been made by your framework of choice.

Other sorts of projects (like games or "big data" processing) can be a different beast. You do have to make some of those big, architecture-level performance decisions up front.

Remember, for a game... you are trying to process player inputs, do physics, and render a complex graphical scene in 16.7 milliseconds or less. You need to make some big decisions early on; performance can't entirely just be sprinkled on at the end. Some of those decisions don't pan out.

    > FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time

    Wouldn't this mean their optimization mattered even less back then?

I don't see a reason to think this. What are you thinking?

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

#209

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #97

> "It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days" Is it not? I've genuinely never understood it! I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures? In particular I find the massive disparit…

> I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?

Yeah.

A single 4096x4096 texture is 16 megapixels. At 8 bits per channel with potentially 4 channels, that's 64 MB for a single texture uncompressed.

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

#210

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #202

JohnBooty wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a working software engineer? I'm sure that whatever project you're assigned to has a lot of optimization stuff in the backlog that you'd love to work on but haven't had a chance to visit because bugfixes, new features, etc. I'm sure the process at Arrowhead is not much different. For sure, duplicating those assets on PC installs turned out to be the wrong call. But install sizes were still pretty reasonable f…

I’m a working software developer, and if they prove they cannot do better, I get people who make statements like GP quoted demoted from the decision making process because they aren’t trustworthy and they’re embarrassing the entire team with their lack of critical thinking skills. When the documented worst case is 5x you prepare for the potential bad news that you will hit 2.5x to 5x in your own code. Not assume it w…

Well, then I'd like to work where you work. Hard to find shops that take performance seriously. You hiring?

In my experience it's always been quite a battle to spend time on perf.

I'll happily take a demotion if I make a 10x performance goof like that. As long as I can get promoted eventually if I make enough 10x wins.