Don't want to blame too much, but it seems like your internet got stuck in the past. I have 10gbits. I used to have 1gbits for a long time before. 100mbits is not that much these days. Switzerland is talking about a government mandated minimum speed of 80mbits in 2024. That's a 7 hour download on minimum speed for an unusually large game. Switzerland is not alone in this regard. That could be a view of privilege, but average internet speeds are still progressing forward fast.
Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
221–230 of 267 posts
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#222Don't want to blame too much, but it seems like your internet got stuck in the past. I have 10gbits. I used to have 1gbits for a long time before. 100mbits is not that much these days. Switzerland is talking about a government mandated minimum speed of 80mbits in 2024. That's a 7 hour download on minimum speed for an unusually large game. Switzerland is not alone in this regard. That could be a view of privilege, but…
I beleive it is your internet is a bit in a future. Good for you, but not a reason to blame others. See https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-map-us... , for example. 30-50 Mbps was median in 2020, even with COVID-induced improvements I doubt things became significantly better today.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#223Don't want to blame too much, but it seems like your internet got stuck in the past. I have 10gbits. I used to have 1gbits for a long time before. 100mbits is not that much these days. Switzerland is talking about a government mandated minimum speed of 80mbits in 2024. That's a 7 hour download on minimum speed for an unusually large game. Switzerland is not alone in this regard. That could be a view of privilege, but…
It is an extremely privileged view. In my home country of Egypt, a population of 100 million lives on an average home internet speed of 30mbps with about 300gb monthly data cap, in 2023. I'm sure most of the world is similar.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#224Don't want to blame too much, but it seems like your internet got stuck in the past. I have 10gbits. I used to have 1gbits for a long time before. 100mbits is not that much these days. Switzerland is talking about a government mandated minimum speed of 80mbits in 2024. That's a 7 hour download on minimum speed for an unusually large game. Switzerland is not alone in this regard. That could be a view of privilege, but…
You're correct about the internet stucked the past, but for a lot of places in the world even with a lot of money you won't get fast speeds! My hometown is only getting 100/25Mbits max after the previous max 30/5Mbits 2 years ago!
It's not like we don't have the money, I bought a 10900k and 2080 super for my brother back then, it's just that the speed is unavailable. A "git gud" simply don't do that justice.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and if it weren't for the RTX graphics cards setting the precedent, there would probably be more research into making things prettier without having to "brute force" things. Not really. A lot of this research included making rudimentary versions of RTGI that could run on hardware of that age(see SVOGI). Of course you can bake everything and make amazing looking levels, that are completely static. But that doesn't w…
I'd rather have more RAM in the GPU and give up the ray tracing hardware. The real problem in the industry is that GPUs are not getting cheaper. It cost about $250 for an 6GB NVidia 1060 in 2016, and it costs about $250 for a basic NVidia card today that can do slightly better. Meanwhile, people are buying $100 WalMart laptops and trying to play games on them.
You can buy RX 6600, which is roughly 2x faster than 1060 and has 8 gigs of VRAM for 200 dollars[1]. If we take inflation into account, 1060 did cost around 300$ in today's money. So basically you are getting 30% more ram and 2x performance for 30% less money. In other words you are getting performance 20% better than GTX 1080 for 4x less money(launch price of 1080 was $600). And it uses less energy too, so TCO difference is even higher. And I'm not even talking about expanded feature set.
[1] https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-radeon-rx-6600-gv-r66eagle-8...
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you assuming MP3/OGG formats are the ones to use for game audio compression ? It's like trying to use PNG for texture compression instead of better suited formats.
What formats are better suited? To my knowledge most games use mp3-like compression for all their audio. Console hardware often has decompression support, it’s reasonably compact, quality/bitrate can be tuned by the sound engineers and supports a wide range of content.
It seems like on PC one would want to use Opus instead of the older MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. It has a number of performance-related improvements in addition to better audio per bitrate, although the higher-quality codec out of its two internal modes is still conceptually similar to MP3 & Co. so I figure it wouldn't necessarily solve all performance issues either.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you have to have the game reprocess all the assets on the users machine which could easily take an hour
With the size of games nowadays, that's likely a net time save for many people from the discounted download time.
Gamers being gamers though they’re not going to say “well, we on reflection I’ve not had to wait so long”, they’re going to slam you with one star reviews for the fact there’s an hour long loading screen on first start.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt you can do it in 8K at that speed and also why not just compress it? Any quality degradation from compression will be less than the artifacts produced by an AI image generator
> I doubt you can do it in 8K at that speed All inference of Stable Diffusion is done in FP16 at best, with multi-step models, and models themselves are highly inefficient. I would be surprised if in May 2024 4090 isn't capable of generating 8k(8192x8192) Stable Diffusion quality image in less than 1 second. And also you wouldn't realistically need to > also why not just compress it? Any quality degradation from comp…
I think this is exactly right. The next step is generated meshes/textures and generating entire worlds. You can do generation in a smart way so that performance is not an issue. Predict what you will need before you need it. Generally you would almost never need to generate an 8K texture from scratch, you would generate it from a 4K texture you already generated earlier, which would be much faster. You could have specialised asset generation HW on a GPU.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#229I 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?
Sheesh. Please no. We have enough asset reuse as it is.
Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blizzard us a bad example. Their games take incredible amounts of time to start. I think they dont play their own games and nobody gives a shit. The launcher is bugged and downloads either empty or 137mb patches (maybe bad CRC at some server? Different CRCs at some?). Every time. Starcraft remastered was bugged at some point and couldnt be played for a week. If you statt Heroes of the storm, it takes few minutes to d…
Your experience is not my experience at all. Blizzard is the gold standard for me in starting games faster than any other launcher. In fact they are the only one I’ve seen that lets you play the game part way into the download. No other dev seems to have this technology. I waited hours to play Witcher 3, Cuberpunk, Assassins Creed Odyssey. With WoW I was playing within minutes.
Guild Wars 2, EverQuest 2 also allow launching after a relatively small (maybe 10%) base amount of data has been downloaded. Its never ideal IMO as it creates longer loading times to areas not already downloaded, but I appreciate that its an option.