281–290 of 297 posts
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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 think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs I looked up the size of the latest one, and Sony's investment in RAD Kraken seems to be paying dividends: Xbox: 214 GB PC: 162 GB PS5: 96 GB
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The game installer can't control the layout on an HDD without doing some very questionable things like defragging and moving existing user files around the disk. It probably _could_ but the risk of irrecoverable user data loss or accidentally corrupting a boot partition via a bug would make it completely not worth it. Even if you pack those, there's no guarantee they don't get fragmented by the filesystem. CDs are di…
It's less about ensuring perfect layout as it is about avoiding almost guaranteed terrible layout. Unless your filesystem is fully fragmented already it won't intentionally shuffle and split big files without a good reason. Single large file is still more likely to be mostly sequential compared to 10000 tiny files. With large amount of individual files the file system is more likely to opportunistically use the small…
I am a little curious about the performance of reading several small files concurrently versus reading a large file linearly. I could see small files performing better with concurrent reads if they can be spread around the disk and the IO scheduler is clever enough that the disk is reading through nearly the whole rotation. If the disk is fragmented, the small files should theoretically be striped over basically the entire disk.
Curious some how it affected hdd users with ram in excess beyond the minimum.
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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…
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…
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By their own industry data ( https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... ), deduplication causes a 5x performance increase loading data from HDD. There's a reason so many games are huge, and it's not because they're mining your HDD for HDDCoin. The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that t…
> In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns. That makes no goddamn sense. I’ve read it three times and to paraphrase Babbage, I cannot apprehend the confusion of thought that would lead to such a conclusion. 5x gets resources to investigate, not assum…
HDD and SSD, where SSD is deduplicated.
Im.sure some gamers will develop funny opinions, but for the last 8 years I have not had a HDD in sight inside my gaming or work machines. I'd very much rather save space if the load time is about the same.on an SSD. A 150gb install profile is absolute insanity.
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I mean its not really a cost to anyone. Bandwidth is paid for by Valve, games can be deleted locally, etc.
Taking up 500% of the space than is necessary is a cost to me. I pay for my storage, why would I want it wasted by developer apathy? I'm already disillusioned and basically done with these devs anyways. They've consistently gone the wrong direction over time. The game's golden age is far behind us, as far as I'm concerned.
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Taking up 500% of the space than is necessary is a cost to me. I pay for my storage, why would I want it wasted by developer apathy? I'm already disillusioned and basically done with these devs anyways. They've consistently gone the wrong direction over time. The game's golden age is far behind us, as far as I'm concerned.
Putting something on your hard drive temporarily does not use it up? You don’t lose anything. Nothing is wasted.
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Putting something on your hard drive temporarily does not use it up? You don’t lose anything. Nothing is wasted.
On my high performance SSD for games and other data that requires it. If I pay for 1 or 2 TB of high performance storage, I want to use that extra space for other things. Not to mention the fact that I don't want my storage to fill up too much because they affects general performance on the drive. Also, more data that is written and rewritten with game updates is more, unnecessary wear on the drive.
> "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.
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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.
It's true for most of the modern web. Hardware and internet connections have come reliable and fast enough for many people not to care. Unfortunately there are still people on metered/slow connections that really do care still.