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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

#41

Post by literallywho »

nerdjon wrote: post #26
snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want. Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales. Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for…

Latest Ratchet and Clank game relies heavily on ps5’s nvme drive. Its PC port states that SSD is required. And IIRC, the experience on mechanical drives is quite terrible to the unplayable level.

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

#43

Post by ga2mer »

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…

>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam

Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0])

[0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/

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

#45

Post by afavour »

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

> 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 hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.

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

#46

Post by embedding-shape »

bombcar wrote: post #35
PoignardAzur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find it surprising at all. A ton of developers do optimizations based on vibes and very rarely check if they're actually getting a real benefit from it.

This is the moral behind "premature optimization is the root of all evil" - you could say preconceived just as easily.

> 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.

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

#47

Post by deng »

amlib wrote: post #40
deng wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11% still play HD2 with a spinning drive? I would've never guessed that. There's probably some vicious circle thing going on: because the install size is so big, people need to install it on their secondary, spinning drive...

Even though I have two SSDs in my main machine I still use a hard drive as an overflow for games that I judge are not SSD worthy. Because it's a recent 20TB HDD the read speeds approach 250MB/s and I've also specifically partitioned it at the beginning of the disk just for games so that it can sustain full transfer speeds without files falling into the slower tracks, the rest of the disk is then partitioned for media…

> It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.

Yes, because they apparently still duplicate data so that the terrible IOPS of spinning disks does not factor as much. You people need to stop with this so that we can all have smaller games again! ;-) <--- (IT'S A JOKE)

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

#48

Post by jeffwask »

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

Game companies these days barely optimize engine graphical performance before release never mind the package size or patching speed. They just stamp higher minimum system requirements on the package.

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

#49

Post by embedding-shape »

onli wrote: post #37
nerdjon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want. Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales. Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for…

That already happened :) Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them. And I think I saw SSDs as requirement for a few other games now, in the requirement listings on steam.

> Starfield claimed to not support HDDs and really ran bad with them.

To be fair, at launch Starfield had pretty shit loading times even with blazing fast SSDs, and the game has a lot of loading screens, so makes sense they'll nip that one in the bud and just say it's unsupported with the slower type of disks.

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

#50

Post by embedding-shape »

ga2mer wrote: post #43
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…

>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0]) [0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/

Makes sense, initial claim was that HD2 size was mainly because of duplicated assets, and any compression worth it's salt would de-duplicate things effectively.
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