Do all the latest big budget games require over 100 GB of drive space? What's the average size of a AAA game today? We've investigated the figures in search of answers.
Recommended game storage over the last 15 years
Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes?
- Thread starter neeyik
- Start date
Game sizes exploded with the release of PS4 and XB1 in 2013-2014.
Maybe dev's should start focussing on compression soon, as PS5 and XSX have somewhat low space available for actual games.
PS5 = 667GB left for games
XSX = 802GB left for games
XSS = 364GB left for games
Nvidia already showed that textures can be highly compressed while still looking pretty much identical - Neural Texture Compression. It is time for dev's to actually start thinking about this for real. If they do, install sizes and VRAM usage would go way down.
BC7 is nowhere near - https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...than-standard-compression-with-30-less-memory
NTC can offer way better quality at same size or same quality at much lower size.
Maybe dev's should start focussing on compression soon, as PS5 and XSX have somewhat low space available for actual games.
PS5 = 667GB left for games
XSX = 802GB left for games
XSS = 364GB left for games
Nvidia already showed that textures can be highly compressed while still looking pretty much identical - Neural Texture Compression. It is time for dev's to actually start thinking about this for real. If they do, install sizes and VRAM usage would go way down.
BC7 is nowhere near - https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...than-standard-compression-with-30-less-memory
NTC can offer way better quality at same size or same quality at much lower size.
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WhiteLeaff
Posts: 469 +854
To say that the graphics now are "vastly superior" to justify the 4-5x increase in size is an overstatement.
Btw I like the strategy of releasing the high-res 4k textures in a separate optional pack to keep the game smaller.
Btw I like the strategy of releasing the high-res 4k textures in a separate optional pack to keep the game smaller.
Yeah as long as that 4K texture pack is not just the same looking textures, just uncompressed. We have seen this many times.
Proper compression and you wont need additional texture packs.
amghwk
Posts: 1,549 +1,540
When you actually partition the space hogging game into categories, the graphics still eats up most of the available drive capacity. The "HD" and "4K" textures being the no.1 culprit.
In the excuse given above for Last of Us Part 1, 17GB for audio alone is nothing compared to the minimum 100GB required. Audio is just 17% of the total space taken. Pray tell us also how much space the graphics files took up too.
And just because a game is worthy of the "AAA" title doesn't mean it is good. Most of these so-called "AAA" titles are just....meh. Most just crammed with the space hogging high-res textures and add in speech for every line in multiple languages which we don't want to have.
And what does a so-called AAA game stands for anyway? It just means that it's coming from a well known or a big publisher. No matter how you try to justify it. It doesn't mean the game will be worthy of your time.
In the excuse given above for Last of Us Part 1, 17GB for audio alone is nothing compared to the minimum 100GB required. Audio is just 17% of the total space taken. Pray tell us also how much space the graphics files took up too.
And just because a game is worthy of the "AAA" title doesn't mean it is good. Most of these so-called "AAA" titles are just....meh. Most just crammed with the space hogging high-res textures and add in speech for every line in multiple languages which we don't want to have.
And what does a so-called AAA game stands for anyway? It just means that it's coming from a well known or a big publisher. No matter how you try to justify it. It doesn't mean the game will be worthy of your time.
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PS5 games (and PS4/PS3) are all compressed installations; part of Sony's proprietary archive format. So are Xbox Series X games, too, which is why both consoles have dedicated hardware for data decompression.
The article makes it clear that the installation sizes are mostly about graphics, but for the sake of information, the assets files come to 59 GB in total.
This was pointed out in the article as being something that developers could do to reduce installation size.
It refers to the size of the budget, a term borrowed from economics/credit industry. Not sure where in the article it says that AAA means good or worthy of anyone's time.
True but there's tons of games exceeding 100GB on PS5.
Far Cry 6 takes up 160GB on my friends PS5 and GT7 is almost 200GB
Indeed, PS5 games do seem to be excessively large, but in the case of those two games, it's because of all the additional content. The base installation of FC6, for example, is something like 50 GB or so (might be a bit larger).
Edit: Just checked my PC installation of FC6, which includes the HD texture pack and a couple of DLCs, and that comes to 142 GB.
Are you sure you are not confusing compression with encryption?
Nope:
The PlayStation 5's compression tech can drastically reduce game file sizes
However, there are drawbacks to all this progress: most notably, the PS5's mediocre 825GB of available storage space. As game file sizes climb higher and higher (sometimes...
www.techspot.com
Xbox Velocity Architecture: A Closer Look at the Next-Gen Tech Driving Gaming Innovation Forward on Xbox Series X - Xbox Wire
When we set out to design the Xbox Series X, we aspired to build our most powerful console ever powered by next generation innovation and delivering consistent, sustained performance never before seen in a console with no compromises. To achieve this goal, we knew we needed to analyze each...
news.xbox.com
Sorry but...
starting with the resources to install... do the developers know things like FitGirl or others similar and/or previous? I myself used to put "New York inside Manhattan" with the games I kept (and still keep after the years) for this I made my own analysis and compression/decompression tools (different compression schemes for different file types, I even re-encoded the audio and videos), I packed them even more than what they originally came.
then, it seems that most of them also don't know about lossless and lossy compression methods for resources once deployed/installed. I have seen so many games with fully decompressed resources that with proper lossles or lossy compression, they would take up infinitely less storage space without apparent quality lost to the human eye. and the decompression could be very fast.
see the example of the article regarding TLOU. the audio of the dialogues, VOICE, can be compressed A LOT, even lossless.
And the videos... ...I've encoded videos with better visual quality in 1/10 the space of those included in games for a long time. As long as they continue to use the BinkVideo garbage (it made sense until the PS2, or on portable consoles a few years ago, due to the lower computational requirements to decode) they will be consuming enormous space by having to put in huge bitrates. don't want to use H264/265/MP3/AAC because the royalties? Well, use Theora+Vorbis!!
Why were games more compressed before? Why not now or is it done less or with a lower ratio? are they afraid of loading times? Are they waiting for dedicated hardware decompression units to become standard on consoles and PC (will have to be on the GPU when switching to DirectStorage)?
It would be interesting this included in the storage units, something similar to how LTO tapes do (in their case it is really the reader/recorder units that do it), right now its done in software
starting with the resources to install... do the developers know things like FitGirl or others similar and/or previous? I myself used to put "New York inside Manhattan" with the games I kept (and still keep after the years) for this I made my own analysis and compression/decompression tools (different compression schemes for different file types, I even re-encoded the audio and videos), I packed them even more than what they originally came.
then, it seems that most of them also don't know about lossless and lossy compression methods for resources once deployed/installed. I have seen so many games with fully decompressed resources that with proper lossles or lossy compression, they would take up infinitely less storage space without apparent quality lost to the human eye. and the decompression could be very fast.
see the example of the article regarding TLOU. the audio of the dialogues, VOICE, can be compressed A LOT, even lossless.
And the videos... ...I've encoded videos with better visual quality in 1/10 the space of those included in games for a long time. As long as they continue to use the BinkVideo garbage (it made sense until the PS2, or on portable consoles a few years ago, due to the lower computational requirements to decode) they will be consuming enormous space by having to put in huge bitrates. don't want to use H264/265/MP3/AAC because the royalties? Well, use Theora+Vorbis!!
Why were games more compressed before? Why not now or is it done less or with a lower ratio? are they afraid of loading times? Are they waiting for dedicated hardware decompression units to become standard on consoles and PC (will have to be on the GPU when switching to DirectStorage)?
It would be interesting this included in the storage units, something similar to how LTO tapes do (in their case it is really the reader/recorder units that do it), right now its done in software
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Imagine the times with 8-bit consoles, games used to fit in very little space (For example IIRC Super Mario was 32kb in size).
When the developers were restricted in space they used to go and look for tricks to save space, they reuse textures with some modifiers, rotate, flip, crop, change color palettes on the same texture...
There are many videos on Youtube about computer graphics in the early days and the tricks developers used to bypass restrictions and create impossible graphics (one good youtube who talks about this is the 8-bit guy
).
Developers now have unlimited space and storage is cheap, they have no need to optimize, they don't even separate textures into packages as the OG post mentioned (per resolution, per language). I don't know if Game engines have features to optimize games on behalf of the developers.
One terrible example is Street Fighter 5, with every update you had to redownload the textures file which is 15-20GB in size, even if they add very few features or new maps. they didn't care to do it in an optimized way (I ended up uninstalling the game as I lost too much time on every update).
When the developers were restricted in space they used to go and look for tricks to save space, they reuse textures with some modifiers, rotate, flip, crop, change color palettes on the same texture...
There are many videos on Youtube about computer graphics in the early days and the tricks developers used to bypass restrictions and create impossible graphics (one good youtube who talks about this is the 8-bit guy
Developers now have unlimited space and storage is cheap, they have no need to optimize, they don't even separate textures into packages as the OG post mentioned (per resolution, per language). I don't know if Game engines have features to optimize games on behalf of the developers.
One terrible example is Street Fighter 5, with every update you had to redownload the textures file which is 15-20GB in size, even if they add very few features or new maps. they didn't care to do it in an optimized way (I ended up uninstalling the game as I lost too much time on every update).
For what it's worth, as part of the research for the article, I compressed some of the psarc files for TLOU -- compression is optional for Sony's format but for the three game world/asset packs I tested, they were already fully compressed. Only the shader psarc showed any decent amount of size reduction but since the original is less than 8 MB in size, one can see why the devs didn't bother shrinking it.
In fortnite, many buildings have similar textures yet the game was requiring large storage. The graphic and all other stuff play a rule of course but the main reason is that developers and game publishers want to grab as much as possible money with as minimal as possible effort.
Meanwhile, Elden Ring provides the most absurdly large, lasting and environmentally diverse interactive experience I have ever seen on a screen in "only" 50 gigabytes.
Optimization is a unicorn.
Optimization is a unicorn.
I think the answer is they don't really care. The cost to the company to put in the extra time to make things smaller/compressed is not worth the cost to them. I assume they see it as internet download speeds are fast enough and the cost of SSD/HDD is cheap enough that the burden is easier on the consumer. It is an issue that people gripe about, but does not keep them from buying games. IF that stays true, companies have zero incentive to minimize the size of the game's installation. Their assumption is that you, the consumer, will just buy a bigger drive to store it on.
But the textures and graphics aren't that impressive.
The game is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on my display, who cares about textures :-D
lol fair enough. Also long as you are getting your money worth!
You have no idea...
yes, compressed, but how?
with a mere bzip?
I don't have TLOU at hand to check it.
Imagine if they are just bzip compressed WAVs, instead of using a specialized compressor like WAVPac or FLAC, if they want it to be lossless. but even more, they could be lossy compressed, just the permissible, and they would be even smaller files.
The games that at one time I supercompressed myself, some were like that, had the voices in wav, so in the compression script I recoded them to AAC, just like the music. the effects were left untouched. but then I used UHARC, which has subroutines dedicated to compressing multimedia, to compress the rest of media files. Other files were compressed with 7zip. during the decompression everything returned to its original formats.
I remember some supercompressed game that, whoever made it, recompressed the textures in another format and during the "installation"/decompression reconverted them to the original texture format.
Of course, all this only saves on the installer files, in the end everything is occupying the same space. but a lot can be compressed in a way that is suitable for each context of use and type of file.
but some different examples, Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead, the first Call of Duty MW series and earlier CoD, and other games, their files are Zip compressed but with little or no compression, only used as containers. so, in my "decompressor" I compressed them to the maximum that zip would allow. That's why I ended up with a lot of games sometimes taking up only half of the disk space, with only a slight increase in load times.
Even Quake 3 back then had many of its textures in JPEG.
Then, I've seen UV textures maps that are absolute wasteful. either the artists are lazy or the tools are rubbish.
on of those game that I have ever seen that deliver more content in less space are the Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series
Has anyone here played .kkrieger?
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m3tavision
Posts: 1,438 +1,222
I guess I am going to feel like the adult in the room and just say OMFG... if some of you people care this much about space, put an extra $20-$40 & get a bigger SSD.
Attacking your fears has always worked. Feels good to conquer them and not a worry, or complaint. You are the answer...
Attacking your fears has always worked. Feels good to conquer them and not a worry, or complaint. You are the answer...
I think I do, LetMeSoloHer
I echo that I would love to see installers become smarter (or just give us the option) of only downloading and installing the bits of the game that are relevant to us. If I only want English cut scenes and audio, I should be able to download and install only the English files. If I am playing on a GTX 1060, I don't need to download and install the 8K texture packs.
I can always buy more storage, that isn't an issue. But having to wait 6 hours to download a 100GB game gets old. Waiting 3 hrs for the 50GB 'patch' to download is even worse.
I can always buy more storage, that isn't an issue. But having to wait 6 hours to download a 100GB game gets old. Waiting 3 hrs for the 50GB 'patch' to download is even worse.
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