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Compression is dead, ladies and gentlemen.

RoadHazard

Gold Member
It's one of the things I truly hate and have hated since Carmack's Megatextures kick.
We have to get back to optimized experiences.

Not a single person would notice the difference between a 100GB redfall and a 20GB redfall.

Breath of the Wild is an impossibly big game and is sub 15GB.
Tsushima takes up 35GB.

Devs can and should do better in a world where +100GB SSD space isn't cheap, especially in the console space.

Those games, while I absolutely love them both and think they look amazing, use a LOT of repeating assets everywhere. Redfall seems to have a lot more unique details and locations.

Not really defending Redfall, I think it looks pretty bad, just trying to use reason to understand why it might be like this.
 

Hugare

Member
Forspoken is 120GB. Explain that.
FF XV from 2016, using the same engine, was 100 gb

So maybe it has something to do with the engine. It's difficult to say for sure, since its an in-house engine, so there's no documentation about it.

If it has CG in it (since its made by Square), that can take easily 10-20gb since it would probably be 4K. Much more if you consider unique CG files for each of the voiced languages.

So yeah, the game looks like a piece of shit and seems like it reuses tons of assets, but the bloat can be explained somehow

EDIT: I just remembered that FF XV had a HD texture pack on PC that was 80 GB in size. Just for adding 4K textures.
 
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DavidGzz

Member
I was looking and went up and then back down and realized OP was joking when he thought that cel shaded game looked better than Redfall. LMAO. I mean, I hope he is. I think it looks better than Destiny too, by a margin. I think OP is talking about liking the art styles more, I think.
 
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Lux R7

Member
i mean..i'm not an expert and i don't know if they compressed it right, however c'mon it's 2023, it's not that expensive to have plenty of space on our ssds.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
7951l3.jpg
 
Still not an excuse to unoptimize and waste space on our drives.
That’s nice idealism but I’m afraid that isn’t going to help you. It sucks but what you going to do about it? Like I said before, storage is cheap. You can whine about the problem for find a solution.
 

hybrid_birth

Gold Member
That’s nice idealism but I’m afraid that isn’t going to help you. It sucks but what you going to do about it? Like I said before, storage is cheap. You can whine about the problem for find a solution.
i’m going to start a Charity giving SSDs to those who feel they are too expensive.

Blow your load on a rtx 4090? Here’s your ssd.
 

Fafalada

Fafracer forever
the issue is that the minimum specs here. the CPU/GPU for the minimum specs might not be fast enough to decompress files on the fly.
Sure - back in 1994.
The issues Op complains about have nothing to do with compression - asset waste is, and has always been a thing, especially on anything that has a physical release. When you're finalizing a GM - the last thing anyone dares doing is 'removing' assets from a package that might break the build, so most games ship with a ton of stuff that is absolutely never used, some of it maybe never has been.

This 'could' be much improved (or even solved) with a sophisticated dependency tracking database - but there's basically nothing on the market that ever solved for that properly, and depending on how the game is built, you may be creating new dependency chains that engine tooling wouldn't be aware of anyway. So everyone is on their own - and most teams don't have the time or $ to solve this properly (patchwork does happen occasionally).
It's kind of like the whole shader compilation thing - which has been around for 16+ years and counting, and also virtually noone bothered to solve, so to this day games are still shipped with manually collected shader-lists that get compiled down.

Worth mentioning that one of the main reasons 'streaming install' that PS4/X1 were trumpeting never really took hold - is closely related to the above issue, as doing incremental installations also requires reliable dependency tracking - else you have to split packages by hand, and that is way too expensive and cumbersome to do/maintain.
 
So, I know I'm not the only one has a feeling that the developers and (principally) GPU manufacturers have been in some kind of deal to force people to upgrade their systems by making it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to play the newer games on the market.

It's well established that most users on Steam are still running low - lower mid tier hardware and playing at 1080p, and those people would happily stay that way indefinitely if developers, well publishers really but you know what I mean, continue to make games with reasonable minimum requirements.

Thus, a situation arises where games coming to market are now demanding more and more power just to run at sub 1080 resolution at low settings 30fps.

I mean, look at the ridiculous minimum and recommended specs for the recently released Forspoken.

The average Steam user is lucky if their system meets the minimum requirement for 720/30...720p????

What is this, 1980?

Anyway, it's just a theory, a fevered "conspiracy theory" I'm sure, as big corporations never collude to fleece the consumer...but it kind of makes sense in some ways.

If I'm right we'll see game releases continue to demand absurd requirements all under the guise of being "un-optimised".
 

ZoukGalaxy

Member
That's lame.
You can have a lot of "vacation" movies for the same space.
Hot Dog Reaction GIF


By the way, 10TB ? Better go ditectly 20TB my friend.
 
The sad thing here is that there's no way to convince many here of why Hi-Fi Rush is on another level graphically compared to it's cel-shaded counterparts. It would take a technical breakdown and most people here aren't interested in the development aspect of a game. So it will be dismissed and brushed aside as being yet another cel-shaded game even though it's peak cel-shadedness.
 

DragonNCM

Member
Developers did start encoding audio in FLAC rather than using a compressed format like OGG/HE-ACC, that could have a effect when you take into account the different languages of dialog.
yeah....FLAC files are damn big but sound superiority is evident.
 

Shubh_C63

Member
People giving justification like more space is ok because more HD textures.

Ok, how large is large enough then ?
Next CoD 220GB, are you okay with that also.
 

GenericUser

Member
I have to give modern warfare 2 some credit here. You can install and uninstall all individual parts of the game. As soon as I finished the campaign and got the operator skins that were locked behind coop missions, I immediatly deleted those parts. Saves around 35GB iirc.
 
Don't make excuses for lazy storage optimization.
I don’t understand. Do you think taking a stance against game install sizes is going to affect game install sizes? Anyway I’m done talking about it. I found a solution. Have more important things to worry about. Enjoy yourself.
 

yurinka

Member
Devs seem to don't give a fuck about game sizes, optimization and compression. With other things, I understand they may have too much work and very limited time for what they have to do.

But having someone removing unused stuff, optimizing stuff, and taking care of proper compression wouldn't take a lot of work. The game sizes we're seeing recently don't make sense at all.
 

Utherellus

Member
It's very sad that majority of fellow PC gamers have never heard of Windows 10/11's native compression algorithms.

Get CompactGUI from Github and compress all unoptimized games for the love of god. Will save you dozens, if not hundreds of GBs.

Xpress 8K is very lightweight algo and essentially does developer's job. You can't compress already nicely compressed games though.

S41PVo5.jpg
 
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PS4 is 34
PS5 is 122

I'd rather install the smaller one and play some minor downgrade version that nobody will notice
I agree that having to download 122 GB versus 34 is a big ask, and I'd probably do it only if I felt the ps5 version was miles ahead in every way.

Don't forget, most ps5 games are going to offer 4k60 (in performance mode or as standard) while PS4 often ran at 1080-30...a considerable difference.
 
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