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Game File Sizes May Skyrocket with Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite, Says Developer

https://wccftech.com/game-file-sizes-may-skyrocket-with-unreal-engine-5s-nanite-says-developer/

Game file sizes have increased significantly in the last five years or so, going over the critical threshold of 100 GB in several cases. In fact, Call of Duty Modern Warfare and its Battle Royale spin-off Warzone recently managed to get to the rather incredible 'milestone' of 200+ GB, prompting plenty of complaints from fans (especially those who have to deal with data caps).

The issue with game file sizes may be about to become even more prevalent with the upcoming Unreal Engine 5, which promises astounding advancements in visual quality that could however translate into even larger game file sizes. When we asked Kitatus and Friends CEO and Lead Programmer Ryan Shah what he thinks of the Unreal Engine 5 as an existing Unreal Engine developer, he told us - after plenty of praises for Epic - that could indeed be a problem.
It looks absolutely fantastic. Especially the Nanite system for a start, I had to scoop my jaw up off the floor after that. It takes a lot of the headache out of asset creation, but at the same time, it starts to raise more concerns. And one of the examples is Call of Duty Warzone at the minute, as people are harassing Activision over the size of Call of Duty Warzone. And I think when we've got technologies now in the Unreal Engine 5 that allow us to use the original source meshes, with the original source textures and everything like that, the game file sizes are going to have to skyrocket which presents a unique set of challenges.
It was a very interesting presentation. What's more exciting than anything is that not all of the features, but a lot of the features are available in some form in Unreal Engine 4 as it stands. Like the particle system is already actively available to us now, even in a rough state, which has been fantastic for us, because this means when Unreal Engine 5 eventually launches, we've got the power to take what we've made now and kind of bring it up there instead of having to remake a game from scratch or make some serious porting adjustments. It will be hopefully relatively seamless to really tap the full potential.
The problem is inevitably going to be compounded by the fact that storage solutions may be getting faster with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, but they're certainly not getting larger. Sony's console has 825 GB of space, while Microsoft's has a bit more room with 1 TB.

How many Unreal Engine 5 games will fit in the respective SSDs? We don't know yet, but Epic is aware of the potential issue regarding download sizes, so we can hope they'll be able to find a workaround by the time it ships next year.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion

Nikana

Go Go Neo Rangers!
tenor.gif
 

Fbh

Member
Wait...weren't people in other threads saying how game sizes should actually go down because assets no longer need to be duplicated or something like that?

Because if the standard next gen will be 200gb+ the storage on both new consoles will be laughably bad, and probably expensive as hell to expand.
 
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SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Yeah I was saying this when they first started talking about it in conjunction with the PS5's storage. I think storage size, rather than bandwidth is going to be a practical limitation for games this gen because they don't have that much space available.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
but ... but

MUH SSD!!!!!

You know why they call it a PS5?

Because when you see one, you can only fit 5 games on it and walk away.
duh

PS = 2 letters
5 / 2 = 2.5

obv can't store 2 and a half games.

= PS5 can only install 2 games!

RIP Sony
WTF, that would be exactly the opposite to what Cerny said would happen.

He pointed out that to address slow HDD issue, the same assets are stored multiple times, which is not needed when fast SSD is available.
and you obviously fell for the marketing bullshit. SSD was never going to free up storage space LOL
 
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kraspkibble

Permabanned.
How come "multiple copies of the same stuff stored, to quickly load in one go" is marketing bs?
think about it...lol

HDDs are slow but they aren't that slow that they need multiple copies of assets to make games playable.

Sony needs to hype up the SSD because it seems that's all they've put effort into. and people like you are eating it all up.

I’m stunned people are still dealing with data caps. Is that a US thing? Can’t remember the last time I saw home broadband here that wasn’t unlimited.

yup seems to be the US. im in the UK and i have never had a cap on my internet and i'm talking the last 20 odd years. years ago it would throttle speeds if i downloaded too much too quickly but it would never cut off my internet. now every broadband package is completely unlimited.
 

FunkMiller

Member
yup seems to be the US. im in the UK and i have never had a cap on my internet and i'm talking the last 20 odd years. years ago it would throttle speeds if i downloaded too much too quickly but it would never cut off my internet. now every broadband package is completely unlimited.

I’m genuinely amazed. I thought we were quite backward in the U.K with out broadband, but... I guess not? What are US speeds like? Do they get above our phone line 70mb or cable 300mb?
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
If next gen consoles support USB 3.2 I assume external SSDs would reduce the wait time to backup games?
well of course. if the USB port, cable, enclosure, ssd are all fast enough and don't cause any bottlenecks.

consoles will shave costs wherever they can and USB ports are probably one of them. there isn't much advantage to putting in fast ports when most people only use them for charging their controller.
 

Herr Edgy

Member
Wait...weren't people in other threads saying how game sizes should actually go down because assets no longer need to be duplicated or something like that?

Because if the standard next gen will be 200gb+ the storage on both new consoles will be laughably bad, and probably expensive as hell to expand.
Spiderman.
EZp-FBLWsAEOaj3


It is necessary to say that this is not affecting all games, but primarily those with a lot of streaming going on.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
Moving games from and to SSD will reduce SSD Life Cycle
yup, i don't see anyone talking about this.

SSDs will burn out eventually and god help us all if they are soldered onto the motherboard and therefore can't be replaced. a modern SSD will easily last 5-10 years so more than enough to last a generation but their blocks eventually wear out and they will start slowing down or freezing.

PS5 + XSX consoles in 15-20 years will all be dead. I recently bought a PS2 which is 19 years old. it still works perfectly fine of course but there is no way that in 2039 you will be able to buy a working PS5/XSX console.

and of course...the smaller the SSD means it won't last as long. my 2015 SSD is a 1TB and works just fine but my 250GB SSD from just 2 years ago is already degraded quite a bit (still works fine though)

Right now MS and Seagate have a 1TB SSD card coming out.

I might wait it all out until an external 2TB SSD comes out.

My current external HDD is 3TB, and I got it in 2014 for $120.
remember external drives are only really for back up.

unless the drive is equal or faster than the boot SSD and the cable/enclosure/ports don't bottleneck it then it will be useless.

you could have a 14GB/s ssd but if you have a shitty enclosure/cable and the Xbox has crappy slow ports thent that 14GB/s SSD is only gonna run as fast as the slowest part of that connection.
 
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kraspkibble

Permabanned.
Game sizes increased substantially in every previous generation. Why should next gen be any different?

You should expect that they will.

exactly. i remember when games were only a few GB on PS3. i remember thinking holy shit Skyrim is 6GB why does it need so much space?

now games are into the hundreds of GB and people are complaining that the sizes will go up a bit more? if they were hitting 200-500GB i'd get the point but they are quite reasonable still.
 
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Zero707

If I carry on trolling, report me.
yup, i don't see anyone talking about this.

SSDs will burn out eventually and god help us all if they are soldered onto the motherboard and therefore can't be replaced. a modern SSD will easily last 5-10 years so more than enough to last a generation but their blocks eventually wear out and they will start slowing down or freezing.

PS5 + XSX consoles in 15-20 years will all be dead. I recently bought a PS2 which is 19 years old. it still works perfectly fine of course but there is no way that in 2039 you will be able to buy a working PS5/XSX console.

and of course...the smaller the SSD means it won't last as long. my 2015 SSD is a 1TB and works just fine but my 250GB SSD from just 2 years ago is already degraded quite a bit (still works fine though)


remember external drives are only really for back up.

unless the drive is equal or faster than the boot SSD and the cable/enclosure/ports don't bottleneck it then it will be useless.
To be fair SSDs improved over the last 3 years but heavy use of SSD will still reduce it life cycle
 

DragoonKain

Neighbours from Hell
We’ll see how it all plays out, but if this indeed does end up being the case where you can only fit a few games on the SSD, then I would’ve been perfectly fine waiting another year or two for nextgen consoles until the technology got cheaper.

I always felt like these nextgen consoles were kinda rushed out.
 
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Grinchy

Banned
I’m stunned people are still dealing with data caps. Is that a US thing? Can’t remember the last time I saw home broadband here that wasn’t unlimited.
It doesn't seem to be a thing at least on the east coast where I live. None of the ISPs have data caps here and the one I have (Spectrum) is well-known for being a horrible ISP. But at least it's unlimited.

The US is really big, though. What happens in one portion of it doesn't hold up in every portion. Some of our single states are the size of entire European countries.
 
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geordiemp

Member
But oodle texture are a non native format. After transfer to main memory, they must get decompressed so the GPU can use them. Native texture formats stay compressed even in memory and the GPU can work with them.

No oodle texture is RDO compress to native BCn before it goes on disk, for ANY console or PC.

Oddle is from Rad, its similar to BcPack and is like a JPEG to image before you make it native format (BC1-7) and store it on SSD.

The decompress is just Kraken (ps5) or Zlib (XSX) into memory, not much difference but you can look it up if you wish.

So both consoles are doing same thing, RDO compress to BCn (oodle or BcPack) and then small compress onto disk (ps5 Kraken or XSX zlib)....

The textures in BCn format are not comprerssed much by kraken or zlib, so you have to have a lossy change of the raw file, think Tiff to JPEG for simpicity (but more compelx with Lamda and RDO so more like Mp4 in a way).
 
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Allandor

Member
No oodle texture is RDO compress to native BCn before it goes on disk, for ANY console or PC.

Oddle is from Rad, its similar to BcPack and is like a JPEG to image before you make it native format (BC1-7) and store it on SSD.

The decompress is just Kraken (ps5) or Zlib (XSX) into memory, not much difference but you can look it up if you wish.

The textures in BCn format are not comprerssed much by kraken or zlib, so you have to have a lossy change of teh raw file, think Tif to JPEG for simpicity (but more compelx with Lamda and RDO).
yes and no. Oddle "just" reorganizes the "texture" (native format or not) so it can be compressed better. After it is in memory, there is no longer any "oddle" thing there. Just the pure texture (and yes even in native format).
 

Lethal01

Member
HDDs are slow but they aren't that slow that they need multiple copies of assets to make games playable.

This just isn't true Spider, Horizon, Death stranding are all games that rely on duplicating data to make HDD able to read it faster. If they didn't they would need to lower the quality by a lot to make it run.

Now I'm not saying that this is enough to counterbalance the fact we are going to a new generation with highquality assets but it will absolutely save atleast 30GBs of space in a lot of cases.
 

the_master

Member
Of course sizes are foing to increase a lot!

Every generation the game sizes fo up due to bigger textures, more triangles in meshs, more texture channels, more sounds, partudles, effects, more variety, etc...

If now we can use the hi res raw assets, the size will be insane
 

Allandor

Member
think about it...lol

HDDs are slow but they aren't that slow that they need multiple copies of assets to make games playable.
I thought the same until I realized that like on disc's packaging is still a thing to maximize throughput. You are right, if you would load everything 'file by file' you would not need duplicates. But with HDDs we are still not there that you can do something like that (request each file) without big compromises. To get everything as fast as possible into memory compressed packets are created. Else seek time would really crush your effective bandwidth. This is something that is no longer relevant with SSDs. Even with 'slow' SSDs this is no longer needed. Than you can request each (compressed) file (or part of it) without wasting time and bandwidth for seeking things.
Funny thing about that is, that game sizes can be reduced significantly. On the other hand, asset quality is so high with next Gen games, that this space reduction won't lead to smaller games. But at least they can be shipped on a disc again.

Zhe funny thing about that is, that the effective bandwidth with an SSDis even higher than specs show, just because you also don't waste bandwidth for duplicates.
 
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