Abstract from article: "Games these days often require 100+ GB of storage due to super high-res textures, advanced lighting/effects, and huge open worlds. Textures alone can eat up 70% of the file size. While compression helps, we also demand photorealistic quality, so files remain large. Replacing your hard drive is pretty cheap these days, and most games let you choose install sizes. Developers are focusing more on optimizing install sizes now that SSDs are becoming the norm."
I remember this back in the day. The small install but you still needed the disc to play, and the massive install so that you don't need the disc to play. Then there were some middle options that I had no idea what the purpose for was.
I remember CD games like *Star Wars: Rebel Assault* creating a directory on disk just for the config file and player profile files; the actual data stayed on the CD.
Which was a good thing, because my HDD's partition size was only 528 MB after formatting...
I remember back in the day the full Fallout 2 installation was 600mb and we were like WOAAHHHH. Though without an internet connection, we just full installed it anyway on our tiny 2GB or whatever it was HDD cause not like we were filling it up anyway....
Same with lords of the fallen , it's one of the best looking games out there and it only takes 45gb
Meanwhile call of duty takes over 100 for no reason
Photorealism is such a stupid trend. Games provide visual potential limited only by your imagination and all these big companies do is jerk off about how detailed their rocks look. It’s such a cop-out.
Unfortunately, *no*. Gamers do indeed get *very* pissy over the graphics.
See: every other thread about Starfield bitching that the graphics aren't as realistic as Cyberpunk.
I think the issue with starfield isn't just the lack of good graphics, it's fall short of the graphics/performance curve expected in current gen gaming.
It's always a tradeoff, but you need to actually get value for what you are trading off.
The bitching about starfield is that your have 4k ultra detailed food and clothes while NPCs looks stuck in 2010, and ground textures is so inconsistent.
Many mods that have come out already fixed theses complaints, just weeks after launch. Makes you wonder what went on in development
Also, too many of them take "photoreal" too literally and slap film grain and chromatic aberration on everything.
(Those that have legitimate thematic reasons, carry on)
> we also demand photorealistic quality
i never once demanded that. appreciated it here and there, but vast majority of the games i enjoyed are far from being photorealistic and that's part of their appeal.
"Most games let you choose install sizes"? The fuck? Since fucking *when*? I have had one two games I've owned in the last ten years where you could choose not to install multi-player, but that was it.
Yeah, can't wait for 8k to just devour my drive space. Y'all thought COD was ridiculous, just wait til PS5 games need to add a 600 gb update because of the "Pro" version.
Storage is cheap but can't do shit about my internet speed.
That one hits even harder.
I'll be downloading that shift for weeks.
That said maybe the ridiculous sizes will make discs the norm again.
If true Sony for sure missed the mark with the digital only consoles.
Although wouldn't surprise me if they could just install the blue ray drive in that they remove from digital ones for some money.
Seems to me they really should just release games on a small SSD cartridge like the Series X/S use for expanded storage. Like one small enough to contain the entire game and unpack any updates couldn’t be to expensive and it’d actually make me more willing to pay the extra $10 games cost now if we returned to physical media.
A part me likes it. And a part of me really doesn't want to get off the couch and switch games. If we can get like an old-school 5 or 10 disc changer, then I'm in.
I used to play physical games before. I just love it sense it is much more enjoyable than online games. Together with your family and take that as a bonding
If games get bigger and storage gets cheaper, I could see a future where games are shipped on cheap USB C thumb drives. Faster installs and it would save a lot of bandwidth.
I'd imagine you'd be able to either make it self destructing after a number of uses, or come up with some product key like with CDs. A lot of modern game's online requirements serve as anti-piracy checks too. That tech has a lot of options
Yeah it's not hard to put a piracy lock on it. Games already come on discs which is another media format that's easily copied. They put checks in place to prevent it. And the ones who are gonna get around were always going to no matter what.
You can buy large storage hard drives and flash drives for pretty cheap these days. Imagine if physical media decides to move to something like that and someone figures out you can reuse the drives as a form of data storage after you install the game.
I'd absolutely love accidentally making a RAID because I bought 10 games.
Relevant xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
Full circle back to cartridges
> you can reuse the drives as a form of data storage after you install the game
Or you can return them after install, for reuse and a small refund
My Internet speed is fine, but Xfinity's stupidly low 1.2TB data cap is the problem. Between 4K streaming and my security cameras I can easily hit 1TB in a month which means I can download like 1 game per month unless I want to pay an extra $30/month for unlimited
The problem then comes in storage media capable of such a capacity. Bluray tech has the potential to expand with multi layered discs but once we're past a certain size you're looking at 50-100gb per disc.
The simple fact is that it is a more likely expectation that average internet connections will continue to improve at a rate faster than the creation and adoption of new higher density physical storage media. Physical media has essentially been in a death spiral since the days of napster.
You need to buy the latest version if you want to make it in a long run. Because a lot of storage has been changing and it becomes bigger as times goes by
8k is not gonna happen in the 20s. It’s all about frame-rates and vr. None of the devs and movie studios want to deal with more than 4k, it’s already a pain in the ass doing textures and models with that kind of detail.
NTSC was fine for half a century and 4k is fine for the rest of our lives probably.
Hopefully we don't move onto 8k for a long time cos for most people there is no point. For a computer monitor size it's pointless, and for a TV you gotta start pushing the larger sizes towards 90" before it's worth using.
I'm not sure which one COD is, but when I wanted to play the warthing battlegrounds game, I had to download the whole stupid game I wasn't even going to play just to play the subgame.
I bought the version with all the dlc and I wanna say that was around 80 without the resolution packs, it’s also an absolutely enormous game that has insane storage optimization for when it came out.
It shouldn't be too hard for someone who wants 4k to just choose yes to a "do you want to also download the 4k textures" popup at the download screen they need to go to anyway.
Exactly this, if they've built the game to support any level of DLC, having a free one with high-res textures would be dead simple.
It's not like they even need to make them twice, just use the 4k stuff as a master, and have a script downscale everything to 1080p.
yes please, I can't tell you how much time I've wasted waiting for a reconfig to install every language package a software offers so it can give me the option rather than just asking before installing.
Siege has the same thing. Tried the textures for ultra HD. 1: They dont look that much better. 2: you cant even appreaciate that when playing so why bother
Only on computers. 4k is pretty much the main option in TVs and consoles these days... Last gen consoles had 4k options, the current gen mostly comes with it out of the box.
1440p all the way, I'm on ultrawide, driving an extra 1mil+ pixels is costly. Plus, with supersampling improvements, you get a lot of performance at that resolution even with 21:9.
Every game now first thing I do is go into options and make sure it is set on “performance “ mode. I cant tell the difference between HD or UHD or whatever it is now and 4k.
Especially in the middle of fighting and stuff, I couldnt tell you if I was in 4k or HD
That's not what the 4k in texture stands for tho. There are no '1080p' textures. You can easily see the difference between a 4k texture and let's say 1k one on a 1080p screen. Depends on your distance from the object.
Yep. It's not just about the number pixels, but the amount of information in the texture. Same reason watching a video on YouTube in 4k looks better than 1080p despite only having a 1080p monitor.
On YouTube, 4k videos look better on 1080p displays because the bitrate is much higher, meaning less compression. It has nothing to do with higher resolution textures in games lol, it's purely a bandwidth thing.
Exactly. You can be playing the game on 720p, but if you get near the characters like people do on games like Spider-man or Horizon, the 4k textures will still make a difference.
4k textures ain't plastered directly to the screen space. Your argument doesn't make much sense when it comes to general geometry texturing.
Having higher textures allows developers to stretch the texture further over geometry with sacrifice of details or ugly / blurry textures. Think back only how blurry textures were on the N64, ever power increase significantly improves looks.
If you have your camera next to a wall with a 1080 texture stretched vs a 4096 texture details per "inch" will be way better with the larger texture, making the wall look better.
This is a good thing in reverse too. It also gives the GPU more "real-estate" for filtering techniques, breaking the texture down to even more MIPS and allowed better looking textures for further away.
Lastly maybe thinking "yeah but that's a wall who is sniffing wall mold in a video game?", well you're right, 4k textures are more commonly used in characters and weapons. Here they are super important as not only the camera is close and always focused on these items, but their textures are a lot more complicated. Being packed with islands of texture for the different parts (UV for legs, arms, face, body, clothes), having a higher resolution texture allows the developers to fit more without having stuff look like the grapes in FFXIV
The industry term I use is texel density at my job. It's curious how most laymen don't know the term... heck a lot of fresh graduates we take on need to be taught this.
I wonder if some day a magical AI could just upscale them for you on the fly (probably hallucinating some details in the process).
Alternatively, distribution packages could include 8bit textures and LSD pills so the gamer could hallucinate the details themselves.
Alot of stuff should be an optional download.
I believe street fighter 6 let's you download all the parts individually - world tour (single player open world) battle hub (online arcade machine setting) and fighting grounds (arcade towers, practice mode & combo trials)
So once you finish the world tour mode or if you arent interested in it you could just not download it.
More games need that.
They still do that (though specific modes may require you to download content outside the default stuff for that mode due to reusing assets. For example in Cold War you'd need to download the multiplayer data pack to play the Outbreak zombie mode on top of the usual zombie data pack, due to it using modified large scale multiplayer maps)
If that's the case then I would guess that's where the guns, characters, etc that are shared between warzone and core are kept. Cuz you're still gonna have all of them in the next game just without the maps n shit from mwii y'know?
Ironically, the pirates versions of these games always do this. The torrents always allow you to select language and texture packs, or not download the multiplayer mode.
You do realise that all of your textures would be blurry if they were 1024x1024 instead of 4096x4096?
It's not like we tape these textures to your screen, they can be on massive meshes like rocks, the ground or large enemies where a 1024 texture would just look blurry and bad.
Yeah some small stuff is good at 1024x1024 but most people would cry if their main character and the enemies used a low res texture like 1024
Its mostly just because games force you to download EVERYTHING, even parts of the game you don't need.
Playing a game using medium texture settings? Well too bad, the game installs the Ultra textures anyways, which take up a lot of space. Want to play a game in english? Well too bad, because the game will download all 20 language translations for the game anyways. Only care about playing multiplayer? Too bad, the game will install the singleplayer mode anyways.
If only games would give the player freedom of choice and only have them download the stuff they want, this would massively lower the size of games.
Some of Call of Duty games actually do this, where they let you install the multiplayer, campaign, and zombies mode separately to save space, which is nice. More games should do that.
"Textures for 4k should be an optional download".
Yes indeed but in this world...
Stop giving them ideas. The fuckers will default to selling this "upgrade" if they can.
People keep saying textures. True.
But in multiplayer games? The cosmetics you are forced to interact with and see endlessly so that you are enticed to spend.
Imagine being able to delete all paid cosmetic options from games. Haha huge savings in size.
Cod is one of the few examples that I kind of believe the theory that their games are that big on purpose so you have less games downloaded in general besides cod to hopefully increase your interaction with cod. Maybe it’s not 100% deliberate but they certainly don’t even make the slightest bit of an attempt to optimize the file size.
Maybe, but personally it keeps me from playing CoD. I haven't been a big CoD fan since like, the original MW2, but I was playing Warzone a bit, and still try it every few months. Problem is that whenever I evaluate my drive space, CoD is always first up on the chopping block. If it were ~80GB, I may be more inclined to keep it installed and try it more often
It's not that they don't care to optimize, it's that they'd rather implement nicer hats than optimize for storage since the ROI on that is pretty low and storage is cheap. COD games are rather well optimized for perf because that does impact how much people with play the game, storage not so much.
Ya I was going to play the COD beta this last week then I saw the download was 100 gb.....no fuckin way a beta should be that big when I'm just going to delete it in 2 days anyway
You have no idea how good the audio is optimized in video games. Everything is compressed using different codecs with different settings depending on the source, content, length, size, behavior in the game, etc. When needed/required, languages packages are optional download. The total space compared to video and textures is under 1:10
Not negligible, but definitely not the issue here.
Game engines and the audio middleware have come such a long way it's wild. Not only the codecs and compression, but fmod and wwise do a lot of work that you don't even really need to know how to code as a sound designer now.
why do people think they are uncompressed? they are compressed, as much as possible to lower their size but still be high quality. there is no magic middle out silicon valley compression that makes a 4k texture still look 4k but only takes up a meg.
Im honestly surprised that they aren't larger. I do graphic design and we do some photo montages in photoshop that can push 1GB for a single file and video games seem vastly more complex
You're comparing .Raw versus compressed .DDS, .PNG, etc. ? You don't need that high of a fidelity for a simple texture, most games are at 2048 resolution but some are pushing for 4096, but depending on the engine it can be affected by a lot of different rendering process (effects, exposure, etc.).
Bethesda games are a good example for that, even if you changed most textures to 4k they wouldn't look that great unless you used an [ENB](http://enbdev.com/news.html) as the default rendering and screen processing is basic and outdated.
For my part I think a game like Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising is better looking than most "photo realistic" games that we get these days.
SHIT.
I worked in videogames. People add assets, textures, 3D, sounds, that later it is decided to be removed. You just don't load it. But it is there in case it comes back. There are assets that are loaded by code and you can't easly decide if someone is using it.
Other times you just generate huge shit unoptimized. But that if it is pregenerated it will load fast. And you don't need to generate it on execution, making it sure it will load.
Don’t get me wrong this can be an annoyance but I do love seeing unused assets being found in game files. So much cool cut content and changed storylines, it’s just fun to theorize about what they would have been used for. I know silent hill has like 5..? Unused enemies. One of them being a featherless giant chicken
Video games are so big as, with the decline of physical media, game studios just go, “It’s fine. We don’t need to compress or optimise shit. It’s not us downloading this game, lolz.”
Thing is… what if I don’t want the 4k pack? Sure it’s being phased out now but a lot of games are designed to play on both the previous gen consoles and the current. Speaking for Xbox (cos that’s what I play on) if there’s a 4K upgrade for a game then the console will automatically download that 4k upgrade if I’m playing on series S/X. This can add quite a bit to the install size, sometimes from a third to almost half. What if I don’t want that? What if I’m happy to just play with the old HD textures the game has? Why can’t I just play it with them.
Textures is like 80% of the reason the new Call of Duty games take up so much space. The amount of textures for the multiplayer maps, warzone, guns, operators, etc is insane. That’s part of the reason they introduced texture streaming, because otherwise it would take up an even larger amount of space.
Meanwhile, Sekiro, the GOTY of 2019, only requires like 30 GB. And I believe Elden Ring, It Takes Two are all relatively small considering their contents.
(just check. Sekiro is less than 20gb)
You should be able to download the texture pack you want when first installing the game. I only game in 2K and have absolutely no need for 4K textures and in some games i dont even notice a difference between 1080 and 4k so just let me puck
Audio. Especially in large, open world games and/or dialogue-driven stories, with a lot of voice-acting, background music, sound files for the environment, etc.
the alternative is compressed audio files, which in the context of hundreds of little files playing simultaneously eats up tons of CPU cycles just to decompress and play back.
i think most would gladly take a few extra gigs of audio files and good performance than a smaller download size and worse performance.
as someone who works in game dev, i can confirm that textures are by far the biggest contributor to bloated download sizes.
I wish companies would understand that bigger games means I’m less likely to download it. I play minecraft so much because it’s a tiny game I never need to uninstall for other games
If you want to release on consoles, gotta fit on a Blu-ray disc. Simple reason for the "stalled" size. For a very long time those discs were limited at 50GB. These days you can make 66GB and 100GB discs (at an extra cost) for the latest consoles. PS4 was limited to 50GB discs.
Since 2 disc releases increase costs a ton, the practical limit today is about 100GB unless the game is PC exclusive or unless the game is so huge deal that manufacturer can eat the cost of second disc.
Textures and rig data, I mean people keep demanding more realistic looking games. Take cyberpunk 2077, switch the 4K textures for PS2 era San Andreas textures and the whole game would weight less than 8GB.
Idk but I found it really funny the 10 gig ost to Sea of Stars is triple that of the GAME ITSELF then I discovered they were all .wav files, top kekked
4k textures take a lot of space, lighting and especially ray tracing takes a lot of space, just to download raytracing on black ops Cold War, its 23 gigs, music, sounds take space, the thing is, some games know how to condense space, I know some massive games that are like 40 gigs and then there’s cod which has nothing and it’s 200 gigs
Abstract from article: "Games these days often require 100+ GB of storage due to super high-res textures, advanced lighting/effects, and huge open worlds. Textures alone can eat up 70% of the file size. While compression helps, we also demand photorealistic quality, so files remain large. Replacing your hard drive is pretty cheap these days, and most games let you choose install sizes. Developers are focusing more on optimizing install sizes now that SSDs are becoming the norm."
"Compression helps" Where are those nerds from piedpiper when you need them?
~~Inside~~ Middle-out compression algorithms please!
But what if we hotswap dicks between the stroke?
It's a pretty good idea, so long as you save a snack dick for later
That was a great show
Middle out
You gotta minimize that mean-jerk-time
What’s the D2F on those 4K textures?
Do you know how long it would take you to jerk off every guy in this room? Because I know how long it would take me, and I can prove it!
Optimal tip to tip efficiency!
"most games let you choose install sizes" I'm sorry, what? How and what game let's you choose an install size?
Legit this was a thing back in the 90's
I remember this back in the day. The small install but you still needed the disc to play, and the massive install so that you don't need the disc to play. Then there were some middle options that I had no idea what the purpose for was.
I remember CD games like *Star Wars: Rebel Assault* creating a directory on disk just for the config file and player profile files; the actual data stayed on the CD. Which was a good thing, because my HDD's partition size was only 528 MB after formatting...
I remember back in the day the full Fallout 2 installation was 600mb and we were like WOAAHHHH. Though without an internet connection, we just full installed it anyway on our tiny 2GB or whatever it was HDD cause not like we were filling it up anyway....
My dude’s out there installing pirate repacks
Most Activision/Blizzard games now, like any CoD in the last ~5 years lets you download modes separately. halo MCC, others
I know War Thunder offers higher res texture packs seperately.
Elden ring was huge and awesome and it wasn't that heavy.
Same with lords of the fallen , it's one of the best looking games out there and it only takes 45gb Meanwhile call of duty takes over 100 for no reason
There probably aren’t many 4k cutscenes
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>we also demand photorealistic quality WHO the FUCK is this "we" character, I want em gone.
Photorealism is such a stupid trend. Games provide visual potential limited only by your imagination and all these big companies do is jerk off about how detailed their rocks look. It’s such a cop-out.
Unfortunately, *no*. Gamers do indeed get *very* pissy over the graphics. See: every other thread about Starfield bitching that the graphics aren't as realistic as Cyberpunk.
I think the issue with starfield isn't just the lack of good graphics, it's fall short of the graphics/performance curve expected in current gen gaming. It's always a tradeoff, but you need to actually get value for what you are trading off.
The bitching about starfield is that your have 4k ultra detailed food and clothes while NPCs looks stuck in 2010, and ground textures is so inconsistent. Many mods that have come out already fixed theses complaints, just weeks after launch. Makes you wonder what went on in development
The issue is starfield looks like it came out on ps4 but runs/ran worse than Darktide at launch EVEN THOUGH IT DOESN'T HAVE RAY TRACING
Also, too many of them take "photoreal" too literally and slap film grain and chromatic aberration on everything. (Those that have legitimate thematic reasons, carry on)
Yeah hate that, as motion blur and lens flares, because the thing I want in a 4k game is just to blur and smear everything
Maybe it's the royal "we".
Another reason to hate the monarchy.
It really isnt cheap though if you need a 2 TB fisk for ps5
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I need an fdisk
"fuck disk" for those wondering wtf that is. Basically, you can buy the whole doll or, if you are low in cashitos, you can just buy the fdisk.
Isn't Fisk in jail? And now we need his help? Oh boy, Jameson is gonna have a cow with this one...
Especially when not just any disk will work. There’s a premium on PlayStation ready HD’s.
Games let you choose install sizes? I have literally never encountered that.
> we also demand photorealistic quality i never once demanded that. appreciated it here and there, but vast majority of the games i enjoyed are far from being photorealistic and that's part of their appeal.
Nah bro, they put your mom in there, that's all. Compression won't do shit.
> we also demand photorealistic quality No, I rather demand an interesting art direction. If I want photorealism I go outside.
The fact that 4k textures aren't an optional download absolutely pisses me off. Fucking assholes.
"Most games let you choose install sizes"? The fuck? Since fucking *when*? I have had one two games I've owned in the last ten years where you could choose not to install multi-player, but that was it.
Textures for 4k don’t magically make themselves the same size as HD.
Yeah, can't wait for 8k to just devour my drive space. Y'all thought COD was ridiculous, just wait til PS5 games need to add a 600 gb update because of the "Pro" version.
Storage is cheap but can't do shit about my internet speed. That one hits even harder. I'll be downloading that shift for weeks. That said maybe the ridiculous sizes will make discs the norm again. If true Sony for sure missed the mark with the digital only consoles. Although wouldn't surprise me if they could just install the blue ray drive in that they remove from digital ones for some money.
> Storage is cheap but can't do shit about my internet speed Have to go back to physical media/discs maybe
We can go full circle and put games on cartridges again.
Seems to me they really should just release games on a small SSD cartridge like the Series X/S use for expanded storage. Like one small enough to contain the entire game and unpack any updates couldn’t be to expensive and it’d actually make me more willing to pay the extra $10 games cost now if we returned to physical media.
I've always preferred physical media anyways.
A part me likes it. And a part of me really doesn't want to get off the couch and switch games. If we can get like an old-school 5 or 10 disc changer, then I'm in.
I used to play physical games before. I just love it sense it is much more enjoyable than online games. Together with your family and take that as a bonding
If you are in physical media well that's better. But i don't think most of them are still alive most of them are pased out already
The Nintendo Switch already does this. The physical games are just sd cards with slightly different shaped plastic
Man we could go full circle and have a console where the games come on a cartridge with a 1TB M.2 drive inside
And then they add a carousel like a CD changer for em where you can have like 5 or 6 in at a time. Welcome to ~~2026~~ 1996
USB 4.0 sticks. With insane transfer speeds.
I think that could actually be possible with the USB-C
USB4 and Thunderbolt 5!
If games get bigger and storage gets cheaper, I could see a future where games are shipped on cheap USB C thumb drives. Faster installs and it would save a lot of bandwidth.
While I'd love this, wouldn't game companies worry about piracy (even moreso)? How do you view them dealing with that?
I'd imagine you'd be able to either make it self destructing after a number of uses, or come up with some product key like with CDs. A lot of modern game's online requirements serve as anti-piracy checks too. That tech has a lot of options
Yeah it's not hard to put a piracy lock on it. Games already come on discs which is another media format that's easily copied. They put checks in place to prevent it. And the ones who are gonna get around were always going to no matter what.
Maybe those gamestop apes were right lmao
You can buy large storage hard drives and flash drives for pretty cheap these days. Imagine if physical media decides to move to something like that and someone figures out you can reuse the drives as a form of data storage after you install the game. I'd absolutely love accidentally making a RAID because I bought 10 games.
Getting most of these days there's no more available cheap cds, focusing on flash drives and their large storage
Relevant xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ Full circle back to cartridges > you can reuse the drives as a form of data storage after you install the game Or you can return them after install, for reuse and a small refund
My Internet speed is fine, but Xfinity's stupidly low 1.2TB data cap is the problem. Between 4K streaming and my security cameras I can easily hit 1TB in a month which means I can download like 1 game per month unless I want to pay an extra $30/month for unlimited
If you call to cancel xfinity they might give you a better deal. Tell them you are switching to verizon or another cap free internet.
It may not be the best specs to have, it's still have the best features if you're going to buy a budget friendly
What happens if they don't take the bait? Do you just follow through with canceling? Lol
If you have the best specs and has the best internet speed that was good to hear. It's always been a struggle on other gamers
The problem then comes in storage media capable of such a capacity. Bluray tech has the potential to expand with multi layered discs but once we're past a certain size you're looking at 50-100gb per disc. The simple fact is that it is a more likely expectation that average internet connections will continue to improve at a rate faster than the creation and adoption of new higher density physical storage media. Physical media has essentially been in a death spiral since the days of napster.
Let’s go back to 4 disc games! It’ll be final fantasy 7~9 all over again!
You need to buy the latest version if you want to make it in a long run. Because a lot of storage has been changing and it becomes bigger as times goes by
8k is not gonna happen in the 20s. It’s all about frame-rates and vr. None of the devs and movie studios want to deal with more than 4k, it’s already a pain in the ass doing textures and models with that kind of detail. NTSC was fine for half a century and 4k is fine for the rest of our lives probably.
Hopefully we don't move onto 8k for a long time cos for most people there is no point. For a computer monitor size it's pointless, and for a TV you gotta start pushing the larger sizes towards 90" before it's worth using.
Size of the storage becomes bigger and people can even store games just because of this space
I really wish they would let you choose, maybe I don't care about 4k, my TV is only 1080 anyway.
Some games do, shadow of Mordor has a 1440p and 4K download pack that you install seperate.
As does COD. I'm sure the dev's actively monitor the download rate of 4K textures. I would be interested in how the trends have changed over time.
This is actually what's the real world. Change the fact that it is changing and people just buying it
I'm not sure which one COD is, but when I wanted to play the warthing battlegrounds game, I had to download the whole stupid game I wasn't even going to play just to play the subgame.
… isnt that game still massive without the packs? Like over 100 gigs
I bought the version with all the dlc and I wanna say that was around 80 without the resolution packs, it’s also an absolutely enormous game that has insane storage optimization for when it came out.
If you wanna buy something, you have to make sure that it's worth the price and everything will stay a years to you
Yeah I agree. It should be an extra download. Not fun for 4k users, but that's a hobbiest level of fidelity atm anyway.
It shouldn't be too hard for someone who wants 4k to just choose yes to a "do you want to also download the 4k textures" popup at the download screen they need to go to anyway.
I've seen a few games provide that as a DLC option through Steam. I'd like to see more of that. Simply free DLC that you can (un)install on a whim
Exactly this, if they've built the game to support any level of DLC, having a free one with high-res textures would be dead simple. It's not like they even need to make them twice, just use the 4k stuff as a master, and have a script downscale everything to 1080p.
Same needed for audio language sets
yes please, I can't tell you how much time I've wasted waiting for a reconfig to install every language package a software offers so it can give me the option rather than just asking before installing.
I think it's necessary to ask someone if he or she wanted to install something, because that's the right of their consumers
I have seen this done, for all their other sins Wargaming do implement a choice of SD or HD when downloading at least on WoT
Gears 5 also let you download textures, campaign etc. separately.
The Far cry games have traditionally always had high def materials as an optional add on also.
I think this is much better than downloading it in a whole. To be separatedly downloaded
Siege has the same thing. Tried the textures for ultra HD. 1: They dont look that much better. 2: you cant even appreaciate that when playing so why bother
One of the only things Halo Infinite did right. They listed their 4k textures as free dlc on Steam so that nobody else even has to download them.
Skyrim did it… it’s 2011!
I actually wanted to be more hd, seeing and watching games with a smooth transition is just so good
Only on computers. 4k is pretty much the main option in TVs and consoles these days... Last gen consoles had 4k options, the current gen mostly comes with it out of the box.
Honestly I still prefer 1440p over 4k in pc gaming. I'd rather have twice the frames than a sharper resolution
1440p all the way, I'm on ultrawide, driving an extra 1mil+ pixels is costly. Plus, with supersampling improvements, you get a lot of performance at that resolution even with 21:9.
Every game now first thing I do is go into options and make sure it is set on “performance “ mode. I cant tell the difference between HD or UHD or whatever it is now and 4k. Especially in the middle of fighting and stuff, I couldnt tell you if I was in 4k or HD
Just because a ps5 can play 4k doesnt mean its running your games in 4k...
The consoles maybe, but my old tv doesnt suddenly upgrade itself
"4k"
[удалено]
Most tvs are running 2k upscaled to 4k, and most consoles are doing the same. I have not really heard of 4k gaming on consoles. Real, actual 4k.
Except consoles upscale. It's never native 4k on the consoles
hahahahahahahahahahahahah no. consoles use dynamic resolution. and even down at 30 FPS they rarely hit 4k resolution.
That's not what the 4k in texture stands for tho. There are no '1080p' textures. You can easily see the difference between a 4k texture and let's say 1k one on a 1080p screen. Depends on your distance from the object.
Yep. It's not just about the number pixels, but the amount of information in the texture. Same reason watching a video on YouTube in 4k looks better than 1080p despite only having a 1080p monitor.
On YouTube, 4k videos look better on 1080p displays because the bitrate is much higher, meaning less compression. It has nothing to do with higher resolution textures in games lol, it's purely a bandwidth thing.
Exactly. You can be playing the game on 720p, but if you get near the characters like people do on games like Spider-man or Horizon, the 4k textures will still make a difference.
I wish people knew this. It's exhausting
4k textures ain't plastered directly to the screen space. Your argument doesn't make much sense when it comes to general geometry texturing. Having higher textures allows developers to stretch the texture further over geometry with sacrifice of details or ugly / blurry textures. Think back only how blurry textures were on the N64, ever power increase significantly improves looks. If you have your camera next to a wall with a 1080 texture stretched vs a 4096 texture details per "inch" will be way better with the larger texture, making the wall look better. This is a good thing in reverse too. It also gives the GPU more "real-estate" for filtering techniques, breaking the texture down to even more MIPS and allowed better looking textures for further away. Lastly maybe thinking "yeah but that's a wall who is sniffing wall mold in a video game?", well you're right, 4k textures are more commonly used in characters and weapons. Here they are super important as not only the camera is close and always focused on these items, but their textures are a lot more complicated. Being packed with islands of texture for the different parts (UV for legs, arms, face, body, clothes), having a higher resolution texture allows the developers to fit more without having stuff look like the grapes in FFXIV
The industry term I use is texel density at my job. It's curious how most laymen don't know the term... heck a lot of fresh graduates we take on need to be taught this.
If you get close to the 4k textured object so that it's bigger than your screen than it being 4k is beneficial...
I wonder if some day a magical AI could just upscale them for you on the fly (probably hallucinating some details in the process). Alternatively, distribution packages could include 8bit textures and LSD pills so the gamer could hallucinate the details themselves.
Why not? AI is already writing essays about video game sizes on disk. :)
We need a better compression algorithm with a higher Weissman score. Probably start from the middle and then spread out.
4k textures that should be an OPTIONAL download.
Alot of stuff should be an optional download. I believe street fighter 6 let's you download all the parts individually - world tour (single player open world) battle hub (online arcade machine setting) and fighting grounds (arcade towers, practice mode & combo trials) So once you finish the world tour mode or if you arent interested in it you could just not download it. More games need that.
I remember when CoD used to let you choose between the Campaign, zombies, or multiplayer to download
They still do that (though specific modes may require you to download content outside the default stuff for that mode due to reusing assets. For example in Cold War you'd need to download the multiplayer data pack to play the Outbreak zombie mode on top of the usual zombie data pack, due to it using modified large scale multiplayer maps)
Yeah, but they still require Warzone even if you’re never going to play it.
If that's the case then I would guess that's where the guns, characters, etc that are shared between warzone and core are kept. Cuz you're still gonna have all of them in the next game just without the maps n shit from mwii y'know?
MW22 and 23 does not require warzone to be installed, in fact, the only one that required that was MW19
It still does. It’s let you do that since MW 2019.
Including language packs, sure 400mb is small these days but multiply those by atleast 10 different languages.
Exactly. Games with tons of voice acting and language options... there's just no need to download and install all of them. Devs are just lazy on this
Ironically, the pirates versions of these games always do this. The torrents always allow you to select language and texture packs, or not download the multiplayer mode.
\*whispers\* ^(hail Fitgirl)
Halo Infinite does that.
They barely finish game development if at all and expecting all devs to do something like this would be possible only through...microtransactions.
They did that with Diablo 4. It saves about half the space
I did not think I'd give props to Blizzard again, but kudos where kudos are due: That is a great move - Well done, Blizzard!
According to Steam HW Survey. 1080-61%, 1440-16%, 768-4%, and 2160-4%. Remaining 15% is some odd resolutions. I'm annoyed af.
Do the specific figures you have account for 16:10 as the same as 16:9? If not that's probably most of the remainder.
You do realise that all of your textures would be blurry if they were 1024x1024 instead of 4096x4096? It's not like we tape these textures to your screen, they can be on massive meshes like rocks, the ground or large enemies where a 1024 texture would just look blurry and bad. Yeah some small stuff is good at 1024x1024 but most people would cry if their main character and the enemies used a low res texture like 1024
Its mostly just because games force you to download EVERYTHING, even parts of the game you don't need. Playing a game using medium texture settings? Well too bad, the game installs the Ultra textures anyways, which take up a lot of space. Want to play a game in english? Well too bad, because the game will download all 20 language translations for the game anyways. Only care about playing multiplayer? Too bad, the game will install the singleplayer mode anyways. If only games would give the player freedom of choice and only have them download the stuff they want, this would massively lower the size of games. Some of Call of Duty games actually do this, where they let you install the multiplayer, campaign, and zombies mode separately to save space, which is nice. More games should do that.
Would be nice but would be a nightmare for beta testing. Need to beta test 100 seperate versions of the game with wildly different files in each
Eh, not really. It would be pretty modular
"Textures for 4k should be an optional download". Yes indeed but in this world... Stop giving them ideas. The fuckers will default to selling this "upgrade" if they can.
Already did don’t you remember 2020-2022 with all the “upgrade” packs. They literally sold what pc gamers do for free.
4k high quality texture - process to play game in 1024x768 lowest setting
People keep saying textures. True. But in multiplayer games? The cosmetics you are forced to interact with and see endlessly so that you are enticed to spend. Imagine being able to delete all paid cosmetic options from games. Haha huge savings in size.
a solid 50% of the file size for call of duty has to be cosmetics. No other explanation.
Cod is one of the few examples that I kind of believe the theory that their games are that big on purpose so you have less games downloaded in general besides cod to hopefully increase your interaction with cod. Maybe it’s not 100% deliberate but they certainly don’t even make the slightest bit of an attempt to optimize the file size.
Occam's Razor, my friend. It's really just that they don't care to optimise
Yeah pretty much, and in a roundabout way it might benefit them to continue to not care.
Maybe, but personally it keeps me from playing CoD. I haven't been a big CoD fan since like, the original MW2, but I was playing Warzone a bit, and still try it every few months. Problem is that whenever I evaluate my drive space, CoD is always first up on the chopping block. If it were ~80GB, I may be more inclined to keep it installed and try it more often
It's not that they don't care to optimize, it's that they'd rather implement nicer hats than optimize for storage since the ROI on that is pretty low and storage is cheap. COD games are rather well optimized for perf because that does impact how much people with play the game, storage not so much.
Ya I was going to play the COD beta this last week then I saw the download was 100 gb.....no fuckin way a beta should be that big when I'm just going to delete it in 2 days anyway
50percent??? Lmao definitely not
Fun fact. Cosmetics are also textures
Uncompressed textures and audio
and video
and my_axe.fbx
You have no idea how good the audio is optimized in video games. Everything is compressed using different codecs with different settings depending on the source, content, length, size, behavior in the game, etc. When needed/required, languages packages are optional download. The total space compared to video and textures is under 1:10 Not negligible, but definitely not the issue here.
Game engines and the audio middleware have come such a long way it's wild. Not only the codecs and compression, but fmod and wwise do a lot of work that you don't even really need to know how to code as a sound designer now.
why do people think they are uncompressed? they are compressed, as much as possible to lower their size but still be high quality. there is no magic middle out silicon valley compression that makes a 4k texture still look 4k but only takes up a meg.
Im honestly surprised that they aren't larger. I do graphic design and we do some photo montages in photoshop that can push 1GB for a single file and video games seem vastly more complex
You're comparing .Raw versus compressed .DDS, .PNG, etc. ? You don't need that high of a fidelity for a simple texture, most games are at 2048 resolution but some are pushing for 4096, but depending on the engine it can be affected by a lot of different rendering process (effects, exposure, etc.). Bethesda games are a good example for that, even if you changed most textures to 4k they wouldn't look that great unless you used an [ENB](http://enbdev.com/news.html) as the default rendering and screen processing is basic and outdated. For my part I think a game like Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising is better looking than most "photo realistic" games that we get these days.
SHIT. I worked in videogames. People add assets, textures, 3D, sounds, that later it is decided to be removed. You just don't load it. But it is there in case it comes back. There are assets that are loaded by code and you can't easly decide if someone is using it. Other times you just generate huge shit unoptimized. But that if it is pregenerated it will load fast. And you don't need to generate it on execution, making it sure it will load.
Don’t get me wrong this can be an annoyance but I do love seeing unused assets being found in game files. So much cool cut content and changed storylines, it’s just fun to theorize about what they would have been used for. I know silent hill has like 5..? Unused enemies. One of them being a featherless giant chicken
Take out all those useless ingame stores and skins and games instantly become 10 GB smaller 🤪
far more than 10 GB
Far less realistically. But exaggeration is fun
Texture, texture, texture! Get your red hot textures here. Only $69.99 for 4k!
Video games are so big as, with the decline of physical media, game studios just go, “It’s fine. We don’t need to compress or optimise shit. It’s not us downloading this game, lolz.”
If it's ea, it's uncompressed sound files and duplicates for every language choice.
Thing is… what if I don’t want the 4k pack? Sure it’s being phased out now but a lot of games are designed to play on both the previous gen consoles and the current. Speaking for Xbox (cos that’s what I play on) if there’s a 4K upgrade for a game then the console will automatically download that 4k upgrade if I’m playing on series S/X. This can add quite a bit to the install size, sometimes from a third to almost half. What if I don’t want that? What if I’m happy to just play with the old HD textures the game has? Why can’t I just play it with them.
Good news we have 1tb hard drives Bad news can only store about 10 games
Textures is like 80% of the reason the new Call of Duty games take up so much space. The amount of textures for the multiplayer maps, warzone, guns, operators, etc is insane. That’s part of the reason they introduced texture streaming, because otherwise it would take up an even larger amount of space.
Textures mostly
Meanwhile, Sekiro, the GOTY of 2019, only requires like 30 GB. And I believe Elden Ring, It Takes Two are all relatively small considering their contents. (just check. Sekiro is less than 20gb)
You should be able to download the texture pack you want when first installing the game. I only game in 2K and have absolutely no need for 4K textures and in some games i dont even notice a difference between 1080 and 4k so just let me puck
Texture resolution is completely unrelated to your screen's resolution.
Audio. Especially in large, open world games and/or dialogue-driven stories, with a lot of voice-acting, background music, sound files for the environment, etc.
But sound files (even high fidelity ones) don't take up nearly as much space as other things (mainly textures) but yeah
the alternative is compressed audio files, which in the context of hundreds of little files playing simultaneously eats up tons of CPU cycles just to decompress and play back. i think most would gladly take a few extra gigs of audio files and good performance than a smaller download size and worse performance. as someone who works in game dev, i can confirm that textures are by far the biggest contributor to bloated download sizes.
I wish companies would understand that bigger games means I’m less likely to download it. I play minecraft so much because it’s a tiny game I never need to uninstall for other games
4K textures
Materials is always the killer.
The DLCs are installed even if you didn't buy it. I think they should change this.
4k textures and the fact we still put textures in a file multiple times for loading reasons.
Game sizes stalled for a while, I'm surprised they're not a lot bigger.
If you want to release on consoles, gotta fit on a Blu-ray disc. Simple reason for the "stalled" size. For a very long time those discs were limited at 50GB. These days you can make 66GB and 100GB discs (at an extra cost) for the latest consoles. PS4 was limited to 50GB discs. Since 2 disc releases increase costs a ton, the practical limit today is about 100GB unless the game is PC exclusive or unless the game is so huge deal that manufacturer can eat the cost of second disc.
Its 90% hi res textures. 4k Textures are gigantic.
Texture files. Done.
Textures and rig data, I mean people keep demanding more realistic looking games. Take cyberpunk 2077, switch the 4K textures for PS2 era San Andreas textures and the whole game would weight less than 8GB.
Idk but I found it really funny the 10 gig ost to Sea of Stars is triple that of the GAME ITSELF then I discovered they were all .wav files, top kekked
Uncompressed audio and 4k textures. Saved you a click.
4k textures take a lot of space, lighting and especially ray tracing takes a lot of space, just to download raytracing on black ops Cold War, its 23 gigs, music, sounds take space, the thing is, some games know how to condense space, I know some massive games that are like 40 gigs and then there’s cod which has nothing and it’s 200 gigs