Why Games Take Up So Much Space
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- Опубликовано: 6 авг 2024
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Why do so many modern video games often take up huge amounts of space on your drive - sometimes even over 100 GB?
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I'll always bring this example: Fallout 4 and Skyrim have they high-res textures as free DLC, you can save disk space by just disabling the DLC and downloading only the basic lowres textures and I think fortnite tried the same thing last year. Why don't all games do this? Seems like a relatively easy solution. No need to pack 4k textures for everyone, they should be optional.
Fallout 4 with all dlc‘s is like 100gb, skyrim is better tho
That is because these games had textures already in the game upscaled after release using machine learning, not necessarily because they wanted to save space.
I'm the type of person to install mods with even higher resolution textures because many basegame textures are poopoo
It's pretty standard for pirated games to have optional higher res textures and different translations. Getting a better experience than paying customers will never not be funny.
Diablo 4 of all things has this feature. It has base textures and then a 40gb optional download for the high-res textures.
I've been saying this for over 10 years, just like how Steam allows you to select different aspects of a download (language, location, DLCs, etc.), it should also let you choose the texture size before the download/installation. We all know that the percentage of people playing at 4K+ resolution is minimal, and those who don't use these resolutions shouldn't have to be held hostage with valuable disk space being occupied by data they will never use.
nowadays, only steam and piracy can give you that as an option
Again, 4k textures and 4k res aren't the same. You can notice 4k textures even on 1080p. It doesn't mean that 4k textures are made for 4k players. They simply need to correctly compress them, a thing I doubt they are doing in the last years.
@@enricod.7198 They are lazy lol because it takes time to compress & double check
I kinda wish I could have medium resolution textures and only download the hi res ones on the fly if I enable them in-game. Or just cache them and clear them out if I haven't touched the game in over a month. That way, I can still launch the game real quick.
@@enricod.7198 Bro MOST PEOPLE can't run this stuff.
I will never stop being impressed with what the original Legend of Zelda, LoZ:OoT, and resident evil 2 (N64 port) managed to accomplish in 128kB, 32MB, and 64MB respectively. None were the best graphics of their generations, but were vast and engaging games in incredibly small packages.
Compressed snes games were so small…. Smw was like 256kb compressed. We need to improve fast procedural generation of textures.
Tears of the kingdom is also pretty impressive that they managed to fit the whole in just 16gbs
@@junoperberry go check out what .kkrieger can do in 96kb
Kessen III was so weird that when you make an ISO of them you end up with something bigger than 4.7 GB (7.2 GB in fact) which was the PS2 disc
What is this bullshit compression magic, Koei?!
@@junoperberry TOK uses a base of cell shading texture (basically like wind weaker), and most of the detail in the model comes from shader and light effect. Basically, you could save most base colours as a low-res texture because you don't have any details to it. So its save a lot of memory compared to a high-resolution texture from other game.
A huge part is also most textures now are PBR, this means that for each texture they will usually have more than three images for each texture. A colour map, a normal map and height map at least.
Then they leave them uncompressed or unnecessarily high resolution depending on if they're normal/bump maps etc
This has been the case since 1999. They just call it a unified name now instead of the engine-specific naming (node-based shaders, compiled shaders, dynamic textures, etc). PBR is NOT the reason for the bloat.
Why do you need a color map? If you were to use texture that is already some sort of image such as png, doesnt it already include all possible colors that can be displayed?
@@test-rj2vl The issue I think is an ambiguity in the use of the word "texture" - With PBR, you can think of one "texture" as being a composite of several "maps", as others have listed. The color map is the same as a conventional image, and is the only one that can still be used as a "texture" on its own while making sense. Normal maps, roughness maps, etc. are all things that describe the material properties of the surface that the color map represents; If your color map has the appearance of a brick wall, you don't want that surface in-game to shine like polished metal. Effectively, these additional maps simply use image formats as a way to store and *represent* non-color data.
@@spokeBc You can also compress normal maps to 2 channels, thanks to the fact that normals always point outwards and the Pythagorean Theorem.
More games need to have Ultra textures (and uncompressed audio) as free DLC so you can choose to download them separately. Also, most games could probably get away with doing half-res normal maps to increase performance. But this requires management actually caring about the players and not wanting them to continue churning out (money making) content.
That ultra texture DLC can easily be another $10 lol 😂
Go play on your consoles and stop ruining PC gaming
I don't think so imo. Most players expect when they download a game that it'll be the intended experience. If they see it looks like shit they'll the game is bad.
@@hwstar9416 I haven't seen a game in long time that that was released and was the intended experience.
Game repacks have had this for years.
Choose if you want HD textures and cinematics or not upon install.
Can choose what language you want, this alone can save upto 10GB in some games.
Pirates have been ahead of the game for decades.
They should release games with low res textures for 1080p and a 4k texture pack for those that want it.
I agree. This is the correct solution.
Yes
Diablo 4 actually has this, when setting up the install you can decide which version you want, 45Gb vs 77Gb iirc
Totaly agree. There's actually a tiny amount of games doing this andr it doesn't cost me (as 4k user) anything¹ to install hi-res textures along with the game while it's saves space for those who don't need that.
¹ except time, only for those game what implement 4k textures downloading *inside a game* instead doing it of inside the launcher (ex. Steam) where I can choose to install both the game and hi-res textures without needing to wait for the game to download first.
Toss in 1440p too, because having to get 4k downresed isn't the most clean solution for space saving.
When I built my first gaming pc in 2011, I was thinking I would just buy a 1tb hard drive and that would be waaay more space than I ever need. And with the average game at the time being around 8gb size, I was right at the time. Times have definitely changed since the Xbox 360 era!
I remember my mind being boggled at the size of Dragon Age Origins (with DLC) being like 25GB lol.
Then there is people like me who got a 3Tb in 2012 and filled it up in 2 days. XD
@@Dewalt-mh1dz did u store your homework?😏
i have 1.5tb of space on my pc and im usually good with that granted i dont play AAA games that much cause most of them suck nowadays. Most of my storage is taken up by mods for games that are usually at most like 20gb
@@Dewalt-mh1dzbruh what the heck did you store in there?! 💀
I am an infrastructure and devops engineer for a very large videogame maker. Our biggest game is an offering in the MMO category, and its source control requirements for full history, including all code, multimedia, and internationalization, is nearly 25 TB. Given all the supported resolutions, languages, etc., this should come as no surprise.
Wow
Do you know why some games is so well optimize like Doom 2016, Half-Life Alyx. (Can run on Core 2 Quad)
But others games have creazy high system req.?
@@skak3000 Alyx is a VR title, so it's built from ground-up with the idea of being ran at high FPS to reduce motion sickness. Doom also has high performance as part of a core design philosophy, so it's entirely built around it from the get-go.
But that's raw source code, not compiled, which does reduce a lot of the size if you're using DLLs in your client code. Plus, as you said its an MMO, I am a 100% sure you might also be including the server infrastructure code, which would be gigantic, I can agree. The game would be a "client" by default, which shouldn't be bundling the server side configurations. The actual, compiled client would be much smaller in size.
@@palaashatriit’s not code that’s the issue, it’s assets. I have a single raw fireball explosion that is 3GB. It’s only 5s long..
Getting it into a game uses complex tech like flipbooks and other junk
They should seriously start making stuff like 4k textures, language files and cutscenes optional downloads. It's completely dumb to fill up disc space with crap you won't use if you play on 1080p or 1440p and only use one language
Yeah, why would i like to even dare to have the Ultra assets on my potato that struggles to get 20FPS on low. #FreeOurStorage
Fitgirl has your fix !
It's important to note (although I'm sure you're already aware) that 4k textures and 4k resolution monitors aren't the same thing, so having 4k textures isn't something one should consider overkill for 1080p gaming. If anything, the difference would probably be more noticable on a 1080p 27" monitor than it would on a 4k 27" monitor, for example.
On top of that - they already are. It is easier to downscale a 4k texture to 1k or 2k (1024² or 2048², respectively) than to upscale, even with machine learning.
Game developers want to create the best possible presentation they can for a given budget. It isn't economical or useful to make separate texture packs when they can just put their best foot forward, and allow the option to downscale textures for people that have weaker systems. This is something most games already have built into them.
More and more games nowadays have an optional "high resolution textures" option you can select or deselect when installing the game. Most recent in my memory is Diablo 4, the high res option basically doubles the size of the game from 40ish-gb to 80
Absolutely. Like, you already have the separate files probably, why not just put them up as DLC?
The biggest issues are the lack of optimization and options. Plenty of games have unoptimized assets which could be brought down (like in the old days when space was a restriction). Someone running on a 2012 laptop does not need a 4k texture and 4k is still a rarity in the current state. The problem is that because it's no longer a restriction many studios don't bother. CoD is a major example where it went from 300 GB to 100GB when they finally optimized War zone. Most devs don't have a reason and so build for the most expensive.
However, there are ways to compress or make a lower res version. Genshin as one example while still big is always working hard to compress and save space as they need to have a mobile version. The biggest issue is that most of these space savings are ONLY available on Mobile. PC cannot download the Mobile version or save space. One of the other biggest issues is the trend towards hyper realism which has been understood as a trap in the industry for literal decades (I learned it in school) and we're somehow falling for. Stylized graphics are much easier to make and often have more of an impact. Not all games need to be stylized but more games should be.
Uncompressed Audio is also a big deal but that one is often harder to fix as the quality will take a hit. We could definitely go back to OGG and other formats but the average sound setup is so sophisticated that it often can't be helped. This is the biggest bottleneck that can't be fixed (and only one).
Now for some good examples. Punishing Grey Raven devs have often been praised for their optimization of their games where they look stunning and run on SUPER old rigs. They started making a Genshin like Open World that still runs on older tech because their devs are crazy about optimization. Their games are small too for the content.
Omega Strikers similarly took on the challenge of being the most accessible multi-player game. They did this by having no shaders or post processing enabling people to play it through only CPU and then heavily optimizing everything. As well as this they stylized so you need much less power for a much better picture. Very important. Their game is tiny and runs smooth even on a business comp with no GPU.
Finally I'll say Genshin for all its worth is well optimized and should be the average. They're a MASSIVE open world game but they've notably kept size as low as possible since launch. The fact that they're so big now is testament to the sheer amount of content in the game and audio/cutscenes added as well as the vast environments. As someone who played from the start I could tell by how small the increments were for things like a new region how well their optimization is even if it's not perfect. I would just like the option for downloading the mobile version to save space if I choose. Also, Genshin biggest problem is their Patcher which uses the archaic method of needing double the space to install (9GB patch needs 20GB). Which is horrible during large patches or fresh installs. This is still common way too often and more devs need to look at their patching systems and make block like or dynamic patches.
Anyways, that's all I got so hope you guys enjoyed and got something out of it!
Thank you!!! This is much better than saying textures duuhh. This was probably the most brain dead ulsur of a thing I heard from lines he usually knows allot but this, THIS! Total bogus. New games are an unoptimized glitchy cash grab mess don't play dumb it's all about the cash flow with these big companies. You know a game that actually warrants this 100gb is payday 2. why? You may ask l. Because it hase over 100 guns I believe over 100 maps as well as having tons of skins.
My First thougt Was KKrieger the game. Impressive and mindblowing.
The problem with this logic is that games today using 150+ GBs have nowhere near 4k resolution textures on display for most stuff. Most in game assets are much lower res than that because as you say, there's no reason to saturate the RAM with super duper high res assets when that game isn't going to be running anywhere close to 4k native; that extra framebuffer is better spent on other things like enhanced volumetrics or whatever. Game devs aren't stupid lol...it's super duper rare that a game dev just leaves uncompressed, raw texture data in the game and doesn't use that memory for something else (the original Dark Souls PC release being noted at the time for how odd incredibly odd it was for actually doing this; some textures in that game don't start to resolve properly unless you're in the 4-5k internal render res lol) the big thing that modern games have done that have exploded space is what in legacy titles minor things that were super duper low res or even just simple flat sprites are now high definition objects with geometry and multiple passes going over them for stuff like PBR, which has exploded space requirements. Basically, stuff like the random signpost that used to be a small 320x240 texture with a few triangles are now 5-10x that and in higher end titles stuff like tessellation going over the top, which requires even /more/ texture detail to properly show off.
In short, the floor is higher now. Stuff that last gen would be a handful of megs (or even smaller if it was a sprite) is now in the multiple hundred megs territory. You multiply that out into the literally thousands of objects that need to be textured....yeah, it adds up quick.
If games were truly using all 4k+ asset quality across the board, you'd be /easily/ seeing over half a terabyte sized games...which is the point linus was making here: this isn't going to slow down anytime soon.
4k textures do have its place, for example i do vehicle mods and commonly have main texture as a 4k one.(in most cases 2k is too blurry, for me as a 1080p display user)
Many game assets aren't optimized in a different way: 4k resolution for something low detail or small in the game world.
Repack scene is awesome, they compress and remove unnecessary parts of the game to minimize their download size, I dont understand why steam or publisher and devs in general not attempt to do it. In a game repack you will usually able to choose what language, video quality (4K or full HD) ,bonus content (ost, bts video , commentary) and texture quality. When installed this will make overall install size also reduced , sometimes quite significantly.
Because it's too much effort for something that doesn't make money as instantly.
It's easier to sell graphics on a storefront then an actually functioning good game that won't put your PC in heavy strain even if you get top tier setup.
They should take example from pirates and repacking groups. They allow partial download where if you don't need other language voices (and sometimes 4K textures) you can skip them entirely.
another piracy W
@@koli4213 Potential malware = that W don't count, big L
@@Dwight511 think my comment got deleto but you gotta use trusted sites, a good place to look is a piracy subreddit megathrad
@@Dwight511antivirus, like malwarebytes = W for the brave
@@Dwight511 I will take potential malware over overly monetized microtransaction live service hell hole with PC melting graphics industry loves so much these days
I was surprised that Monster Hunter World had an optional ultra rez texture pack as a free download. I wish more games allowed higher resolution textures as an optional free download to save on space
I still remember when GTA 5, one of the biggest games ever, was only an 8gb install (disc version) at launch on PS3. And even that size was a controversy back in 2013.
Are you sure? I remember it taking about 17-37 (can't quite recall the exact size) gigs on my HDD. I didn't have it on disc though.
God of War 3 and MGS4, on the other hand, were crazy back then.
@@Behdad47 I’m positive. I remember clearly because I preordered GTA 5 and wanted to know ahead of time what the requirements were so I could play it immediately after I picked up my midnight launch copy.
8gb isn’t much now but back then it was huge. Most games didn’t have a mandatory install on PS3 and the ones that did were way smaller.
I just checked and the 8gb install requirement is still up on Rockstar’s support page. Look up: Grand Theft Auto V Xbox 360 and PS3 Installation Requirements. It should be the first article.
@@FatherManus devs can compress large files/installation files into smaller ones to fit in a download folder. You can fit an 80gb file into a 30gb compressed zip files for example. But once you unzip it/install the program, it will uncompress back into it's original size. it doesnt matter if the installation files only takes up 8gb in your usb, when you install the actual game in your console, it will balloon up into its original size and take space in your console instead. Unfortunately only a few game does this since it's time consuming. You can often found this practice in pirated games. I downloaded resident evil 4 remake with dlcs that went from 30gb to 80gb.
The PC version was around 60-70GB in 2015. I remember it taking a long time to download on a 10Mbps fiber
@@Pasi123 I had to get a Steam backup from my friend. It was 14 DVDs when I got it so I guess around 62-66 gigs. I was flabbergasted when I saw him hand me those DVDs.
Another space issue is the hyper-realistic art style that the company is going for. Because they're trying to render every blade of grass and every nose hair, they need many extra textures just for each individual hair variable. If you compare to something that uses an anime art style, even at 1440p, there's a huge decrease in storage space just because they don't have to have those excessive, hyper-realistic textures, especially on character models. Using a modern game for reference, Atelier Ryza 3, which came out in March 2023, only requires 50gb of storage, less than a third the example used at 0:11 does.
Hell, anything beyond 1080p is overkill to me.
As long as you can tell what's what, the graphics do the job more then enough.
What I would add to compression is that it can be slow. You can compress your files and then decompress when you load them, but it takes time, leading to performance penalties.
They can release seperate free DLCs with higher texture files.
For audio they can just use Opus 192 kbps because there isn't any audible difference between that and lossless.
yea its rare when games that let you uninstall the ultra high texture packs in steam
I believe they did it similar to this with Arma 2. You could play the base version of the game for free with your friends, but if you didn't buy the game you had what felt like 16x16 textures
Why can't every game do it kinda like Far Crys. The game downloads with 1080P textures at start and if You want to play on higher resolution You have to replace the textures with 1440P ones.
My first HDD was 200Mb and Wolfenstein 3D was 1Mb.
Now I have a 2 TB SSD and games are 100Gb.
Ssd are getting cheaper
@@mikkodoria4778 Cows give milk.
If only what you said about focusing on performance and graphics fidelity was true and guaranteed by big files, I don't think many would mind, unfortunately we've had to learn the hard way that a game can be big in disk, play poorly and look ugly all at the same time, otherwise it's not funny. It's challenging to be a developer and it is tricky to make a game, but certain standard should be put in place and we still should try to encourage developers to be mindful of game file sizes.
Triple A industry went so hard down into the gutter it's not funny anymore.
Huge games, expansive marketing, "realistic" graphics, buggy messes on release that get fixed maybe a year later into a barely functioning state if the game doesn't get abandoned, overkill monetization with overpriced skins, pay 2 grind battlepasses, seasonal FOMO content, seas of DLCs and so on.
Literally just go over indie titles and AA games if you ever think about getting a triple A game, you're likely gonna save yourself a headache, and your wallet will likely thank you alongside your PC.
because no time or effort is put into optimization due to immense pressure from management
The good news is AI is about to set us free from this problem.
AI compression is on an entirely different level.
The problem is you need a neural render to take advantage.
The good news is there are AIs to help program a neural render.
So... Soon 🤔
That's the real reason, capitalism sucks the fun from our hobbies yet again.
This isn't really true
We already use a lot of optimizations because it actually makes our lives faster and easier too. Things like tileable textures and trimsheets save us time, so they're already used.
Sure, there are some optimizations that could be implemented with more time, but those wouldn't reduce the final game file size as much as you might imagine. In fact, it would probably make very little difference at all.
@@Aspeckygenerally blaming capitalism for anything n°1290
@@Aspecky In a way, yes. Nobody wants to pay $200 for a game so that it can be optimized and ultratested.
As someone that never goes above 1080p, i hate this. What about just releasing separate versions of games with no 4k textures for people that don't care about it? I bet more than half the size of AAA games are just 4k textures.
That would require the devs to put in extra work I am sure. And they all ready skip on putting time into optimization.
Or above 1080 textures can be a free day zero dlc
@@noahosborne8581 I don't think it would take that much work, you'd basically just replace all the 4k textures for lower resolution ones
Some games do it, Diablo IV full installation is 84GB but you can choose to not download the 44GB of textures needed for 4k.
@@rizizumEven if it takes a single employee just half a day of work, it's enough to make them say "this will also sell without it" and they would be right
another big problem with this is a lot of us still have dsl internet with 20-30mbps download speed and a lot of times 1/10th of that upload speed, downloading a 150gb game takes forever and if i don't limit the download speed, my internet is borderline unusable while im downloading something, so it takes even longer then :(
Yea, it takes a few hours even in the uk lol.
20 to 30? i get like 1-2 if im lucky lmao
i would kill to have 20 lol (not literally, but you get the point)
i'm stuck with 1.5mbps DSL since I live in a rural area.
I think we just need a game company to make a break-through in textures like Polyphony Digital did with Gran Turismo 3. It was the first game of its kind to look high resolution without exceeding the space limitations of a PS2 disc.
Well Nvidia is working on neural texture compression, looks pretty promising.
@@Pixel_J I'd prefer the middle out compression from piped piper.
@@nicholasxuu 😂 Not hotdog. That would rule.
@@Pixel_J That will be the future. It's basically just an extension to the existing DLSS technology, essentially just a smarter version of JPG.
@@Pixel_J Reserched into that - it only benefits on really crap quality levels and resolution. Also there is HUGE performance hit and requires custom shaders for everything.
You could have also mentioned the additional textures that layer on top of the Color Map, these also have to be fairly high resolution.
Exactly.
An additional problem for maps that are not used for the diffuse color is that they need special compression techniques and cannot be compressed as much or neven not at all. Lossy compression usually heavily relies on removing (color) information that our eyes do not see as well as others or by removing details our brains filter out anyways. Many algorithms for example just throw away half of the information in the red an blue channels to save space, because we can perceive a lot more green shades than shades of the other two colors.
Textures not used for diffuse colors (like specular, glossiness, normals & displacement) in the game though are not made to be viewed directly, we use them to change material properties of surfaces, so their pixels hold vital information for the shaders used in the game. Hence many classic compression techniques won't work on them. If you use standard jpg or classic DXT compression on a normal map, you'll get a really messed up surface.
I think they should give you the option to NOT download 2K and or 4k textures if the PC can only do 1080p anyway.
That's not exactly how it works. A 4k texture can look blurry on a 720p monitor if the object is big enough in the game that it's stretching out the texture. That's an extreme example. But even on a 1080p screen a 2k or 4k texture can look bad if the object is big enough or you're close enough. Like, a 4k texture on a baseball is going to be hard to tell that it's 4k, vs a 4k texture on a skyscraper that you can walk up to and only see a fraction of the wall on.
A lot of recent games, the developers seem to not worry about file size OR if the game works right, or even looks good.
It's typically not the fault of the developers, but instead time constraints from the studio. Executives will choose a release date with little mind to how long the game will actually take to complete, so developers have to crunch to finish the game as fast as possible before release. This leads to a lack of time for optimization and bug fixing, which typically happen later in development but have to be vastly shortened because of limited time. Rather than blaming the game developers, blame the huge studios who forced the developers to release before the game was ready.
@@filedotjar So what you're saying is, the executives need to be legally and personally (not able to hide behind the legal fiction of "company personhood") held responsible for rushing products out the door in an Unfit For Purpose state? I dunno, that sounds like socialism to me.
Or, y'know, British, or some other country with less-oligarch-friendly laws.
So there's a mix here. Some studios clean up after themselves. Some don't care and just leave duplicate textures and models everywhere (especially by giving each level an asset pack file with everything it needs, dupes be damned). Then there's the new trend of letting automatic optimization take over: shaders compule on the fly but either eat up loads of disk space in shader cache or they don't cache much and your CPU gets bogged down (the reason games like Jedi: Survivor run badly).
There are games that exist on console with the whole Low to Ultra gamut of asset variants, knowing full well they only use the High assets or whatnot, and because it costs money to have a guy clean out unused files they make end users take a drive space penalty. This is almost exclusively a publisher degree though and not the dev studio whenever this happens.
Just saying, there are games that the teams involved have do e the minimal effort to optimize disk usage, then there are games where they outright do not care about efficiency in disk usage for monetary, timeframe, or lazy (live shader compilation!) reasons. The former is expected of a AAA price tag, and the latter is a studio or publisher seeing their customers as cash stock cattle.
Ubisoft be like
@@filedotjar It is not the fault of executives either, it is demand of the market. Public demands good looking games now, not in few years . Most people are willing to pay money for better GPU, CPU, RAM and storage , in order to play those non-optimized games.
We submit for your consideration: Deep Rock Galactic. It uses well-executed low-poly (but somehow still high-detail) design, and probably also minimal textures, to cram itself into just 3GB!
Rock and stone, everyone!
I was late to the DRG stuff but all my friends were playing it. Was pretty much surprised a game thats so many people are playing is just around 3GB. I thought I had to free up another 20GB to download this game
its just stylization vs realism. not every game is or should be low poly.
Did I hear a Rock and Stone?
Isn't Deep Rock Galactic procedural? No man's sky is also like 10GB with a massive universe inside because it's procedurally generated.
@@Nandrith Rock and Stone!!
Cyberpunk 2077 not even taking 70 Gigabytes is genuinely remarkable then
Update: After 2.0 the base game just takes up 57.9 GB of storage instead of the 67.4GB before.
Have you seen some of the textures in that game? Very blurry
@PickeringSamuel only if you are using a 30+in 4k display. Most of us can afford a system that can render it at that settings.
Cyberpunk has a ton of asset reuse and many of the textures are small repeatable layers. Heck some are solid colors.
@@Random_dud31 most people play on a 3060 lol. I'm on a 4090.
If you skip the updates....
I don't care how much excuses they make, game size can be trimmed severely if they really wanted to, and here's how:
- Compression can be made in many ways, you can use lossy compression with artifacts like in DXT or you can use palettized textures with some dithering
- Details can also be achieved in many ways, you don't need grass or dirt or even a brick wall to have a very high res unique pattern, you can use detail layers to overlay some noise and imperfections over a way more basic texture
- Further more, for the most boring textures you can use a stochastic shader and make them look way better, by breaking the patterns, thus making them look more unique and even fixing uneven patterning textures
- Finally, they have to improve their file management, if they ship their games with thousands of repeated images in a bunch of different files, obviously, it will bloat fast, they need to define generic textures in tiers and decide which libraries to load based on simple rules. It's a bit hard to explain but basically, don't have a thousand generic_metal_rusty, instead, if that texture is going to be in a thousand objects, pack all the repeated textures from those objects in a library that will load when any of those objects load, then for the unique object specific textures, load the library for that specific object, effectivelly deduplicating textures.
AAA games already do every single one of the optimizations you listed, and more.
@@notnullnotvoid Yeah... no.
I've been modding games since before I had a computer that could run them, and I can assure you that is not the case at all.
I'm not mentioning any new or revolutionary technique, but they're not being used effectivelly, and often they leave some in the table even on 100GB+ games.
@@YOEL_44 "I've modded games" doesn't work as a credential pull when the person you're talking to is a developer.
@@notnullnotvoid How do you know?
@@notnullnotvoid Oh and as a developer you have industry spies on every single AAA studio that has guaranted you that all of their tittles have been optimized with all and every single technique I listed.
Well then of course, I have nothing to say there...
Textures have multiple layers that are used for different things by shaders.
Base color, Height, Metallic, Normal, Roughness, Specular, Emissive (these may have different names). Each of these texture types determine some aspect of how something looks. If you want to know more, look up PBR Textures.
Very accurate. A fellow Blender user, I presume?
Great vid, almost watch a 17 min vid on this but a 5 min one that gives constant reason on the topic is nice, well made my man
Efficiently using textures used to also be more of a thing back in the day. Splat maps, texture atlas's, etc...only mobile games bother to optimize anymore.
Mobile games look like crap though
You are not getting spiderman on a phone
@@oo--7714 Mobile games can look surprisingly good, it just depends on the developer.
Not true, those are basic optimizations everybody does nowadays (maybe except texture atlases, there's better approaches now), it's just the amount of textures has increased.
A simple basic PBR material has to have three textures, which will equate to probably at least a 2k albedo + 1k normal + 1k Roughness/Metallic/AO, for a relatively realistic looking material.
@@Magnulus76 bro they all look like crap let’s not kid ourselves
Kind of genius really. Like many others, I'm always complaining about my Steam Backlog. Can't install more than one game due to space... can't have a backlog. Problem solved.
I always appreciated when you have the option to download high resolution textures as an addon or something. Sometimes, those will be bigger than the game itself.
Here's a handy tech tip for you: if you're running low on storage, consider enabling compression for specific folders, such as game mods. Personally, I use it on my FFXIV mods folder, which has helped me to save around 200 GB out of 500 GB. To enable it, simply right-click on the folder, go to Properties, select Advanced, and check the option "Compress contents to save disk space." It will take a while to apply at first, depending on the folder size and disk speed. Enabling compression won't affect your read speeds negatively, it will even decrease load times on slower drives. While it may theoretically slightly increase the load on your CPU and RAM, the impact is minimal and hardly noticeable on modern systems.
As a 3D artist myself i wasn't expecting Linus to be so accurate about the technicality of textures, but he nailed it. Even if that's not just "the only thing" making game size bigger, it is a big one to deal with, now prepare for "Full nanite high-ress meshes" games in this "next gen" and 250gb+/- game file sizes lol
I mean, it is not really advanced stuff he was speaking about. Also, he is just host, writer is other person, and it is their job to write good stuff.
@@yaroslavpanych2067After watching Linus for many many years, I believe he would fully understand. As you said it's not that advanced even
Hey, I'm aspiring to be a 3D artist. Got any tips on how to optimize assets to be high quality and potato-friendly. Other than retopology or textures?
High res textures and very high quality audio files I believe are the two biggest contributors contributors to overall size. I could be wrong though.
@@anonym34566 the problem with compressing is that it needs to be decompressed at runtime to be used, which will eat up a ton of CPU power, memory, and potentially cause stuttering or other performance issues even on high tier hardware. It would add an immense amount of complexity to the game engine to optimize and smooth out the decompression.
EDIT: Apparently they use dedicated hardware for stuff like this on consoles, but on PC there are some algorithms and instruction sets that work but currently it's not great. There is a lot of development going into that space though.
I remember back in the fallout 4 days the game's fps was choppy af- I used a mod that had optimized compressed textures and I could even compress them myself with a mod in under an hour- the difference was literally unnoticable in 1080p; the game's size went down more than 50% and the stuttering was gone; from that day on I cursed the industry for not being able to compress the textures right or implement a way that is less resource-hungry
-The worst part is that most of the 'modern games' take up 100s of GBs and still manage to look like something made in ps2 era
Most textures in games are already compressed using S3 Texture Compression. Audio is in mp3 or OGG Vorbis (free) format. Cut-scenes are in many cases just a video files using BINK compression.
I had an idea a while back. If one were to have all textures in a vector based format like SVG, you would only need one texture for LOD instead of multiple. It would also allow for textures to become infinitely detailed at any size. There would be some hurdles in making it render in real time, and saving space probably won't happen this way, but for future proofing your textures and doing LOD related tasks it would be an interesting experiment at least.
I think for stores like steam etc. There should just be different downloads which you could pick based on your screen. So if you are playing at 1080, 1440 or 4k you can choose the best one for you.
Anyone know if there are game engines that will accept SVG textures. Seems to me that they would solve the size issue anywhere they were practical. Layering SVG's with transparency could allow some pretty cool optimizations too. For example, an SVG of a road texture, with a layer that adds road markings, and another that adds tire wear or cracks... all infinitely scalable.
I'm not a game dev, but more complicated SVG files will take a performance hit compared to PNG files. GPUs prefer bitmaps to vectors. You might be fine in smaller games without realistic textures, but at that point, you probably won't be saving too much space by going with SVG compared to PNG.
The way current render engines work mean that vector based images like SVG either don't work or are extremely performance intensive. We rely on pixels.
Also SVG files are great for logos and stuff, but terrible for realistic textures.
Also programs that create textures (like SUbstance Painter and Designer) are designer for raster images, not vector images.
Basically, vector images are entirely incompatible with game production as it is.
It's cool idea and I certainly have heard about such things but it is not very different from aforementioned procedural textures - it would take some processing power to rasterize them, though not as much.
SVGs are not that good at producing photorealistic textures. Unless the SVG simply stores the bitmapped texture as a part of it, at which point you're adding the SVG container overhead to a texture you might as well have just stored straight.
Its not just the size of textures that has sky rocketed in recent years. The graphics processing side of things for ultra realistic side of things has actually made the memory issue significantly worse, since many of the newer techniques use more and more textures than they used to.
If we take the boat example, you might have a diffuse map, normal map, roughness map, metal map, emissive map and baked ambient occlusion map, then add in anything special the model might need, in this case a wetness map (generated dynamically in this case most likely) or a displacement map for the sail. In the early days of 3d, when textures begun being used, games would generally only use a single texture for the diffuse on any model, and that was at a significantly lower resolution than today.
Excellent content! Good info, normal antics and great presentation! Keep up good work more like this!
Texture decompression seems like an ideal candidate for offloading to an auxilary GPU the way you could select a PhysX device in the past.
I always been preaching there need to be separate texture files for 720p, 1080p, 2K and 4K. On the eco side would save plenty global network traffic and energy too.
720p is no longer needed.
Its a dying format (says me from a 720p laptop, oh irony).
Most modern games will not run on PCs that are old / low tier enough to be only 720p.
@@hubertnnn There are still low PC budget builds can benefit with 720p, is sure less hassle for devs to just release 1080p as standard since players can downtune to to 720p anyway. But mobile devices also use 720p textures so not quite a dying format yet.
@@YumeNeuron no even phones don't run games in 720p, it 900p usually, lot of games run higher like pubg mobile at 1440p at max settings. Come on 720p gaming is dead.
@@oo--7714 Steam Deck has a 1280x800 display (16:10 version of 720p) and last time I checked it was quite popular, definitely not something I'd call dead. A lot of games on phones like Genshin Impact runs at around 720p even if your phone had a 1440p or 4K display
@@Pasi123 Genshin is a bad example since it slows down to bloody 20fps even on a PC if you stand where there are 5 trees. It's like they real time calculate every leaf that isn't even there!
It is a combination of several things. While it is true that texture optimization does contribute but it doesn't contribute as much as people might think it is. Like the video said, yes, higher screen resolution does give large contribution to the increasing texture size but that is not the only thing that increase the overall texture budget.
The move to realistic material increase texture budget since a texture will be accompanied by like 3 to 4 other textures (for normal, roughness, etc), also a lot of big games have less repetitive texture, and not only that but also layered material (so an object might have several material on it like base material, decals, dirt). Basically creating realistic look without looking repetitive requires a lot of textures. And no, baking the texture only increase the texture size since those layered material ended up creating random look, thus when baked you ended up with probably unique texture for all surface. Anyway, the desire for creating this kind of look also contribute to this shader compilation problem.
Having said that, you can definitely create a game that still looks good with a lot less texture budget and also reducing/removing shader compilation problem by carefully managing and reusing assets, but obviously this will have less creative freedom. Personally I don't mind PS3 era style shader just with increased texture resolution, higher polygon budget, higher resolution, better lighting. While current gen games with realistic material does indeed look... realistic but I prefer games that can run smooth and not having shader compilation problem or having to wait for the shader to be compiled. Something like FF13 but with increased everything except for material shader complexity is good enough for me. Or maybe something like the latest Zelda game with the same treatment. But then Digital Foundry will probably bash that kind of visual for AAA games since it will be on current gen console and PC but look like last gen visual even if it runs really great since last gen visual can only get a pass if it is on Switch. Imagine FF16 with FF13 material shaders. Even if because of that it can run at 60FPS stable with higher resolution, I can guarantee you that they will say it looks like last gen and will ended up with them less pleased with the graphics.
Love your channel! I’m tryin to build my first gaming computer and learning as much as I can and your videos really helped!
I was surprised when installing Diablo4 they had an option for downloading 4k textures. So the game was like 45gb and extra 40gb if you choose 4k texture
I always said 2tbs is the lowest you should buy for gaming when buying your m.2 drive.
2TB is really cheap now too especially budget ones.
2 terabits per second? maybe 2tb drive, but i agree, i also recently bought a m.2 2tb ssd, not only i wanted to make sure i always have enough space, but it was the best value one
4tb Gen4 NVME drives are now under $100. There’s really no excuse anymore for not having more storage.
@@Phoenix88203 dont know where youre getting $100 but you can get a crucial rn for $200 and at best buy which is what I paid for my 2tb about a year and a half ago.
@@M1szS if you want to be a smartass, do it right. tbs would be terabyte times second not per second. :)
In your example of the wall, most people don't realize it's more than one texture. Materials will have a diffuse or albedo, normals, specular map, metelness, etc all these textures are compiled into one material or the brick wall.
Would like to see more selectable options in the install. Opt out of lossless audio. Opt out of high res textures (since depending on your resolution and quality settings they may not be used anyway). Etc etc.
One thing I would like to mention is that .png is often overlooked, because it's true features are rarely advertised.
.png is a lossless format, and you can compress it further by up to 90%, completely losslessly. In my own personal experience, A texture atlas I was working with, thanks to .png compression, went from 49MB down to 12MB.
However, compression does still always mean calculations.
ie; Performance loss for space saving.
If it really was that simple, they would've fixed that within an engine already so they'd never have to think about it again. But the reality is that compression = performance.
@@theBabyDead realistically speaking, as long as you compress out of engine it is no longer of concern. compressing within the engine is where it gets messy
@@NekokunPlays but it still needs to get decompressed at some point, no?
@@theBabyDead Only if you compress it within the engine
@@NekokunPlays right. But that means you just deliver compressed textures then, right? Which means lower quality, no?
I would like if there was an option to download textures suitable for 4k or other resolutions when installing/downloading the game. But, I could also see how that would be a waste as more and more people play in 4k.
Actually less than 3% of the Steam surveyed people even have a 4K monitor attached to their system. And the trend is stable if not slightly downwards.
Just because you and your rich friends all recently got 4K monitors, doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Even 1440p is basically unheard of for most people, at less than 17%.
Less than 1 in 5 people has anything above 1080p, EVEN in multi monitor and ultrawide setups it's basically all 1080p with different aspect ratios.
And I don't think this is because of monitor pricing, rather GPU capabilities.
If you have a 1440p monitor, you need a 3060 to play fucking Skyrim.
Basically you need a 2070 Super, 3060 Ti and up, and those are expensive af even now (cheapest used one at 350€, new above 400€).
And the new stuff you require a 6800XT, 6900XT, 6950XT, 3080 12GB, 3090, 3090 Ti, 4080, 4080, 4090, 7900 and 7900XT. Some rare game runs reliably well at high settings on A770 LE and 6700XT.
4070, 4070 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, 3080 10GB would have the power to do so, but they're memory limited. And even if they weren't, they're still expensive AF.
I could go out tomorrow and buy a decent 1440p monitor for 250€, but I won't do that because then I would have to upgrade my 3060 12GB to a 600€ 4070 or 6950XT, which will be then limited by my PCIe Gen 3 mobo so I would need to also upgrade that for another 130 to 200€.
Basically doing the switch to a basic 1440p screen would cost me an extra 700€ in upgrades just to reach 60 fps reliably. You see how that's unsustainable and/or not worth it for most?
@@Anankin12 I'm sorry, I believed was trending upwards because from what I seen on RUclips. Also, rich? I wish, I still play on 1080p and of last week finally managed to upgrade from my GTX 780.
@@Yemto very happy for you mate 🔥, also sorry about the assumption. I made it because I've seen this exact comment made by people who run a 13900KS or 7950X3D and 4090 with insane everything, who talk about how everyone they know is getting into 4K gaming and they don't see how anyone could ever play at anything less.
This happens a lot, which is why I jumped to conclusions.
before installation is complete there should be a resolution option to download the game at that you can later change (it will download the new res and delete the previous one).
Thanks, that was informative. Good to have a refresher.
When you compare open source software to proprietary software you see a big difference in space because open source projects have higher standards in code quality. Just textures is the easiest and boring answer but there are more reasons
High quality textures make for fancier screenshots and trailers which are easier to sell then a functioning game nowadays apparently.
As far as audio goes, it's not like you need Waveform files for everything. Using Opus or Vorbis will work well for lossless audio in small file sizes, and Opus supports spatial audio. But, if the devs decide to go the Dolby Atmos route, these are definitely of no use.
So let's do some math for dialogue. Skyrim had 60,000 lines at launch, all voiced. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it averages 10 words per line, so 600,000 words about. Average speech is about 130 WPM, so approximately 4,615 minutes (about 3.2 days worth) of speech, totaling about 276,923 seconds. We'll use 24 kbps, Opus's wiki recommendation for podcasts and audiobooks, and we get 6.46 GB for just audio. That's over half of vanilla Skyrim's install size of 12 GB.
Now, I don't know what the actual bitrate for Skyrim is or even if I correctly estimated the total length of time but this is one of the main problems with game audio. With compression (which also takes processing power to decompress) you're really just taking a bitrate*running time for audio files and that adds up.
@@LaPollaAtomica 276,923 seconds of uncompressed wav audio is still at least 24 GB.
3:20 That's why I think .kkrieger is a great proof of concept. A really great example of a demogroup from Germany. A first person shooter with it's own engine in only 96 kb. A screenshot of the game would be several times it's size.
Bad compression is usually the biggest reason. Repeated assets due to storage speed limitations (especially with hdd) being a secondary.
2:30 I would like to add something to this - Usually from the user standpoint, when you think about an image compression algorithm you think about jpeg (lossy) or png (lossless) - while they save a lot of space, you usually need to decompress it to access any random pixel. The more complex algorithm, the more computation is needed to do that. Your GPU to render one frame needs to access hundreds of random textures (and pixels) - we can't use there formats like jpeg or tiff or png, as that would simply be too slow for real time use - your GPU would spend more time on decompressing the textures than actually drawing on the screen.
GPUs use their own texture formats (which usually have hardware support for on the fly decompression) like DXT or ASTC which generally offer a lot lower quality / size ratio - but have a lots of more important advantages like: constant compression ratio, which makes it easier for the GPU to manage caching, fast decompression and low overhead for random texture access.
So for example, DXT5 compressed 4k texture in the memory takes up 16MB of space, and thats even without the mipmaps. For proper PBR lighting, you usually need at least 4 of those textures (Albedo - color of the material, Metallic+Smoothness - surface metallic and smoothness properties, Normal - surface "details", occlusion - indirect light "shadow"). While these textures are also compressed when building the game (they are then extracted during the game load) - you cant cheat the physics, you can't do it as efficiently as algorithms designed for image compression (like jpeg).
Hey! The nintendo switch emulator makers recently talked about how tears of the kingdom uses ASTC textures, which are apparently great due to how well you can compress them. But they also say that its a pain to emulate it because amd and nvidia doesnt have support for it. Weirdly, Intel does.
And seeing TOTK's file size kinda speaks for itself. Sure, in game you do see that textures are still low rez and compressed AF, yet somehow they retain their charm. Why dont desktop GPUs support all the formats? Surely it wouldnt take much effort for devs to just convert textures to whatever format for a game? And suddenly you saved disk space?
What BS are you talking about? Compressed textures are decompressed at startup once and GPU will only access decompressed raw pixels on (V)RAM.
@@richardlighthouse5328 i was going to say something like that, for starters your never accessing random pixels in a game engine, and secondly you can hold decompressed images in memory, VRAM, Shared RAM or now with Direct Storage 1.1 the GPU can decompress so you could even use block based compression to lower the read from the NVME
@@MartinBarker @richardlighthouse5328 For me you both have misunderstanding about how the GPU rendering works. Firstly - GPU keeps textures in VRAM in their compressed state, all of the compressing algorithms I mentioned were designed to be read directly from their compressed form. Keeping uncompressed textures in the VRAM would fill it up almost instantaneously e.g. (without mipmaps) DXT5 compressed 1k texture weights 1MB in the memory, uncompressed 4MB. 2k compressed 4MB, uncompressed 16MB. 4k texture compressed 16MB, uncompressed 64MB etc.
I guess what you meant is additional compression (like LZMA) which as you can read above - I mentioned, these assets are unpacked during the game load, however the texture is still in its compressed format (ofc if developer wants the texture to be raw, he can do that, but nobody does this without a reason).
As for random access - GPU is most of the accessing the texture in random places - you don't usually draw entire model on the screen. If you only see front of the model, back is culled (not rendered) - texture pixels which won't be rendered won't be accessed. Additionally, models have texture coordinates called UV - which points texture coordinate at the triangle edge - these are defined by 3D artist and most of the time aren't defined in the sequential order. GPUs are actually quite smart in that regards, as there is feature called texture prefetching, which based on the UV coords in the mesh is able to predict what parts of the texture will be read and preload them to the cache before accessing them in the shader.
So to sum up, GPU needs to access random pixels at any point of time, reads aren't sequential, so you can't use compression algorithms used in pngs or tiffs, which need to decompress previous data to read current pixel.
That's not how texture compression works on the PC. Texture compression has minimal performance impact.
I would assume for the same reason they became so much more processor intensive, simply because people have more of it, storage and processing power have become plentiful, and cheaper. Game devs are just growing into the space they have available to them
And that’s why the web is so unoptimizable
@@tylerdean980 That and people are overworked and underpaid to crunch out an unoptimized website. Sure you can make a similar website with less JS while utilizing base HTML5 code but people want their website to look good instead of running well
Adn in the end only top tier PCs can handle their games, and still not well either. Have you ever checked how many modern triple A games actually come out functioning without empty promises of fixing it later when they are done milking out cash and prolly abandoning their live service always online game anyway?
Yeah i use 1440p too (and 144fps) and the lower res textures aren't really so noticable imo, but yeah the sizes have gotten so big lmao. Great video!
this video reminds me of a demo 13 years back that was a entire fps in 96kb, it was all in the textures.
TLDW:
Size doesn't matter, but how you use it does.
Hey, at least Microsoft flight simulator streams the data for the terrain, trees, and buildings from their servers. Otherwise the game would be thousands of terabytes.
OMG, and I was wondering why it runs like crap.
This is why i play risk of rain 2, Crypt of the NecroDancer and DRG only: both games have lots of content, and extremely light
Back in the golden days of the 90s I had a flight simulator WW2 combat game called Battle of Britain. You could take off from airfields all around Britain and France, fly dozens of different planes and engage in air combat and bombing runs. It was great fun. The whole game, including a pretty empty but purposeful mapped out Europe, and all the saved game files, fit on and played from a 1.44mb disk. As I saw games bloom to 100mb, 1gb, 10gb, 100gb I will always remember this wonderful little game that packed so much into so little space.
that sounds amazing, kinda like .kkrieger which also pack a lot in a tiny package
Cant wait to see 500 Terabytes games in 2030 that will take forever to download
Not with this new 2030 Samsung A.I. Evo SSD WITH 1.5 TERABYES OF DOWNLOAD speed Rate per second 🤣🤣🤣
0:14 why is their "minimum" CPU requirement an i7, but "recommended" an i5? Did the 4 generations make *that* big of a difference?
Yes it did, very much so.
@@Mike-Et-Cetera Wow! I tend not to pay much attention to the i5 line, but that's pretty impressive.
Probably because the game isn't performing adequately on I5 7600k that is about 15% slower than that I7.
@@naota3k If you check benchmarks like passmark (cpubenchmark), you can see the i5 11600k actually having more than double the score of the older i7 shown.
i5s these days have like 12 cores
I sure love voiced dialogue in languages I don't know taking up space in my computer.
yea, just as i figured.
also something i feel you glossed over. when u compress a file. when it needs used, it needs uncompressed.. thats 1 more job the pc has to do while gaming. 1 more process...... and as u pointed out. each pic would need that done. it loads down pcs. Kenshi is a prime example of this. and i finally found a mod that changes all the files and uncompresses them all when game loads. so running around the map is sooo much smoother lol.
"Developers are far more concerned with making the game look good and run well..."
Aw, linus, don't make me laugh with these jokes!
It’s the same with all other resources today: RAM requirements also rose significantly over the last years with actually 12-16GB needed as minimum configuration for AAA-titles. GFX the same, namely Vulcan which is nice to have but not really needed for mainstream players. Also some CPU-architecture requirements came along, which also increases quality and/or performance only for a few players.
Unfortunately developers don‘t care much about restrictions that some players may have. Not every gamer is able to constantly increase RAM, GFX, Storage or CPU-Power in addition to games that actually cost 70+ bucks.
But it‘s not only an issue in the games development. Even standard software (e.g. some browsers) is actually wasting resources because no one cares and efficient programming doesn‘t seem to be some kind of a holy grail anymore.
thank you for saying that. i love you!
the same can also be said about internet connections. i live in a rural area and i am stuck with 1.5mbps DLS because my ISP holds a monopoly and can basically neglect their customers.
The hardware will always improve with time. That's why developers don't care so much about "yesterday's hardware". Because pretty soon "tomorrow's hardware" will become mainstream.
100 GB for one single game will become a smaller and smaller problem with time thanks to larger and larger HDDs and SSDs.
It's a great thing that Sony added a M.2 slot in PS5 for an additional (internal) SSD.
@@cjeelde it was about significantly increasing hardware requirements although a lot of gamers don‘t need the improvements (just Look through the comments).
Most of the additional resources only help to improve quality from 80 to 100%, however 80% would be ok for most players. Sometimes it‘s even unnoticable because e.g. limitations of the human eye would make fps-rates far beyond 120 almost irrelevant. The Same would be valid for textures, when most of the gamers are not using 4k-displays.
A lot of games already offer different setups or startup-parameters reflecting different hardware-configurations. This should be the way to include all gamers- not only those that have time and money to upgrade their systems all the time.
@@marcello3159 but this is the reality. These jumps in resolution will require much more from the hardware. We will get there. It's just a question about time. In a few years you gonna thank the developers that they targeted for 4K back in 2022-2023.
Nintendo is still only targeting 1080p (or lower). That's another story. But Nintendo will also jump on to the 4K train sooner or later. It's a question about time and money.
Yes efficiency has been thrown out of the window in the past 5-6 years generally. I still don't know why even mobile phone chat apps and social media apps need to take up 250-350mb of space. Photoshop CS5 used to take up about 500mb with a lot more features than social media apps. It also got to over 1.3gb these days for some reason, despite having hardly any noticable upgrades (more like changes/fixes) compared to CS5. Weird times.
I like that you guys are working with Paradox so much.
Imagine a future, where all the textures are procedurally generated
That's fire
Blobs everywhere
All those patches really add up, don't they?
Edit to add (becouse some don't seem to get it's a joke...)
/s
Well, not really. Most patches affect the code, not the textures & audio unless it's an content update with new guns, maps etc.
^
/S needed?
Doesn’t work like that
It’s not like the patches stacked over each other
Every patch overwrites the previous one
So for mipmapping.... How about creating an algorithm to downscale the high rez textures on the fly. That could be geared towards the cpu use in of gpu or a combo of both. It would most likely increase ram / virtual memory usage. The algorithm can have a few creation storage methods. A: Create the smaller texture files as needed then discard when no longer in use or at a certain capacity limit, B: create the files as needed and store them in virtual memory untill the game is turned off, C: create and store them when the game starts and initally loads increasing first load up start time. D: create and store frequently used textures and textures that are unique to certain objects get created and removed / stored when needed.
That's already being done. It's fairly normal to generate mipmaps on texture load. Not sure how many modern games use pregenerated mipmaps vs generating them on load, but both approaches exist, it's just a file size/performance tradeoff, like many things in games.
For that mip-mapping thing, is there no way to make a scalable vector graphics object but in the 3d game environment? I realize this is like simulating 3d printing software, but is that not possible to do?
Prioritizing "photorealism" is one of the worst trends in modern gaming. Just make a good game and it will last longer than the graphics
And then Nintendo comes in with Zelda TOTK, a giant game at only 16gb
1080p for the win
It is a mobile game, PUBG mobile takes up more storage on my iPad Pro, so does genshin impact.
There's a recurring theme in computer stuff where you can trade time vs. storage space. Hackers do it with rainbow tables -- gigantic lookup tables with gazillions of passwords matched to their encrypted counterparts, because it takes too long to brute-force each individual password. _Elite_ wanted to make space gigantic, but it was nowhere near possible to store enough assets, so it generated as much content as possible at runtime. The whole point of caching websites is to use local storage instead of waiting for the server's response. It shows up everywhere, and I find it very neat.
Big ups to Timetec and Silicon Power SSDs, happy to see them showing up in a few recent videos. Would love to see a video on those brands.
I seriously think more game engines and modeling software should add support for AV1/AVIF/JXL images as textures, as they can store a lot more lossless data with less space, and especially JXL is very easy for both GPUs and CPUs to decode.
Using av1 will be really grrat for amd cards i think :o
AV1 and AVIF are just real efficient lossy codecs, it's not lossless.
When I run out of space on my phone, its like I have to uninstall apps in order to have more space but because it's a smaller device, more space is taken up.
If you're using a handheld PC (which I think soon with OcuLink advancements will be MANY people) I suggest getting yourself 2 or even 3 1tb micro SDs if you don't want to go through the hassle of opening that bad boy up to swap the SSD. For most of my library, including games like Elden Ring, loading times barely took a hit throwing those games on an SD card. And, being as hot swappable as they are, you can just treat them like game cartridges. Only, they will hold whole sections of your game library. Very useful
As a person who plays Paradox interactive games, this is one reason why I like paradox so much
They should release more games as 1440 and then you can optionally download the 4k texture pack. They make so many 4k games but most people are still rocking 1080 or 1440. I feel like that would be a consumer friendly compromise but it doesn't exactly incentivize people to upgrade and surely that's all these companies really care about.
release as 720p then offer multiple higher resolutions as multiple DLCs.
this way the new handheld devices which only have integrated graphics and lower resolution screens don't suffer as much, plus people with normal non-gaming PCs (or even old gaming PCs) may play with better performance or at least more stable/consistent performance. also people in rural areas with bad internet don't have to suffer as many hours of downloading.
Why do games force me to download audio files for languages I don't speak? Stupid.
I don't mind getting multiple languages for a game, I currently speak 3 languages included Spanish (My mother tongue language) but my Portuguese isn't B1, just A2, I took the Brazilian Portuguese.
Optional High-Res texture packs is the way to go imo. A big issue with textures in gaming is that the same texture resolutions are used in objects both large and small unevenly. The texture resolution should be "DPI" based, dependent on the largest asset (worst scenario) along with the minimum distance the character would encroach. Such an automatic tool could save gamers a lot of hard drive space and developers a lot of time.
Finally, many textures are just not optimized well. Some textures are high resolution but low detail (blurry high resolution).
A final random info: Mario 64 is 54MB. They aggressively reuse assets and compress textures to get it to fit in the Nintendo 64 rom.
+ PBR materials are used = even more texture files
+multiplayer games come with a load of skins that also require many textures of course
We should switch to mathematically generated textures & offload some of the load to the CPU, since it typically is used much less than the GPU is nowadays.
Wrong, CPU is used a lot in modern games.
It depends on the game, in brainded game like CoD CPU is almost unused.
In a strategy game CPU is used significantly.
In a simulation game CPU is used more than GPU.
It's still very common, and will continue to be common, for games to be CPU limited, and you'd probably want to generate procedural textures on the GPU anyway if you can. Besides, procedural textures are highly situational. Most textures can't really be procedurally generated.
An AI-based compression logic will come soon, so don't worry :) in combination with SSDs getting cheaper, that won't be an issue. And it has always been like that. I remember when Doom II came out, it was about 18-20 MB as far as I remember. The typical HDDs were around 120-200 MB, maybe 400MB. So it's the same 5-10% of disk space.
Still, when I already pay 60 to 70 bucks for a single game and then might have to uninstall another one or buy a new ssd to have it is pretty shit - especially if you live in a country (like me, germany in this case) that has relatively slow internet speeds.
No need for AI. I mean JPEG XL has been around for a few years now, and offers much better compression than current JPEG. All that matters is it needs more adoption.
Haha, from what I've seen AI is primarily being used the other way: to generate high-resolution textures from low-res ones. I'm not taking about FSR/DLSS, I'm taking about fans creating their own "HD remasters" of games like FFVIII by running the original assets through Stable Diffusion and similar.
@@GSBarlev You saw how AI upscale low-size images that weren't build to be upscaled with AI. Now imagine how good the AI compression will be, if images are build for be upscaled with AI. That's not how AI compreassion really works, but I hope you get the idea.
@@Kaenguruu I feel you. In my recent PC I had 1TB EVO Plus SSD and I ran out of space very very quick. So when I recently upgraded it to the latest components (about 2 mo. ago), I decided to also order an additional superfast 2TB WD Black which was $149 here in the US before taxes (today $139), and I plan to buy two more and get rid of 1TB Samsung. There are much cheaper but slower options for 2TB if money is the priority. But in general yes, I had some games like Horizon already bought half a year ago but waiting to download because I didn't want to uninstall anything :)
Mipmaps may be stored alongside the textures but they can also be generated. When making games with opengl, opengl generated the mipmaps.
Tank you pradox, very insightful
I see a lot of people in the comments yelling confidently without knowing anything about game development 😂
We can't 'just optimize' with more time. Textures don't get smaller the more time we spend on them. Sure, there are optimization methods that aren't always applied for the sake of time, but if you think those would half your game size on disk, you're sadly mistaken. Besides, we already use a lot of texture optimization because it makes our life easier as well. Having massive unique textures for everything actually makes our job harder, so we already use things like tileable texture, trimsheets, and atlases regularly to speed up workflow and reduce file sizes.
This^. Like, what do people actually mean when they say “they should just learn how to optimize games”? Textures, Audio, Animation, localizations and for PC the different hardware types. Also got to take into account the different engines and how they handle data, whether that be Unreal, Unity or proprietary by studios like SnowDrop, Dunia, RE Engine. Also whats the target for the game on an art and performance level too? Are we trying to hit 4K 120 or is that a nice to have? There so much going on there that a lot of people miss.
@@NickyXD97R Lazy developers, amiright?!
lazyness :)
Jokes aside, why dont game devs just include a beta version or something that doesn't contain high res stufc?
Minecraft with shaders, high resolution texture pack, and 200 mods is still only 20-30 gigs. Thats is pretty respectable considering most games start out that size
or having the options for 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 4k before downloading?
Not buying this. Looks more like game studios don't even profile their game files and textures for size/importance, and instead just throw 100GB dog food onto their customers. When did that become acceptable to ship such poorly optimized games?