131gb of duplicate data is disgusting
Thanks for the heads up, if it’s still installed I’m switching to beta right now
I’m wondering how many modern games could do with this.
You been on it for long?Probably a lot of them, huge part of why I don’t give AAA games a shot anymore tbh. Just a ton of storage and bandwidth for me. No! That’s what’s most infuriating to me, I played it for like 10 hours with some friends. Only reason its still on my PC is hoping they want to play with me again
The flipside is a lot of games have dogshit decompression systems that add stuttering like Monster Hunter Wilds.
The thing about duplicate files is that it makes it efficient for loading times if you don’t have a ssd, the other big one for better loading times is having the files be uncompressed.
Data duplication as an optimisation only really makes sense for optical media where you have exact control over where data is pressed or burned to a disc. For example Halo games where each map file contains basically the whole game and level geometry/scenario in a compiled format minus the bits not needed for that particular level so it’s easy for the DVD drive to sequentially load all data for a given level.
In the context of hard drives where you can’t control that layout for various reasons it’s just a meme parroted by devs who don’t bother with or can’t implement a PC-oriented asset loading pipeline (e.g. pre-caching lists, centralised shared assets, virtual file systems/pack formats) and instead kick storage costs down to end users because disk sizes are so large nowadays and it’s easy to just statically bundle assets that might share aspects across each other e.g materials, shaders. Of course siloed development teams makes it very tempting to ship games this way, as does pressure from management so I do sympathise.
File duplication on a hard drive saves a few seconds in the best case scenario with a defragmented disk and even that is margin of error because guess what the OS and filesystem will do whatever the fuck it likes in a random access scenario.
Does this mean if youre in a game with someone who has it installed on a slow arse HDD you’ll have to wait until their game loads until the session starts?
It usually depends on the game in question, I know for payday 2 and SC2 for sure this is true.
In PD2’s case if someone joins mid heist, then it’ll pause the game for everyone in heist until the person that joined loads.
I vaguely remember R6 Siege doing the same thing. Could the install do a check to determine whether its on an SSD or HDD and install whichever to reduce HDD load times?
At that point from what little I know about coding, you’re now essentially upkeeping two separate builds that have to interact with eachother on PC (generally the pc and console builds of a game are different, but not enough to cause issues), and that’s if it’s possible to even tell if the drive it’s installing to is a hdd or sdd.
It really is just easier to have one build of the game that you put out, and have that build cater to the lowest common denominator on pc.
Yes, that’s what a few games in the past have done. Basically they have “HDD version” as a free downloadable dlc for those still using a traditional harddrive. Everyone else gets the “slim” version
I’ve know of games having 4k textures as an optional download, but i’ve never heard of that being a thing.
For helldivers, absolutely. Team based, lobby begins with everyone
I don’t play AAA games. Is it literally duplicated? Is there some reason you can’t just automatically deduplicate it on some COW filesystem like BTRFS or ZFS?
The data was literally duplicated, it was primarily textures and models. The reasoning was to reduce loading times for players with harddrives because the seek head wouldn’t have to move as much to find the data it was looking for, but because the textures and models are streamed in at the same time as the level was being generated (a slow process regardless of the storage medium) the duplicate data wasn’t actually helping that much.
Unsure if you couldn’t deduplicate it lol, maybe Steam would complain because your files are altered?
I don’t know as much about btrfs, but using dedup on zfs is not advised unless you really need it and have a ton of spare ram for the arc. I think it would work if the files are literal duplicates tho!
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Loving the update. Performance is finally silky smooth AND the file size is decimated. New shotgun slaps
I will have to see later on how it performs. And wanna check if I can get the new warbond. Is the fps better?
Played for about 3 hours last night. Locked 90fps on my 7700x and 4070 super, maxed out 1440p. I didn’t have any crashes, though I saw a few reported on the subreddit yesterday.
Lol I just uninstalled it to save disk space, oh well at least it’ll be easier to download in the future.
You will have to uninstall and reinstall to get to that size anyway. At least until later on
Wtf
People noticed with every update it was another 10-20 GB, the game size was far smaller on PS5 for the same game, and many asked why.
So the devs answered because of HDDs and duplication to cater to slower HDD seek time. To which was asked why they can’t just let people with SSDs have the PS5 unduplicated version and have the small percentage of people still gaming on HDDs have a seperate download. After surveying how many people were using HDDs (11%) They took it on board and implemented it. Stating they were following industry standards, which seem out of date today.
So hopefully this will follow through for other ridiculously large games with other studios.
ooooh maybe my ancient computer will be able to pull more than 10 fps out of it now
For hyper planet or whatever
Very funny. Now face the wall
I remember when the newer Hitman games did this. You love to see it!
