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Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes? (www.techspot.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Decompressing an asset so that it can be used is an operation that takes processor cycles as well. It's why Titanfall 1 came in so high on storage requirements at the time, because in order to meet CPU performance targets, they had to leave audio uncompressed. In this case, huge texture asset files are often LODs, high detail versions for when you're up close and low detail versions for when you're far away, so that the machine is always loading the right size version of the asset rather than just always using the best quality one in a worst case like you seem to be implying. This takes up a lot of storage space, but it means they aren't wastefully using high detail assets for a mountain a mile and a half away.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Uncompressed WAV files, lol I'll never get over that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Uncompressed WAV files, lol I’ll never get over that

It doesn't even make sense. Simple compression algorithms like in use by FLAC or AAC are pretty much free to decompress on CPUs from this century and the cpu cycles you save by not doing wasteful IO of huge files from storage easily makes up for that.

I'm sure game devs can make some argument to not use 'expensive' compression, but not using any is just wasteful.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

...sounds good though, i guess??