this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
968 points (97.5% liked)
Dank Memes
6143 readers
94 users here now
This is the place to be on the interweb when Reddit irreversibly becomes a meme itself and implodes
If you are existing mods from r/dankmemes, you should be mod here too, kindly DM me on either platform
The many rules inherited from
- Be nice, don't be not nice
- No Bigotry or Bullying
- Don't be a dick!
- Censor any and all personal information from posts and comments
- No spam, outside links, or videos.
- No Metabaiting
- No brigading
- Keep it dank!
- Mark NSFW and spoilers appropriately
- NO REEEEEEE-POSTS!
- No shitposting
- Format your meme correctly. No posts where the title is the meme caption!
- No agenda posting!
- Don't be a critic
- Karma threshold? What's that?
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Compression is a thing. But software developers offload their laziness on their users.
Compression, rendering and other algorithms that use the processing power of the console rather than then entire ssd storage. This 161gb is so incredibly lazy
It would mean slower loading perhaps but there's a balance to be struck there. Besides, game being fun has nothing to do with game being high fidelity or huge hard disk space.
Not just slower loading. Less available performance in game.
Every time it needs to load a texture it’s uncompressing it on the fly…. That’s going to take away from CPU and RAM (both the compressed and uncompressed versions will be in RAM).
It's not going to be less performance in the game. Once uploaded to GPU texture is ready to be used. Just the loading part would be slower.
It is loading them dynamically in the background constantly. If those textures are compressed, it’s doing work to load the compressed version into memory, CPU is reading it out of memory, decompressing it and putting it back in memory, then moving it to the GPU.
It will take 1.5x (assuming 50% reduction in the compressed copy, probably would be worse) the RAM plus the CPU overhead depending on compression algorithm.
That is happening while you’re playing.
Unless at load it is decompressing and storing the decompressed textures on your disk, in which case you need 1.5x (or more) of the original storage to play the game and compressing them in the first place is worse if the thing you’re optimizing for is game size on disk (which is what this thread is complaining about).
That’s only true if the GPU can fit all of the textures for the whole game in its VRAM, and doesn’t need to store anything else.
What do you think the chances of that are?
It's not a chance based thing. But sure, sometimes keeping texture in memory is fine.
I don't know how much power you think it takes to load and render textures on a model, but I can assure you that as long as you are not running on a potatoe programmed by monkeys slamming a football into a keyboard, it will not significantly impact performance once loaded.
From the games I've seen, all of them have used compressed textures. It's the industry norm my dude. I don't think I have ever seen an uncompressed dds in the wild
You are confusing compressed textures and compressed files. Texture compression is used to give older hardware a chance to render anything by reducing quality of texture which is stored on the GPU. Yes, it has been industry norm since forever, also, not what we are talking about here.
Textures are files. Wth are you talking about, have the game run from winrar?
You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you? There are archives optimized for game asset storage. But even then, yes, there are actually games which do this. Whole of Quake and Doom series (older versions anyway) used zip archives. Source engine also stores its assets in archive. Pretty much every major engine supports one form or another of asset packaging with or without compression. No one saves PNGs and WAVs anymore.
Yea you mean archives, another one of the industry norms? Wouldn't necessarily call them compressions as the size difference is sometimes insignificant, but I seem to be missing your entire point, what is it? What are game devs doing wrong?
Lack of compression. Hence huge game sizes. Lack of optimization as well.
We already went through compression, that is not the issue as basically every game is already compressed.
Optimization, as I understand usually regards the coding/scripting part of things. That has arguably 0 effect on filesizes.
So tell me, what are game devs doing so wrong they accidentally or through sheer laziness added 100s of gbs of useless data?
Have you ever made a game? Or worked with engine? Wrote code...etc.? I'd hazard a guess no because optimization is not "coding scripting thing".
Here educate yourself an learn a bit about asset consolidation.
And stop asking stupid questions about "what are developers doing wrong". Unless I have their source code, I can't tell, can I? But game size definitely grows by poor optimization which you don't realize goes beyond including middleware and copy pasting code. From image compression to audio, etc. Never though I'd have to explain that MP3 is smaller than WAV file and that constitutes optimizing an asset, but here I am.
No
Yes
Yes.
And that's where you're wrong.
Again, archives are not compressions. At least to the point where you saved 100s of gbs of storage for using them.
No I wont, you seem to think game devs are lazy shitters who don't know what they're doing and that's the reason games today are big. The reality of audience wanting higher resolution graphics for their higher resolution screens to display is but a side problem, it's the devs laziness that's the real problem. I guess game devs themselves never made a game, worked with an engine or wrote code.
Sure, let's assume so. An "unoptimized" game (whatever that even means in practice) is, let's be generous and say, 1gb bigger. Now all you have to shave off is 99gb more. What do you do, "optimize" more? Bro just optimize lmaoo, optimize these 4k textures to the point where they are indistinguishable from 256p, gamers love buying a 4k game that just eats VRAM but looks like PS2 Lara Croft, that's optimization bro.
Now I know sound files are also a big part of the games filesize, but I'm not an audio guy and honestly textures generally take way the fuck more space from games. Looking at Skyrim for example, the sounds+voices archives, including music, soundfx and voices are around 3.3gb, textures (9 separate archives) total a 7.5gb, more than half of the total 14.5gb data folder.
So yeah just optimize bro, what are you lazy bro?
So you did write code and played with game engine and you have no idea how game can get big and you don't know how it can be optimized to be smaller? Right. Now I just think you are trolling. You know what you should do? Go to your phone's camera and configure for files to be saved in RAW or BMP. While you are at it convert all your songs to WAV. See how fast your drive space goes. When instead of saving 2-5MB JPEG images you start having 40MB per image. Free space goes away pretty fast.
Archives don't need to be compressed, but when they are... it's optimizing for lower space usage. That's what optimization is... sacrificing one resource for another, in this case loading/cpu time for storage size. Am also not sure how you assumed it's not compression at fault here. You are telling me basketball game has terabytes worth of compressed assets? Fat chance of that even if you take into account all the shenanigans they do these days by adding slot machines and day one DLCs.
And yes, not only game, but all developers have become lazier. Me being one and coming into contact daily with other people's code I can tell you this has changed over the years. People will import 45MB big SDK so they don't have to write a single POST request. Use AI to write a function because they couldn't be bothered to look up documentation. Just look at popularity of Electron. Bundle entire web browser so they can avoid learning native libraries of writing code in some other language. You also seem to think I said developers are lazy bums, which is not true. They did get lazier considering hardware is relatively cheap these days most won't bother with using the least amount of resources because they don't have to. This being a talk about game, it's probably a combination of multiple factors.
You should really look into 64k intro scene and see what people can achieve with just 64kb of executable size. It is an example in opposite direction where people compete in cramming as much as possible in 64kb and optimizing it to all hell, but it goes to show it can be done. Look at Clean Slate from 2021 competition. Or on a different tangent, look at KolibriOS, entire operating system with minimum boot option being single floppy, 1.44MB or entire collection of applications at 40MB, including browser, games, word processor, compiler, debugger, file manager, drivers for all kinds of hardware, etc. It's possible... takes time but it's possible.