Insanity

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.
  
  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.
  
  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).
  
  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.
  
  Have you ever made a game?
  
  No
  
  Or worked with engine?
  
  Yes
  
  Wrote code…etc.?
  
  Yes.
  
  I’d hazard a guess no because optimization is not “coding scripting thing”.
  
  And that's where you're wrong.
  
  Here educate yourself an learn a bit about asset consolidation.
  
  Again, archives are not compressions. At least to the point where you saved 100s of gbs of storage for using them.
  
  And stop asking stupid questions about “what are developers doing wrong”.
  
  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.
  
  But game size definitely grows by poor optimization which you don’t realize goes beyond including middleware and copy pasting 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.
  
  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.
  
  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?

I agree with this. I think the real problem is that people have been complaining about this for years and Sony and Microsoft still do nothing about even tho they sell consoles meant for gaming. At least add transparent compression to the filesystem. Have more storage for games right off the bat instead of selling 500GB models and calling it a day.

this is why I game on pc
Sure, but that's not the devs problem. They cant fix consoles

Something that i liked very much on some games was choosing the assets you want to download, you want to play on low, no need to download ultra high res textures.

The thing is, using less resources is always an optimization cost for the company. If the user will just get better hardware, there's not much incentive for spending on that. Unless the company aims for devices with lower hardware like switch, deck or mobile.

Two things:

I'd say around 98% of players don't want to choose between texture sizes. Plug and play is by far the most convenient, especially on these sports games. Seriously, think of someone who legit plays nba games, do they really care?

Second of all, graphical fidelity is the only thing keeping these games afloat. There is not much untapped innovation when it comes to sports games. They HAVE to make graphics better per gen to justify 80$ pricetag or whatever these games go for.

Unless you render every basketballer nuts in 4k quality, there is no fucking way a basketball game adds up to 100+ gigs