A forum for discussing and organizing recreational softball and baseball games and leagues in the greater Halifax area.
HELLDIVERS 2 Tech Blog #2 - Opt-in install size reduction beta (from 154Gb to 23Gb)
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*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._ _By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*_Okay, this is insane, and insanely good. Insane that they're using 5x the amount of space needed, and good because now I can forever leave the game installed in case a friend asks me to play, and won't have to worry about losing 16~% of my 1tb ssd for games.
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A 2TB Drive is just over £100, even with the crazy memory prices lately. I've got one in my PS5 ffs. A bog standard SATA drive will do practically the same load times as NVME. It's all about the access time. Devs should abandon HDD completely. Look how much space they saved here by not wasting it on duplicated resources.What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s. NVME drives do **at least ten times that** for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.
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The fact that they were using 5-6x more space than required in the first place is pretty infuriating.My Genshin install on PC would be ~115 GB (in practice it's more bc I have an extra voice pack), while the same game on mobile is allegedly ~30 GB
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You ever heard of the fit girl? She does this to every single game she touches and it is amazing to see.
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What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s. NVME drives do **at least ten times that** for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.I know they are. For something like database work, they're amazing. Now go an look at some game load time benchmarks. Because I can guarantee you they're *nowhere near* that much faster for 99% of games. Once you get off spinning rust, CPU speed remains the number one factor in load times. Because nearly everything is compressed and has to be unpacked and processed into the right formats by the system before it can be used. Picking whatever comes up at the top from googling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8 Just scanning though that video I can see the biggest difference is like a second. DirectStorage was supposed to be able to make game loading faster on faster SSDs, but as far as I can see that hasn't really happened. The PS5 does actually get noticeably slower if you cobble a slower drive into it, although not really enough to break anything. The decompression units in that hardware are actually pretty good, and can keep up with the faster SSDs.
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I found that surprising too. In the article, they explain that this was on purpose to improve loading times for people on slow HDDs.
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Realistically a single drive should be 3-4 terabytes in 2025... A 4 terabyte sata is like 200-230 bucks for a middling drive on Amazon right now. Having 8 terabytes of storage is not hard to have. It's not like you can't put more storage in your PC. Seriously I would question anyone with less then even just 5 terabytes.Holy shit, ok I'll state it yet again and then I'm done. For the 3rd time, this isn't about who can afford what drives or who has what drives or what drives exist in our universe. Pretend drives doesn't exist if that is easier because the drives don't matter. Drive space is a symptom of the underlying issue. This is about the near universal trend of software companies destroying a decade plus of hardware performance gains because they refuse to properly optimize their software. Full stop. Anything else is a side effect of not properly optimizing things. The drive type arguments, drive space arguments...they disappear once the fundamental issue (optimization) is addressed. Holding these companies accountable is how this gets fixed. It's how this particular instance got fixed. This thread wouldn't even exist if these weren't legitimate complaints because the devs wouldn't have bothered with this round of size reduction if there wasn't a problem affecting their bottom line.
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What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s. NVME drives do **at least ten times that** for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.The much faster speeds of NVMe drives is often dictated by the smart use of caching. Once the cache runs out, the benefit is gone. In games specifically, NVMe drives were repeatedly shown on par or a little bit faster than SATA SSDs. There are workloads where NVMe drives boost performance dramatically. Gaming, however, isn't one of them.
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No the issue isn't with the user having a 400GB drive. The issue is the devs chose to leave 131GB of unnecessary duplication in the game artifacts when published. That is a fundamental problem with software in general but games especially. Blaming the customer for expecting to have a decent product is laughably misplaced. Part of software being a decent product is it being optimized. This was an absolute failure and they should really be putting out an apology instead of patting themselves on the back. It's great the game is so much smaller now but it should have been this new size at launch. Certainly not 131GB bigger than it needed to be.It wasn't unnecessary, according to their knowledge at the time. They even wrote that in a [previous post](https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/553850/announcements/detail/543369627969783287) and referred to that information in this post. Seems like you didn't read either and just decided to get angry.
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*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._ _By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*_
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Programmers need to respect other people's hardware. A 4TB HDD currently costs more than it did a decade ago. My data is stored on a mirrored RAID, and backed up on two alternating offsite drives. For every TB of space I use, I buy 4. I do not consider this negotiable. I don't back up game installs, but by point remains valid. 90% of hardware advances gets pissed away by bloated shitcode. I see it every day.>A 4TB HDD currently costs more than it did a decade ago. What the fuck are you on? That's RAM that's currently skyrocketing because of AI, you dipshit. I just bought a 12 TB HDD for $250. Memory is the cheapest it's ever been and has always been on a downward decline like that. You don't know what you're talking about.
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> don't shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby > A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It's not some crazy ask This take is very telling of the privileged economic background you come from. Totally out of touch with the reality most of your fellow humans live in. I’ll be very surprised if you aren’t some white American nepo-babySo you get racist af to prove your point? Fuck off twat and stop being a bitch. It's not unreasonable to put money into your hobby. That's what you do. You buy a game here and there, and you upgrade your hardware. What you don't do is bitch and moan that you can't keep up when the effort to do so isn't that much and at the end of the day, no one *owes* you AAA games. Cry harder. It's shit like this that makes gamers look like entitled bitches. You have it vastly better than any other time and you still take most of your time to bitch and moan.
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Never forget: In the case of Mario it's a smart way of handling the limited data available, its not a duplicate texture like Helldivers, its the same cloud copy pasted just with a different color. From what I understand Helldivers had the same files duplicated multiple times so that HDD could find them easily (somehow)
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In the case of Mario it's a smart way of handling the limited data available, its not a duplicate texture like Helldivers, its the same cloud copy pasted just with a different color. From what I understand Helldivers had the same files duplicated multiple times so that HDD could find them easily (somehow)
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The problem I see with it is that we've gone the full circle. First games loaded slow on HDDs, but SSDs solved it. Then, seeing how SSDs are faster, game developers decided they could fit more read/write operations. Now games load slow on SSDs.Nah, in this case the circle is the devs wanting to optimize for HDDs. Which made the game bigger with duplicated files. Which forced players to install the game in HDDs since they lacked space on SSD. Having the choice for both will offer the best for each case.
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Nah, in this case the circle is the devs wanting to optimize for HDDs. Which made the game bigger with duplicated files. Which forced players to install the game in HDDs since they lacked space on SSD. Having the choice for both will offer the best for each case.
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Now replace a badly modified version of FSR 1 with support for FSR 3.x, 4.x and DLSS, as we are in 2025 please.
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Don't need to be a racist piece of shit and attack people mate. Even if we throw back and look to older tech that would be available in a poor African country you can find 5+ terabytes of storage for less than 50 bucks USD with shipping to Africa. Your looking at 7200 rpm drives but storage space is *not* expensive even in the poorest country as long as you don't demand the cutting edge. Load times will be a problem but if your poor you can still easily find second hand storage in large quantities for cheap. Iv been poor as fucking dirt. It sucks but as the saying goes, you can be poor or stupid. You shouldn't be both. And as long as you're smart about it, you can have pretty decently nice things for really really cheap. It's just not going to be new and it's going to be real hard to find but it's doable. So again, that take isn't remotely privileged. It's poorly stated sure, but the point being made is accurate. Your take on the other hand is fucking disgusting and you should sit down and shut up.I’m also white and have also technically benefited from colonialism, lol. The problem with yours and [@fishos@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/fishos) line of thinking is that you are looking at that 90USD / 30USD through the lens of your own earning and buying power. For someone in your hypothetical “poor African country”, that may well be days or weeks of income. Both of you seem to be having a strong reaction to that statement, I get the impression I’ve struck a nerve and that you might be facing (and rejecting) an inconvenient truth. Ultimately, that doesn’t matter - y’all in here simping for corps by excusing 100GB of inefficiency and it’s not a pretty look.
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*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._ _By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*_
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*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._ _By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*_
