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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!*_
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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!*_I opted into the `prod_slim` beta and it works as advertised. 22.01 GB on my SSD and the game is running the same as before, as far as I can tell.
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The fact that they were using 5-6x more space than required in the first place is pretty infuriating.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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Nah, it's just not 1995 anymore. I was around for those times bro. I know what computer tech used to be. I know what it is now. I've seen the progression. And yes, if you only have a 500GB hard drive today, you're the equivalent of someone trying use floppy disks. Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100.... Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg. Sorry you're trying to game in modern times with an Atari, but again, that's a you problem. Maybe get a job?
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This vibes like that scene in Dumb and Dumber where Harry is standing next to a fire complaining that his fingers are about to fall off, and Lloyd says "you should take these extra gloves. Mine are getting sweaty". This game currently consumes 30% of the hard drive on my main PC. I'm impressed by the technical feat, but am also annoyed that they knew they were wasting this much space and simply did not care. I'm betting every 100GB game is like this.That's what happens when your artists are not technically literate. I worked with photographers / videographers for a bit and I had to explain to them that no, you can't just copy paste your 40Mb photos onto the online gallery, even if yes, the Web page will just resize them. We don't actually need a full gallery of 600dpi files online thanks. Feckin muppets.
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To be fair that's still an issue of out dated rigs. It's an understandable problem, but it is a "you" problem more then anything. Companies could do a lot more to compress files and reduce file size but then you just move the problem from storage space to out dated CPUs with long load times and poor performance. Really having less then 3-4 terabytes at this point is baffling.But we're not talking about compressing data. Just not wasting storage by having duplicate data in there. And I fail to see how it is a user's problem when it's the developers who are introducing the issue to begin with. If you are sold a product with an easily fixable problem from factory, you don't take it accept the fault as your own. I got 4TB of total storage, but i struggle severely with storage between all the car and flight sims with mods, multiplayer games with massive installs, and enormous single player games.
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Nah, it's just not 1995 anymore. I was around for those times bro. I know what computer tech used to be. I know what it is now. I've seen the progression. And yes, if you only have a 500GB hard drive today, you're the equivalent of someone trying use floppy disks. Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100.... Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg. Sorry you're trying to game in modern times with an Atari, but again, that's a you problem. Maybe get a job?> Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100.... Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg. We are literally in a comment thread about how fancy graphics don't need to take up 100+ GB. Like, come on dude.
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That's what happens when your artists are not technically literate. I worked with photographers / videographers for a bit and I had to explain to them that no, you can't just copy paste your 40Mb photos onto the online gallery, even if yes, the Web page will just resize them. We don't actually need a full gallery of 600dpi files online thanks. Feckin muppets.Read the article before making assumptions. It's nothing to do with the artists. They were deliberately duplicating all of their data to speed up load times for mechanical disks. Based on industry standard assumptions, they thought this was necessary. The article goes more into why it wasn't actually necessary after all. But it was nothing to do with the efficiency of their models and textures.
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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!*_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.
