Saying "They take hundreds of gigs because they don't use ANY compression." is absurd when you immediately have to caveat that codecs like BC7 are used for texture data, which makes up a large portion of the shipped data.
Sony included dedicated compression support in the PS5, licensed from a leading middleware company, specifically to make it easier to use compression in games. Games are using it.
I don't know why you're trotting out this misinformed BS.
You can also simply watch the statistics when Steam is installing a game - the amount written to disk is larger than the amount downloaded over the network, because they also compress assets in flight to reduce bandwidth usage (the most important thing, since raw assets often load faster from an SSD as long as you have available storage.)
You can argue every single file should be compressed at rest on persistent storage after install, but that's a losing argument. People really hate longer load times, so compression at rest is only appropriate if it improves them.
Yeah, I could've indicated better that I'm talking about on-disk compression of files.
>Sony included dedicated compression support in the PS5, licensed from a leading middleware company, specifically to make it easier to use compression in games. Games are using it.
Not really if we look at 3rd party games. Jedi Survivor is likely not using that since it takes 147 gigs on PS5 and only 139 on Series X. Warzone doesn't use it, Fortnite doesn't use it(despite Epic's acquisition of RAD), Hogwarts Legacy doesn't use it, Elden Ring doesn't use it, FIFA doesn't use it. These are some of the most popular games on the platform. My point was that he is talking about something beyond LZ compression when most games aren't using tools that are available off-the-shelf.
>You can argue every single file should be compressed at rest on persistent storage after install, but that's a losing argument. People really hate longer load times, so compression at rest is only appropriate if it improves them.
We have hardware-accelerated decompression in all current gen consoles and GPU decompression on PC. We would be in much better world if everyone used that.
> Fortnite doesn't use it(despite Epic's acquisition of RAD),
You're talking nonsense. I worked on Fortnite and have direct experience with it and the HW decompression on PS5. I can even point you to the patch [0] where Fortnite enabled oodle compression and shrunk the game by 60GB.
I find this extremely unlikely. The packaging tools by default will compress files when building a package. Decompression is transparent and done by the hardware; the game doesn't have to implement anything or link any libraries. You would have to explicitly select "no compression" during packaging. Warzone definitely uses it - I worked on Cold War, Vanguard, and MW2 specifically on streaming and decompression across our supported consoles.
Sorry, the fact that Xbox version is smaller confused me. What might be the reason for Xbox install being 20 gigs smaller than PS5 one given that PS5 compression is generally better?
Imagine you have a 1GB game, with a 500MB patch. To be able to play the game while downloading, you need the full patch space available. To apply the patch to the game, you need to grab the old 500MB, stuff it somewhere, and replace it with the new 500MB (in that order, otherwise if the update is interrupted, the game is screwed and you need to redownload the whole thing).
>(the most important thing, since raw assets often load faster from an SSD as long as you have available storage.)
>You can argue every single file should be compressed at rest on persistent storage after install, but that's a losing argument. People really hate longer load times, so compression at rest is only appropriate if it improves them.
Is this really true? I feel like you'd need an absolutely blisteringly fast SSD to match something like an modern, optimized lz decompressor's speed.
Sony included dedicated compression support in the PS5, licensed from a leading middleware company, specifically to make it easier to use compression in games. Games are using it.
I don't know why you're trotting out this misinformed BS.
You can also simply watch the statistics when Steam is installing a game - the amount written to disk is larger than the amount downloaded over the network, because they also compress assets in flight to reduce bandwidth usage (the most important thing, since raw assets often load faster from an SSD as long as you have available storage.)
You can argue every single file should be compressed at rest on persistent storage after install, but that's a losing argument. People really hate longer load times, so compression at rest is only appropriate if it improves them.