100 gigabytes. If you're excited to play a recent AAA title like
Star Wars, Jedi Survivor, Microsoft Flight Simulator, or the latest Call of Duty,
you're gonna have to have well over 100 gigs
of free space on your computer. Even if you've got a healthy two terabytes
of total storage capacity, just having three games installed
would take up over 15% of your disk. Yikes!
But why exactly is it that modern games are so freaking huge?
To answer, we got in touch with some of our friends over at Paradox Interactive,
and we'd like to thank them for their contributions to this episode. Let's start by talking about the main culprit, textures.
If you're a little unfamiliar with how game rendering works, textures are the visuals that wrap themselves around
the shapes on your screen to give you a complete image. For example, a building might be wrapped
in a texture that looks like bricks, or a car might have a texture of metallic paint
for a realistic and colorful look. Well, as processing power has increased,
and we've expected our video games to look more and more realistic,
these textures have become higher and higher resolution.
And if you know how much space a single high-res image can take up on your drive,
well, imagine having thousands of them in order to make sure that everything in your game
looks true to life. There's a hardware component to this as well.
Plenty of gamers are now playing at 1440p or 4K resolution,
and textures have to be designed so that they won't look blurry on these high-res screens.
You can really tell if you walk your character up to a wall,
and it looks like a smeared mess, instead of having sharp-looking bumps and imperfections
like a real wall would. But why can't game developers use space-saving tricks,
like compression, to make this problem a little less painful?
It's actually quite hard to compress down high-res images
without having a noticeable loss in image quality.
Think about how JPEGs often contain unsightly artifacts,
especially when you view them up close, as frequently happens in our games,
like in our wall example before. Although there are ways to lighten the load on the GPU,
such as mit-mapping, these can actually increase the amount of space on disk
that the game takes up. See, mit-mapping is a way to render faraway textures
at lower resolutions, so the GPU isn't working super hard
to render lots of detail at distances where the player won't even notice it.
The problem, though, is that mit-mapping requires multiple
low-resolution versions of the texture that are saved alongside the original high-res image,
meaning mit-mapping can actually result in a 33% increase in file size.
Now, there are games that try to minimize size on disk
by procedurally generating textures. This means that the game uses its own internal logic
to come up with textures on the fly instead of relying on pre-rendered images saved on a disk.
But in photorealistic games, procedurally generating textures, at least today,
takes up a great deal of processing power that's better used for, you know,
actually rendering the game. So it generally isn't done.
It also doesn't help that a game's textures are often stored in a manner that prioritizes them
being easily read by the GPU rather than in a manner that's optimized for saving space,
which is unsurprising, given that storage is relatively cheap,
meaning that developers are far more concerned with making the game look good and run well
than they are with having a small footprint on your SSD.
Combine all of this with the fact that game audio is similarly hard to compress without sacrificing quality
and you have a recipe for space-hogging games, a trend that isn't likely to end anytime soon.
So keep an eye out on deals for storage, I guess,
or you can just stick to playing Minecraft, as long as you don't install high-res texture packs.
Or install liking this video if you liked it, or disliking it if you disliked it,
and leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future Techquickie video.
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