WEBVTT

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100 gigabytes. If you're excited to play a recent AAA title like

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Star Wars, Jedi Survivor, Microsoft Flight Simulator, or the latest Call of Duty,

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you're gonna have to have well over 100 gigs

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of free space on your computer. Even if you've got a healthy two terabytes

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of total storage capacity, just having three games installed

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would take up over 15% of your disk. Yikes!

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But why exactly is it that modern games are so freaking huge?

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To answer, we got in touch with some of our friends over at Paradox Interactive,

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and we'd like to thank them for their contributions to this episode. Let's start by talking about the main culprit, textures.

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If you're a little unfamiliar with how game rendering works, textures are the visuals that wrap themselves around

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the shapes on your screen to give you a complete image. For example, a building might be wrapped

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in a texture that looks like bricks, or a car might have a texture of metallic paint

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for a realistic and colorful look. Well, as processing power has increased,

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and we've expected our video games to look more and more realistic,

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these textures have become higher and higher resolution.

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And if you know how much space a single high-res image can take up on your drive,

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well, imagine having thousands of them in order to make sure that everything in your game

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looks true to life. There's a hardware component to this as well.

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Plenty of gamers are now playing at 1440p or 4K resolution,

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and textures have to be designed so that they won't look blurry on these high-res screens.

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You can really tell if you walk your character up to a wall,

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and it looks like a smeared mess, instead of having sharp-looking bumps and imperfections

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like a real wall would. But why can't game developers use space-saving tricks,

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like compression, to make this problem a little less painful?

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It's actually quite hard to compress down high-res images

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without having a noticeable loss in image quality.

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Think about how JPEGs often contain unsightly artifacts,

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especially when you view them up close, as frequently happens in our games,

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like in our wall example before. Although there are ways to lighten the load on the GPU,

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such as mit-mapping, these can actually increase the amount of space on disk

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that the game takes up. See, mit-mapping is a way to render faraway textures

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at lower resolutions, so the GPU isn't working super hard

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to render lots of detail at distances where the player won't even notice it.

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The problem, though, is that mit-mapping requires multiple

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low-resolution versions of the texture that are saved alongside the original high-res image,

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meaning mit-mapping can actually result in a 33% increase in file size.

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Now, there are games that try to minimize size on disk

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by procedurally generating textures. This means that the game uses its own internal logic

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to come up with textures on the fly instead of relying on pre-rendered images saved on a disk.

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But in photorealistic games, procedurally generating textures, at least today,

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takes up a great deal of processing power that's better used for, you know,

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actually rendering the game. So it generally isn't done.

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It also doesn't help that a game's textures are often stored in a manner that prioritizes them

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being easily read by the GPU rather than in a manner that's optimized for saving space,

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which is unsurprising, given that storage is relatively cheap,

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meaning that developers are far more concerned with making the game look good and run well

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than they are with having a small footprint on your SSD.

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Combine all of this with the fact that game audio is similarly hard to compress without sacrificing quality

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and you have a recipe for space-hogging games, a trend that isn't likely to end anytime soon.

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So keep an eye out on deals for storage, I guess,

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or you can just stick to playing Minecraft, as long as you don't install high-res texture packs.

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Or install liking this video if you liked it, or disliking it if you disliked it,

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and leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future Techquickie video.

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Oh yeah, and don't forget to subscribe.