Why Games Take Up So Much Space

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 a hundred 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 percent 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 we'll tell you after we think go to resolve for sponsoring this video are you looking for simple easy to use yet effective It software go to resolve might be the answer for you Safeguard your business with industry-leading protocols like zero trust access control and multi-factor authentication their remote monitoring and management capabilities allow agents to protect and secure it assets you can perform important tasks such as patch management anti-virus management it Automation and general remote support all without disrupting end users check out go to resolve at the link below and start securing your it assets 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 MIP mapping these can actually increase the amount of space on disk that the game takes up see MIP mapping is a way to render far away textures at lower resolution 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 MIP mapping requires multiple low resolution versions of the texture that are saved alongside the original hi-res image meaning mid 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 is 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 uh keep an eye out on deals for storage I guess or you can just stick to play Minecraft as long as you don't install pirate as texture packs or install liking this video if you liked it or disliking it if you disliked it and leave me a comment if you have a suggestion for a future Tech Wiki video oh yeah and don't forget to subscribe

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 310,139

Keywords: video games, gaming, pc, next gen

Id: bKw0A9ilHgA

Length: 4min 32sec (272 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023