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HELLDIVERS 2 Tech Blog #2 - Opt-in install size reduction beta (from 154Gb to 23Gb) (store.steampowered.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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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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[–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

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.

Edit - commenters have fairly pointed out that the difference in actual load times is not as huge as I thought, it might be triple as fast but it's not a huge deal as it's still sub-second. However, it is noticeable and increasing as games develop more for the new tech. Most PC builders do not recommend a SATA SSD over a NVME because the price difference is now minimal and they will be more future-proof as more DirectStorage and similar tech is utilized by modern games.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    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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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    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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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    I've looked, what you say is mostly accurate but getting a bit dated - the NVME performance gap with SATA SSDs keeps widening especially with DirectStorage games (eg Spider Man 2 - triple the load speed vs SATA).

    This gap will continue to widen as devs focus performance improvements on the tech available to them, and as the price difference between SATA SSDs and NVME is diminishing rapidly (only a 5% difference in common mid tier models now) there is very little reason to recommend SATA over NVMe for cost reasons - which was kinda the focus of this thread. I'd not advise anyone today to buy a SATA SSD over NVMe for gaming unless the cost saving was large.

    First article I could find from a website I recognised (there are so many SEO-stuffing AI-generated trash sites today to wade through its truly frustrating) - https://www.techspot.com/article/3023-ssd-gaming-comparison-load-times/

    The performance improvements outside of load times, eg during gaming are significant but harder to benchmark, because pop-in of assets during gameplay is not something we can currently easily measure, it's something you need to compare side by side videos of and there are many that show significant stuttering and pop-in for DirectStorage games like Ratchet and Clank. Another analysis with some videos double, triple or longer wait times in-games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8wXT8F3W4

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, PS5 games are made with the assumption that they'll have access to a 5GB/s drive. It makes sense that they might actually benefit from that. I saw a test of Ratchet and Clank running on a HDD and the main difference was the portals that mask the load times were comically long.

    And it's true the difference in price isn't that great any more. Personally I've got an older SATA in my PC and a NVME. I try to install to the faster drive where I can, but since my PC actually has a worse CPU than my Legion Go S, I'm not likely to see a lot of benefit from it. I suppose you've got a better chance of picking up a used SATA drive on the cheap if you really need to save money.

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