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Why do modern games have such large file sizes? (piefed.social)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 40 points 4 months ago (3 children)

For a very simple element, consider that if you used to have texture resolutions of 256² = 65536 pixels, you now might easily have 4096² = ~16.7mil pixels, a 25480% increase.

So our 4k texture packs really guzzle up harddrive space. And that's ignoring how many many many more things there are to texture in the first place, how each element has multiple textures overlaid for shading, and all the other parts also needing more space like higher-def audio.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    I figured it had to be something like 4k texture packs. I have a Steam Deck and don't generally play anything at high res even when connected to a monitor. There ought to be a way to say hey limit the install to the res I'll actually be using?

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    Far from standard, but some games on Steam offer their HD textures as a free DLC. Then you could choose not to install it. Way back when games still came on disks and DRM wasn't so invasive you could also mod games and replace the HD textures with lower res, but I don't think that is possible with today's game engines. If it weren't outright an option during the installation.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    I remember when Shadow of Mordor released and they added the 4k dlc. I think that the dlc alone took up as much space, if not more than the whole game did without it.

    Iirc it was about 60GB or something, might have been smaller as it's an old game, but still huge.

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