Comments on: Mass Effect 4 Is Looking Better Everyday, Game File Size Is Massive, ‘There Is A Lot In There’

By: d0x360

d0x360 — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 17:26:00 +0000

In reply to mclarenfan1968. Indeed, especially if you are using a platter based drive but I'd like to think a game Dev as big as bioware is kitted out with ssds

By: mclarenfan1968

mclarenfan1968 — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 05:05:00 +0000

In reply to d0x360. Yeah and add to that another thing to consider is that copying speed post Windows XP has been always slow when the file count is higher and especially if they are smaller files. A large single file copies much faster on Windows Vista/7/8 compared to smaller numerous files. Then there is this thing about Windows Vista/7/8's inaccuracy in time to completion estimation. I have seen some initial estimates show 4 days and then a little while later change to mere 2 hours, this keeps fluctuating a lot based on the types of files the OS is dealing with at the time.

By: d0x360

d0x360 — Sun, 14 Dec 2014 14:47:00 +0000

A day to copy would indicate the game is multiple terabytes in size which would mean there are probably tons of redundant files and none of it is compressed. We don’t want that, not ever. The final game will obviously not be that big but uncompressed assets is a BAD thing. We can get 6:1 lossless compression with zero performance hit on the Xbox one and 4:1 lossless with zero performance hit on ps4. We want compression. It not only saves massive amounts of file space which is precious when games are already massive but think of loading times and world size.

At a 6:1 ratio you can have 6 times the number of unique assets in that world and it will load 6 times faster. Would you really be willing to make that trade off for zero gain in quality? I wouldn’t.

It doesn’t matter anyways because neither console has enough available memory to use game worlds with nothing but high res assets. We don’t even see that on PC yet nor will we until video cards come with as much ram as world size. We are talking about at least 12 gigs of vram per card and absurdly fast vram at that. Well beyond the speeds gddr5 can attain…hell well beyond even ddr4. Its one thing to load all those assets into memory in a reasonable amount of time buts another thing entirely to be able to access to utilize them too.