A wild idea about game file sizes

Elektro Demon

Elektro Demon

Banned
So hear me out. Game file sizes are just insane nowadays. They're just too big. But why don't we use some insane compression technique that is able to shrink 100gb file into a 10 gb one? I'm not sure if this is possible but I think it is. Or it could be developed. If you shrink your game dramatically like this, when you're installing the game/unpacking it, it would take a heavy toll on the cpu. But the cpu tech nowadays is not like it used to be, cpu's today have many cores and threads so pegging an 8 core cpu at 100% would get that file unpacked fairly quickly. It just makes more sense to me then to needlessly download huge files.
What do you think? Is this kind of tech possible? If so, why don't devs or online storefronts use it?
 
If you can find an algorithm that can compress 100GBs into 10GBs without massive quality loss, then please inform us of this easy technique you have... It simply isn't as easy as you are suggesting.
 
Boy do I have a show for you:
confused kumail nanjiani GIF by Silicon Valley
 
Oodle Kraken compression on PS5 is already doing this. They also don't have to use repeated assets like they did when HDDs were standard so file sizes can be smaller.
 
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There are already high compression algorithm. PAQ for example. It can compress 10GB to ~60MB. The downside however is it takes about 80 hours to decompress this file.
[h2][/h2]
 
This stuff is probably at hand of some really tight Neural Network, I work in this field, however I cannot imagine such Network, whoever comes with this it's going to be for Nobel Price, it's really one thing which I can think it could shrink file size that much. But with my limited knowledge, I somewhat doubt it...
 
It's a little more complicated than that actually, and pretty long to explain everything.
There is not "magic" compression. Also, compression is already used but it costs CPU/GPU ressources, loading time, etc..
 
Good ol' not really understanding compression.

If you compress something to n (=a number of) bits, you can only have 2^n possible uncompressed things.

Say if you compress to 2 bits, you can only have 4 possible uncompressed things.
 
Whatever compression you're talking about needs to be lossless, and I really doubt any form of lossless compression could ever be that good, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle#Uses_and_applications

There are games that are poorly compressed, they ship uncompressed (Or poorly compressed), audio, textures, video, and they absolutely should work to make their file sizes smaller, but it's just not always possible.

A lot of games will ship uncompressed audio to reduce CPU load for example.

A lot of games ship unused assets.

A lot of games have redundant textures.

There's tons of things game developers can do to shave off a few % of the games size, but it can take a lot of time, and they probably just don't find it worth spending 1 month trying to reduce the game from 100gb to 80gb when most people don't seem to care.
 
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SSDs are cheaper than CPU power, it's simply not worth the trouble. Have you ever been naughty and installed a FitGirl repack? The installation of a highly compressed game takes several hours.
 
Elektro Demon said:
So hear me out. Game file sizes are just insane nowadays. They're just too big. But why don't we use some insane compression technique that is able to shrink 100gb file into a 10 gb one? I'm not sure if this is possible but I think it is. Or it could be developed. If you shrink your game dramatically like this, when you're installing the game/unpacking it, it would take a heavy toll on the cpu. But the cpu tech nowadays is not like it used to be, cpu's today have many cores and threads so pegging an 8 core cpu at 100% would get that file unpacked fairly quickly. It just makes more sense to me then to needlessly download huge files.
What do you think? Is this kind of tech possible? If so, why don't devs or online storefronts use it?
Click to expand...
Don't smoke and post.
 
Lets say that was possible. the amount of time to unpack that would be great making the installation much much longer and not doing anything to disk space but confusion for the users who wondered where all that space went for 10 gig download?
 
onesvenus said:
Kraken is at most a 50% compression on best case as seen on their website
Click to expand...

I dug into it a little more and they can actually get better than 3:1 compression when combined with Oodle texture and still are able to decompress almost instantly.

cbloomrants.blogspot.com

How Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture supercharge the IO system of the Sony PS5

The Sony PS5 will have the fastest data loading ever available in a mass market consumer device, and we think it may be even better than yo...
cbloomrants.blogspot.com cbloomrants.blogspot.com
 
Patrick S. said:
SSDs are cheaper than CPU power, it's simply not worth the trouble. Have you ever been naughty and installed a FitGirl repack? The installation of a highly compressed game takes several hours.
Click to expand...
I have been naughty. It did take 4 hours on my i5 sandy bridge but honestly on my ryzen 3700x it's quite fast.
 
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Better to go the nanite route and avoid duplication by having your engine apply the differences required on the fly. What can be done in that space if seriously worked on can change overall file sizes dramatically.
 
Games are already highly compressed. You have to also keep in mind that decompressing those files eats up CPU that would otherwise be utilized in other ways.
 
Great idea. And then, we can come up with a compression technique that reduces the size AGAIN: so from 100 GB to 10GB, which is your original idea (make sure you patent that) - and then again from 10GB to 1GB!
 
I love the idea being: keep doing whatever you're already doing now, but better!

That said, even if you're over-simplifying you're right, compression techniques are needed today more than ever because games have ridiculous file sizes. Also console manufacturers had the brilliant idea to give us not even 1 TB to store them.
Not to mention download time and patches size.

This is kind of a serious matter and I would love to see some breakthrough in this field.
 
100GB -> 30GB is about as good as you can get right now without having to wait a long time to actually decompress.

So yeah Im expecting games to actually fit on a single Blu Ray without needing to download another 60GB day one patch.

Hopefully Day One patches can also go back to being sub 5GB regardless of how much work said patch actually does.

But 100GB -> 10GB and then actually be able to decompress the assets at run time.....I dont think we are going to see that this generation.
 
I wonder if it would be possible to make a way more aggressive compression for downloading purposes, and then de-compress the files at time of install.
At least download size/disc storage would be much more efficient.
 
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Game console and games already leverage compression this gen whether it's how games are stored when saved on your SSD or the individual assets that make up your game.

The problem is you just arbitrarily picked some dream goal and asked "why don't they just do that?". It's like saying "instead of the whatever percent effective covid vaccine out now why don't they just give people covid vaccine that's 100% effective, no side effects and works for every mutation" or saying "why don't they just make GPUs that are a billion times faster than the one they have today instead of the ones actually out today".
 
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