Red Dead Redemption 2 PC System Requirements - requires 150 GB of storage

Yeah, Im sure your 5 year old hard drive will be just fine.

 

No clue, disabling all windows sounds was the first thing I did when I built my machine.

 

Even hdds have come very far. All top quality ones and larger than 6/8 gb of course depending on specs can achieve up to 200+ mbps speeds with ease and stability. Space is not a thing anymore. Go on.

 

I'm sure it will be.

 

What happened to you @warlord you are helpful and actually making sense now. I miss that crazyass agressive old you that wanted to argue

 

I am putting out all my aggressive manners over ubisoft forums, I am fighting since 3rd September to subscribe uplay plus like hundreds of others, who either fail due to errors or losing money by double charges or more and games not showing etc. I am so absorbed by this situation there . Haha

 

It's going to take 25-30 hours to download here but at least it isn't on 104,167 floppy disks.

 

Try the other tool I posted earlier. It's quite a bit faster too.

 

ok lets take just a tiny part on game developing
for texture, most using TGA and PNG
TGA is uncompressed while PNG is lossless compression
now why more people using TGA than PNG ? (its like 3-to-1)
PNG with alpha-channel can be problematic and also in my experience longer time to load in engine/compositing software

now for TGA itself support compression, yet now the talk is it depend on the engine, whether is it support it or not

https://forums.unrealengine.com/dev...ontent-creation/33788-tga-vs-png-for-textures

in this vids, showing development of open-world (skip to 10:17)


now every compression mean need decompression obviously right?
while the game engine in background already handling cache swap between data
do u realize how can turn be to really complex here ?

https://www.researchgate.net/public...open_world_games_without_loading_screens#pf14
look at 5.3 Loading Resources is slow

also most game engine already use same sort of compression yes
so its not as easy as making it more compression to the system
well talk is easy for sure, if u can try, make a simple workable engine, maybe u bring revolution to game-engine-compression

but really its not as simple like in ur mind, which only look into compression part
do u think those game-developer never have similar thought like urs?
of course they did, those unreal engineers if u watch those development videos, but again not as simple as that

also u dont consider how games created, those game studio have budget/resources/time to consider, so especially smaller game studios, do u think they going to waste to resources+time to make smaller game-size for compression ?

its not like ur idea is wrong, but ur mind POV often to shallow, just look what possible in ur eyes and never considering many other things

edit : i need to dig this, its been years

this vids from GDC2012, and people been using compression long before this

also https://developer.nvidia.com/astc-texture-compression-for-game-assets

with all of these compression yet the game still getting bigger, its simply because the game data is much bigger than before, game is much more complex than 10years ago
so its not like game-developer/engineer not trying to make as compact as possible, but rather the game itself grow much bigger
try compress 4k picture as much as possible, how much u can get per picture ?

 

Phantasmagoria says hello. It was a 6 discs game (roughly 3,6GB) in 1995. How many PCs of that era even had that much available in their HDDs? I know they didn't had to be stored in your PC, but still that's a good example of not limiting creativity because of convenience. Swapping and keeping these discs in working condition was a pain in the ass.

Compressing may not be that simple. As another user pointed out, there are some drawbacks to compression that may not translate well to an open world game. Besides, as a general rule of thumb, you would need to test a compressed build in addition to the uncompressed one. So, more overhead in dev time, more money spent, all for what? Maybe 50GB? How much is a 1TB HDD these days? Is it even worth wasting time talking about this at all?

It costs dev time and thus money to do.

Again, how can you tell they aren't already doing this? My point is that RDR2 (supposedly, I haven't played it) is a huge game with an obsessive amount of detail, so it's not unreasonable that it's total size is so big. Compare that to the ludicrous 175GB size of Call of Duty MW and it seems to me that RDR2 is actually pretty well compressed.

 

Not sure what the whole thing about TGA vs PNG has much to do with what I said, especially considering TGA supports lossless compression. PNG is just one of many compressed image formats.
You seem to have forgotten that games have been using compressed textures for years. I really don't understand where you think the additional complexity is coming from, in a developer standpoint. Most game engines handle this kind of stuff automatically, or with little dev intervention.
Regardless, most of the time, the game isn't doing anything computationally demanding as it is loading in more data. In my experience, any stuttering from loading data in is from I/O wait.

Um... you realize that's supporting my point, right? On page 20, it says "The bottleneck here is the access to disk. Access to disk blocks the CPU
and requires some time." and on the same page mentions to use a separate thread to reduce I/O wait. I'm saying to go beyond that, by using many threads to decompress a file. The more you can spread out the load to multiple sources, the faster you can read the data. The thing about uncompressed data is it can only be read linearly (assuming you don't have a RAID setup, of course), where you are entirely limited by how fast the disk can read. But when you use multi-threaded [de]compression, you get a smaller file to read from the disk and divide the load among many cores, in parallel. That can have a dramatic improvement in load time.

Right, but I'm not talking about layering compression. I'm talking about compressing what isn't compressed, or using a more potent and multi-threaded compression method. Again, this isn't hard to do, and there's free options too.

What about it is complex when the libraries do all the work for you?
Many game devs do have a similar thought process, which is why they use sufficient compression on consoles.
You act like compression is this really tricky thing that hasn't been considered or isn't feasible, but the fact of the matter is, it's regularly being done. My gripe is that PC games are being shafted.
Keep in mind that games have been highly compressed since the early 2000s. Sometimes, compression was the only way to make game load times reasonable when reading from a disc. Sure, nowadays games aren't loaded from optical drives anymore (thankfully), but the point remains that compression allows for shorter load times.

Is that seriously an argument? First of all, small game studios do use compression. I see it pretty often. I've seen some really beautiful indie games with more content than some AAA titles and were maybe 20% as big. But also, you act like compression is this incredibly slow, complex, and tedious process. You only need to compress music, textures, meshes, sound, etc once. Most game resources could be easily compressed in a single day via the average PC, and can often be compressed as you're exporting them. Hell, even professional cameras can give you RAW and compressed images simultaneously the moment you take a photo.

Except I've actually experimented with this kind of stuff with noticeable results, and there's 3rd party benchmarks to back up my claims (like what I linked to earlier). It's 2019 - both PCs and consoles have the system resources to handle this kind of stuff without breaking a sweat.

Yes, games have exponentially more data than there was just a few years ago, but, if things like CompactGUI can shrink a game by more than 20%, then no, devs are not compacting as much as possible.
In general, game devs have become lazy. They don't optimize anything anymore, they just shoot for 30FPS and in some cases add a letterbox for the sake of being "cinematic" (which really just cuts down on what's being rendered). Decreasing load times and sparing disk space is a non-issue to them, since it has such a minimal impact when you're actually in-action with the game. To a lot of people, it's an invisible inefficiency, much like all the junk people lug around with them in their car, or the amount of water needed to flush a toilet. But just because it's invisible, doesn't make it ok.
Of course, there are a few modern games here and there where the devs really went above and beyond to make a game well-optimized, but more often than not, I just see devs who settle for the status quo (which is basically achieving 30FPS on consoles).

 

Who said anything about limiting creativity? I'm arguing strictly for improving efficiency without sacrifices.
I'm all for games pushing things to the limit. I am not ok with games that are needlessly/avoidably inefficient.

Name 1 drawback of lossless multi-threaded decompression on a modern system. Just 1.
Why test both when there's plenty of evidence that decompression has no performance deficit? Just stick with compression and everyone wins.
I really don't know why you're so fixated on the idea of saving disk space. Saving disk space is just a nice side effect. I want faster [down]load times.
As I pointed out before, an additional 2c/4t will yield you more benefits than getting more disk space, and costs less.

Not really, seeing as many devs used to do this on a regular basis on systems that weren't readily equipped to handle decompression. So, what's the excuse now?

It's plainly obvious when:
A. The console version is substantially smaller. Since you brought up CODMW, y'know how big that game will be on PS4? 39.18GB. That's a perfectly reasonable size (in fact, it's actually pretty good). Perhaps it doesn't have 4K textures, but I'll bet you the 4K textures do not make up for 136GB, and I'm quite sure the console version will not have any perceivable loss in quality. So tell me - why exactly do you think it's ok for the PC version to be that large, especially since the PC version will load slower?
B. When the DRM provides a compressed download
C. When 3rd party tools can shrink the game so much that you're given enough room to fit the entirety of an additional compressed AAA game.

 

Okay, but again: how can you be so sure they're being inefficient? It's a 45%'ish increase in size, it might just be textures with less compression/better resolution, which doesn't necessarily equals 4k textures, for example, bumping textures from 1080p to 1440p would increase their size in roughly 50%. They may feel like PCs have more RAM available to use and thus shipping smaller or compressed textures to accommodate console limitations simply doesn't make any sense. There are many other possibilities like that.

Again, you're basing your argument on the fact that they don't already compress stuff. Unless you can somehow prove that, then arguing about it is meaningless. 150GB might be the compressed size, for all we know, and the size differences may be related to higher quality assets that devs feel should be available for PC version since that can go much further in terms of raw power than consoles. Even a mid-range PC probably can do better than a PS4pro, so I really don't think it's reasonable to expect them to ship a 'stripped' version of RDR2 for mid-low end PCs who would only use PS4'ish level of assets to save 50GB.

I'm actually raising the same point as you here: CODMW is too big on PC, for no apparent reason other than laziness from the devs, as being 4x the size is just too much. But to say that's the same as RDR2, the latter would need to be 400GB in size, and that's absolutely not the case, thus why I'm pointing out that people are overreacting in that specific case.

 

My 2TB intel 660p that i keep for games say's it's fine , heck even my boot drive 500GB kingston nvme ssd says its fine , so no complains from me

 

That reason still doesn't really make any sense. Let's assume that the actual game is roughly the same size as the console version, plus ~20GB for good measure if we include 4K textures (so about 60GB). Do you really believe that that they intend to release 115GB worth of additional content? I'm not aware of any game that nearly tripled in size because of [official] DLC. As far as I'm aware, console players didn't get that memo, so, shouldn't they be saving up that much space too?

Yeah, it's safe to assume it's laziness. Many devs do it right. So to ask why some don't do it is kind of like asking why a kid cheats on a test - it's not about doing what's best, for them, it's about taking the easiest way out.

You can prove if it is inefficient when 3rd party methods of compression can shrink the game substantially. If you see less than a 10% difference, I'd say they did a good job. In my own experience, I'd say most devs do a good or "sufficient" job.
Also, compression increases RAM usage, at least temporarily. The only things you're reducing are load times and disk usage. So if anything, devs would deliberately use compression for the very reason you said.

Here's your proof some are not compressing enough:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/76hj26/i_tested_25_games_against_the_windows_compact/
Note how there are a few examples in that list where devs are doing a good job (by my standards anyway - I'm not expecting perfection).

I really need to emphasize I'm not advocating for stripping stuff out (unless you get to opt into that, in which case that'd be kinda nice).
Anyway, one easy way to find out if the game can be compressed [more] is how big the download size will end up being. On PS4, the RDR2 is 105GB and the download size is 88.6GB. That's a roughly 15% difference. Not insignificant, especially since that's definitely enough space saved to fit a whole other game. Even though the PC version likely has higher-res textures, I imagine some PC DRMs will offer a similar level of compression on average (some might be a little better, some might be a little worse). That being said, I would expect the download size to be no more than 130GB on at least one of the DRMs. If I'm right, Rockstar has room for improvement. If the download size from all of the PC DRMs is only 10% smaller, feel free to come back here and rub it in my face that I was wrong.

 

As this list shows:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJUGaoUzhC5titIC1rzQHI4yI/edit?usp=sharing

... it's a hit & miss thing.

Some games are very well structured with compressed assets and have minimal or no benefit at all from using Compact, others are massive space hogs and tens of GB can be gained by compressing.
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But the thing is... Compact only uses LOSSLESS compression, which doesn't work great for images/audio.
A game might have completely uncompressed textures and only get 20% reduction from Compact... If the same game would use some well balanced lossy compression (think: JPG), the game itself might look almost identical but be much, MUCH smaller in size.
Same with Audio - Example: MP3 "256Kbits" (lossy) sounds pretty much identical to FLAC (lossless, which is ~900Kbits), and MP3 is not even a very good algorithm (it's over 20 years old).

The compromise is processing power needed to load game assets, lossy compression is usually very compute heavy.

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I think they choose to do only slight compression (lossless), or no compression at all, because while it's easy to buy more storage space (even for laptops, USB 3.x external drives are fast enough to launch games from them), you can't easily double or triple your CPU speed. Good luck getting 10% ...

Nobody likes to wait for 5-10 minutes while a large world loads while the game decodes 10000 texture JPG's...

This is quite counter-intuitive... large (little compressed) assets load FASTER than small (very compressed) assets. Crazy huh?

 

Guys what are we arguing here ? Consoles have a set hardware so devs choose the optimal res textures to achieve the 30 or 60 fps lock they want. In our computers thought we have at the very least low medium and high textures to xhoose from so possibly 1024 x1024 +2048x2048 ( diffuse/ normal/ specular / depth) yes every single texture you see has 4 images because thats how materials work. So what i imeaning to say why the set up is bigger? My bet is because you just have multiple texture resolution sets to choose from

 

Intel stopped paying him? I don't know how sensitive he is to jokes. Don't be mad at me bruh. Also, only half joking.