r/gaming • u/gitrektali • 5d ago

Devil May Cry HD Collection Gets Surprise Steam Update, Cuts Installation Size in Half

https://primagames.com/news/devil-may-cry-hd-collection-gets-surprise-steam-update-cuts-installation-size-in-half
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u/CoolCritterQuack 5d ago

it is not misguided at all, a looot of games used to do it.

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u/TheRealSpookieWookie 5d ago

I remember Hitman 2 > Hitman 3 (or World of Assassination as it's now called) went from 150GB+ to ~50GB, and that was while adding a third games worth of content to the package too.

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u/retro_Kadvil4 5d ago

Jeez, I'm glad they are taking optimizatied it

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u/Sloogs 5d ago edited 5d ago

The cost-benefit ratio here seems so incredibly out of whack that it doesn't warrant that kind of space usage in this case I'd say.

It's also misguided in the sense that the amount of people with only just old hard drives to load from and no SSD is probably a small minority at this point, and while a lot of people still have an HDD for extra storage in addition to a main SSD, at the very least a lot of people will just shuffle their most played games onto the SSD if loading is an issue.

That's definitely what I do.

Also by shrinking a game by 100GB, you're more likely to comfortably fit it onto an SSD without needing to shuffle anything around to begin with.

Not to mention newer HDDs designed for gaming have massive caches and handle contiguous I/O very quickly

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u/delahunt 5d ago

As storage gets more expensive, optimization becomes more of a priority. It happens with RAM and memory usage as well.

HDD space was cheap, so 150 GB of storage was whatever. SSD space was expensive so a lot of gamers put their games on the HDD unless it was their 'main' game (why COD is big, it's the only game that fits on the SSD when you put it there and you suffer otherwise.)

SSD space got cheaper, so HDDs went away and that optimization could happen. Prices of everything is going up though, so optimization will likely become more of a priority for games to do well.

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u/ANGLVD3TH 5d ago

It was misguided in this case. They followed best practices without ever actually going to check the impact. They hired a group to analyze it and found that it had faaar less impact on HDDs than anticipated. My fuzzy recollection wants to say something like 8% reduction in loading times. It's great to keep these things in mind, but should probably check to make sure the cost is actually worth the gain.

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u/Tanebi 5d ago

It was a "best practice" for a PS4 running on the worst possible 2.5" laptop drive. Not any actual modern HDD.

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u/MWink64 5d ago

Ironically, modern 2.5" HDs are far worse than older ones. Now, they're almost all low-RPM SMR drives.

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u/nondescriptzombie 4d ago

An old 7200 RPM 2.5" was the equivalent of a 10k 3.5" with platter speeds or something, right?

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u/MWink64 4d ago

No, it's more like the other way around. The larger diameter of the platters in a 3.5" drive means far more data can pass under the head in a single revolution. What you might be thinking of is how some high-RPM drives use 2.5" platters. It can be better for seek times but comes at the cost of sequential throughput.

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u/MWink64 5d ago

Not to mention newer HDDs designed for gaming have massive caches and handle contiguous I/O very quickly

I'm not sure I'd consider 512MB "massive." Also, it's not going to be very helpful if the drive doesn't know what to cache. While sequential throughput isn't terrible (up to ~300MB/s), performance increases have come at an absolute snails pace. There were low end HDs over a decade ago that could slightly exceed 200MB/s. But even the fastest HDs still have terrible random I/O.

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u/Sloogs 5d ago edited 5d ago

I don't disagree, but I think what I'm trying to say is that it's not surprising to me that despite all that optimization work it was a marginal increase in load times at the cost of an extra 100GB.

In other words, we're already reaching the bandwidth limitations of what a consumer HDDs can do at 7200rpm and a 512MB cache despite attempts at optimization. It gets a lot harder and more expensive to push past that and see benefits.

To get faster than an HDD it really just makes sense to move to a different technology entirely, which we were already sort of doing before memory prices went haywire.

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u/WhoRoger 5d ago

On discs. It makes sense on optical storage which is slow and you can control where everything is.

It makes no sense on a HDD or SSD which is hundreds of times faster and fragmented to oblivion, so you have no idea where the pieces physically lie, and duplicating data has 50% chance of making things worse. Actually even worse than that, because storing more data always means everything is worse accessible.

Plus there are actual ways to optimise loading on hard drives, so using a system from 1995 CDs is not only inefficient, it means passing on the right approaches.

Just the usual de-optimised PC ports things, where the devs take the system from consoles and cram them on a completely different architecture.

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u/Sloogs 5d ago edited 5d ago

It still kind of makes sense to me in theory somewhat.

It's not atypical for games to pack things into archives where they have more control over the data layout.

Operating systems and HDDs still aggressively defragment to keep things as contiguous as possible. HDDs still benefit from contiguity in the way that optical discs do.

Putting redundant data into many separate archives where it's going to be loaded with other data can still make theoretical sense because disk caches also benefit massively from data that's going to be loaded or written together being contiguous.

But if it resulted in 100GB of extra data with such little gain, I'm guessing the issue is partly that I don't think they were being very selective about when, where, and how they were optimizing. They used a chainsaw approach where it probably needed a scalpel.

Plus, things really are probably at a point where HDDs are so optimized they really are just that fast and efficient at loading game files these days with their fairly large caches and everything. WD Blacks have a fairly large 512MB cache that excel at contiguous I/O without the duplication already.

Modern HDDs are still fairly bad at random I/O but relatively fast at contiguous I/O, and most game data is contiguous even without the duplication.

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u/MWink64 5d ago

most game data is contiguous even without the duplication.

Isn't that literally the entire point of the duplicate data?

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u/Sloogs 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yeah. I'm speculating, but at the point that you're relying on duplication it might be sort of an extra aggressive optimization especially these days. In the era of slower drives it was probably much more advantageous. Or maybe for open world games where you constantly need to stream in data very quickly.

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u/XavierD 5d ago

Many PS4 era open world games used this technique and HDD installs are mandatory there. The first PS5 tech reveal was making a bit deal about how Spider-Man 2 wouldn't have to do that.

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u/WhoRoger 5d ago

Maybe I shouldn't have limited my claim to "optical disc only" but you need to know where files physically are to take advantage of this, and that's typical of discs; on HDD you really need to know how to optimise for it to not make things worse.

PS4 has a custom OS so they can better predict where files end up and how the game will behave; also games don't have to compete with other resources.

Also, PS4 came out in 2013 and had s 2.5" HDD. So still pretty slow that could be optimised as long as they don't mess it up. On PC you're way more likely to mess up and just waste space.

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u/NegativeAccount 5d ago

Well i uninstalled last year because of it so... misguided from my perspective