I do think in this case he misses a bit of the point, goes too far:
> They are designed for fast loading and streaming off SSD's. Who cares about saving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD?
Most games will have only one two or three downloads over the user's lifetime, and it'll never be instant, will always require some wait.
But we load textures many times if we keep playing a game.
Rich's overall point remains, but I think some balance of optimizing load speed is also very appreciated & very necessary.
> Most games will have only one two or three downloads over the user's lifetime, and it'll never be instant, will always require some wait.
Are there any statistics on that? Because I have deleted and redownloaded games a whole bunch of times because you can't fit more than two or three games on a single SSD anymore.
I've played large games off of hard drives because I simply didn't want to delete 240GB of other files off of my main drive. The game experience was clearly much worse than the developers intended, but their space demands are unreasonable. Especially considering I'm only playing at 1080p!
Give me a 1080p installer that shaves off 75% of the texture size and you'll win more than a few milliseconds because the stupid thing can actually fit on my drive and doesn't need to come off the internet again.
That can be solved on first load with a texture cache. Shader caches are pretty universal at this point. Texture caches aren't (afaik), but I think they should be.
So now we would have faster download & faster load, but we'd have significantly bugger hard drive space usage than we have? That also seems like a concern.
I do think in this case he misses a bit of the point, goes too far:
> They are designed for fast loading and streaming off SSD's. Who cares about saving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD?
Most games will have only one two or three downloads over the user's lifetime, and it'll never be instant, will always require some wait.
But we load textures many times if we keep playing a game.
Rich's overall point remains, but I think some balance of optimizing load speed is also very appreciated & very necessary.