Have you seen posts about how large the install sizes are for recent games?

There's two big reasons for this.

The first is that high quality assets - textures, audio, etc. - are big and take up a lot of space. If we want 4k HD graphics resolution, those textures must be installed somewhere. If we want performance optimization like LODs, we need multiple versions of the same texture at different resolutions in order to load the cheaper ones for models at a distance. The more detailed the assets become, the bigger the files necessarily must be.

The second is that we will sometimes duplicate data on disk in order to improve seek and load times. This is in part because we're physically pulling data from somewhere on a disk, which means we need to go and find the physical location on the disk and read the data from there. The further away that reader has to move, the longer it takes to get the data we want. Thus, if we have multiple copies of the same data, we can find the closest one instead of the only one - like having multiple kitchens in an office building, so that workers can go to whichever is closest, rather than everybody trying to go to the one kitchen during lunchtime.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

• Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
• Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky
• Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
• Frequent Questions: The FAQ