this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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It’s likely not only for loading times, but faster loading/streaming of assets and textures. May reduce pop-in with a SSD compared to a HDD.
While this makes sense, it starts to feel like maybe developers shouldn't be leaning so hard on hardware to solve software engineering problems. There's not exactly anything faster than SSD's at the moment to replace them once developers once again push them to their limits.
Gameplay is what makes a game good, not having the fanciest graphics that need an SSD pipeline just to be able to not have horrible pop-in. Just a personal opinion, of course, but it seems like developers could still be making beautiful games without having to go this route for everything.
SSDs have been around for a long time, and have been affordable for quite a while now. While optimization should always be happening on the developer side, its not crazy to start requiring 30+ year old technology to use modern games.
Is it really an engineering problem to not prioritize a slower storage medium?
Last gen consoles still had HDDs but with the newer gen using SSDs that’s what they seem to go for, rather than HDDs and are using the faster read speeds available to them. So with the current gen in mind and SSDs becoming more common to me it makes sense in that regard.
Now don’t get me wrong here this doesn’t mean developers should use this as an excuse to not optimize their game. But I can see how it could let some be lazy about it and push the issue onto hardware.
And I do agree that gameplay is what makes or breaks it, not fancy graphics. It’s why indie games can be so popular even with pixel graphics (not that all use pixel but you get the idea). But that doesn’t seem to be what they were aiming for.
Indeed but it's also a matter of how you design your game. If you're assuming that a game is running off a hard drive, then you'll likely design it so that it loads everything in at load time because the assumption is that storage will be too slow to provide assets on an "as-needed" basis.
On the other hand, if you can rely on there being an SSD you can just assume that you'll be able to grab everything and as when needed.
This actually has an added benefit in that you can design more 'ambitious' games because you don't have to worry about needing to fit all of your assets for a given 'level' into system memory. You can rely on the fact that you can just load and unload things as and when needed.
Yeah, it probably works on an HDD as well, but load times will be awful. I think this gets blown out of proportion. These AAA games or any game which had to load assets or whatever which exceeded available memory always had issues with load times etc. on HDD. So asking users to run it on an SSD is quite sensible to me.
We should argue though if a size of 125GB is actually necessary... Looks like it's time to upgrade my M.2 SSDs from 500GB to 2TB at least 😅