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With a new generation of consoles on the horizon, Microsoft, Sony and gamers are collectively preparing for the impact on the storage capabilities of the next-generation console. While it’s true that game sizes have grown for decades, what we see for the first time with this next generation is that the sizes of hard drives / SSDs really are not increasing so much to keep up. The Xbox Series X will offer a 1TB SSD, which is the same capacity as the Xbox One X (although much faster) and only 2 times bigger than the Xbox One in its launch configuration in 2013.
The problem is, of course, the size of the games. not to have it simply doubled since then. Now we have titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with a staggering 185 GB. Remember when Titanfall, at 50GB, was raising his eyebrows and breaking records? We have overcome that 3 times in the last seven years.
According to Microsoft, it has a compression technology, BCPack, intended for this generation that should substantially improve the situation. First, the company has incorporated hardware-level decompression directly into the console, reducing the overhead of handling the workload at the maximum speed of ~ 3 CPU cores to nothing. There is a dedicated controller that handles this task now.
That’s beneficial to performance, but it doesn’t do much to help the painful parts of your hard drive. However, according to online reports, Microsoft’s new texture packaging methods have reached unrivaled compression heights, reducing size by up to 50 percent compared to current methods. Sony’s Kraken, by contrast, is supposed to improve texture compression by about 30 percent.
I’m interested in the details because I want to know what developers of hardware tech console games have access to. I’ve been writing lossless / texture codecs for about 15 years, so that’s key info.
– Richard Geldreich (@ richgel999) March 22, 2020
This is potentially huge. Most of the data stored in VRAM or transferred through the PCIe bus is primarily texture data. With an uncompressed 4K texture now as large as 8 MB, most of what is stored on a game HDD is texture data. Improving compression algorithms and implementing hardware-based decompression is the way Microsoft hopes to keep costs low without giving up next-generation fidelity.
At the same time, however, we’ve seen the impact of changes like this before, such as when Microsoft introduced a 30 percent compression ratio enhancement over the life of the Xbox 360.
There is a great presentation on VentureBeat about the cost of making games and how it has changed in the past few decades. Although it dates from 2017, I recently discovered it and there is useful information that I have not seen before, which measures concepts such as the cost per byte to develop an AAA game. One of the most interesting findings from the report is that bytes don’t increase gradually with each console generation.
This is a logarithmic scale, so each marker on the y axis is 10 times the size of the previous one. The sizes of the games have grown at a remarkably stable rate. An interesting point that the author, Raph Koster, points out is that the cost per byte has stagnated in recent years (this was in 2017, I couldn’t find an updated slide):
The net change in cost per byte has not really decreased since 2005, which is a profound reason why games are so much more expensive now than they were then. We create more bytes and we create better bytes, but we are not actually building cheaper Bytes While the discussion about how games have become more expensive over time may seem to have nothing to do with the issue of total storage capacity on the Xbox Series X, both questions relate to the amount of storage that You need the system first, which affects your Total Price. I suspect that the reason we’ve seen Microsoft putting so much effort into optimizing every aspect of its content delivery network is in part to avoid the pain of offering less storage capacity relative to game size than we’ve ever seen. seen at launch on previous consoles.
Both the Xbox Series X and PS5 support additional units to increase their basic capabilities, which is good, I suspect they will both need it.
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