[ErroneousBosh]

> The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs.

Maybe, kinda, sorta, on some games, on some spinning rust hard disks, if you held your hand just right and the Moon was real close to the cusp.

If you're still using spinning rust in a PC that you attempt to run modern software on, please drop me a message. I'll send you a tenner so you can buy yourself an SSD.

[expedition32]

The minimum requirement for new games is a SSD true.

However a lot of people have TINY SSDs. Think 500 gigabyte.

[qu4z-2]

So, big enough for a 25GB game but not a 150GB game? I will be amused if we get stats in the coming month that the percentage of users installing the game on a HDD has decreased from 11% to like 3% after they shrunk it.

[mrguyorama]

Fun story: I've loaded modern games off spinning rust for almost all of the past decade, including such whoppers as Siege, FS2020, CoD, and tons of poorly made indie titles. My "fast data" SSD drive that I splurged on remains mostly empty.

I am not the one who loads last in the multiplayer lobbies.

The entire current insistence about "HDD is slow to load" is just cargo cult bullshit.

The Mass Effect remastered collection loads off of a microSD card faster than the animation takes to get into the elevator.

Loading is slow because games have to take all that data streaming in off the disk and do things with it. They have to parse data structures, build up objects in memory, make decisions, pass data off to the GPU etc etc. A staggering amount of games load no faster off a RAM disk.

For instance, Fallout 4 loading is hard locked to the frame rate. The only way to load faster is to turn off the frame limiter, but that breaks physics, so someone made a mod to turn it off only while loading. SSD vs HDD makes zero difference otherwise.

We live in a world where even shaders take a second worth of processing before you can use them, and they are like hundreds of bytes. Disk performance is not the bottleneck.

Some games will demonstrate some small amount of speedup if you move them to SSD. Plenty wont. More people should really experiment with this, it's a couple clicks in steam to move a game.

If bundling together assets to reduce how much file system and drive seek work you have to do multiplies your install size by 5x, your asset management is terrible. Even the original playstation, with a seek time of 300ish ms and a slow as hell drive and more CD space than anyone really wanted didn't duplicate data that much, and you could rarely afford any in game loading.

I wish they gave any details. How the hell are you bundling things to get that level of data duplication? Were they bundling literally everything else into single bundles for every map? Did every single map file also include all the assets for all weapons and skins and all animations of characters and all enemy types? That would explain how it grew so much over time, as each weapon you added would actually take sizeOfWeaponNumMaps space, but that's stupid as fuck. Seeking an extra file takes a max of one frame* longer than just loading the same amount of data as one file.

Every now and then Arrowhead says something that implies they are just utterly clueless. They have such a good handle of how games can be fun though. At least when they aren't maliciously bullying their players.