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How can PS4 game downloads be so small?

Charkel
By Charkel
in Console Gaming
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How come the download is so much smaller than the installed game?

I have thought about this a few times but this is the weirdest example yet. 

 

I just downloaded NBA 2K16. The download was 8GB which took me 10 min to dl. When it was done I tried to start the game and expected like 10gb update files but nope! The game was installed and ready to play and now the game is 51gb on my HDD. 

 

HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE!?!??? 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Charkel said:

How come the download is so much smaller than the installed game?

I have thought about this a few times but this is the weirdest example yet. 

 

I just downloaded NBA 2K16. The download was 8GB which took me 10 min to dl. When it was done I tried to start the game and expected like 10gb update files but nope! The game was installed and ready to play and now the game is 51gb on my HDD. 

 

HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE!?!??? 

 

 

Compression

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6 minutes ago, KearneyMC said:

Compression

What kind of black magic compression spell can compress 51gb to 8gb? 

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9 minutes ago, Charkel said:

How come the download is so much smaller than the installed game?

I have thought about this a few times but this is the weirdest example yet. 

 

I just downloaded NBA 2K16. The download was 8GB which took me 10 min to dl. When it was done I tried to start the game and expected like 10gb update files but nope! The game was installed and ready to play and now the game is 51gb on my HDD. 

 

HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE!?!??? 

 

 

Sometimes a game will pre-allocate room on your ps4 for future updates/expansions/etc. Also sometimes it will only download enough of the game to start playing and then will get the rest of the files later(dark souls 3 did this for me)

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this isn't in PS4 only
an example would be Quantum break's update from 1.6 to 1.7 at a size of 24.8 GB

this same update has been compressed to 300 MB by a repack maker called fitgirl
the trick is that it takes tons of time to decompress the files especially if you're on an HDD drive

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1 minute ago, EvilNeo said:

this isn't in PS4 only
an example would be Quantum break's update from 1.6 to 1.7 at a size of 24.8 GB

this same update has been compressed to 300 MB by a repack maker called fitgirl
the trick is that it takes tons of time to decompress the files especially if you're on an HDD drive

That is very impressive I think I better go find some good articles about compression and read up on it. Extreme compression really blows my mind. 

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ohh, thats interesting, didn't know consoles did so much compression for game downloads, i thought it would be like battle field 4 for pc, where took forever to download, since i had to download like 60GB.  =_=

 

PC games need this more too.... xD

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Game will download and say maybe 10 gig, after it has been installed, hover over it and click options, It will show how much you have still to download. It downloads enough for you to get the game up and running and play through so much.

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1. compression

2. updates

 

1. just like a zip, they compress these files so they are a lot smaller. This is done so that the Xbox/Microsoft servers have to have less bandwidth than with non compressed files

2. Once a game is installed, there will likely be updates too

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PS4's game will first download a portion of the game that you can play for like 5 ~ 10 minutes

After that it will notify you that the console is downloading the rest 

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10 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I can't really understand how a basketball game takes up more space than a 40 hour RPG with voice acting 

A lot of it is audio (more music and commentary from commentary teams to players) and textures

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18 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Okay, let me back it up.

 

How does a basketball game take up as much space as Grand Theft Auto V?

Well As I said a lot of textures and audio and most if not all of it is uncompressed and for a sports game they would have tried to texture all players and try to make it realistic as possible

 

For a sports game its massive although 2K15 was bigger than 2K16 (42.88GB vs 41.1GB - these are raw install numbers before day 1 patches etc.)

 

The Battlefield Bundle is the biggest on console (clocking in at around 75GB for the raw install)

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Textures can't be uncompressed. I think the only figure I can recall was id on RAGE, where they said it was something like hundreds of gigabytes of raw textures and the final game has about 12GB of textures.

 

I looked at Doom and only 17GB out of the 50 were for textures. A lot of space was used for maps. About 6GB for audio (the English track. 3GB or so for the other languages).

 

And let's not forget EA shipped Titanfall where 2/3 or so of the game data was for audio tracks of the other languages.

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On 6/14/2016 at 2:22 PM, Charkel said:

What kind of black magic compression spell can compress 51gb to 8gb? 

oh boy you don't want an uncompressed 4k movie in your ps4

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This actually kinda pissed me off. Me and my brother share the PlayStation and he was telling me this game was only 8GB when it was downloading. Then i go on to play and realise we have like 20gb left.

 

Damn, I really gotta upgrade the HDD 

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Compression can appear really impressive on certain types of data where large chunks of identical streams of bits exist. Most compression works by having a "dictionary" of "words". These words are common bit sequences found throughout the data. Each point where the sequence of a word is found is reduced to a simple reference to the that word in the dictionary. In large games with lot's of uncompressed audio, video and texture there often lot's on the common sequences found and each sequence can be quite large resulting in impressive reductions in size.

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On 6/29/2016 at 3:46 PM, M.Yurizaki said:

I looked at Doom and only 17GB out of the 50 were for textures. A lot of space was used for maps.

Map textures maybe?

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