*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._
By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*
If you’re still using HDD for games in 2025 then what the fuck are you even playing at?
Even the consoles abandoned that.
filthy SSD gamer! so pathetic. real gamers play from ramdisks! what wooden pc are you even playing with less than 200 GB RAM?
Bro have you seen the prices on large SSDs?
Nobody is buying a 256gb drive for games anymore. That’s like 1 to 1.5 games nowadays. Instead 2-4TB drive is the most common purchase for a ‘games drive’. AI has roughly doubled the cost in two years for such drives - even higher for premium quality drives.
I’m not gonna poor-shame people who still play on spinning disk HDDs. AI hype continues to make gaming more expensive by the day.
A 2TB Drive is just over £100, even with the crazy memory prices lately. I’ve got one in my PS5 ffs. A bog standard SATA drive will do practically the same load times as NVME. It’s all about the access time.
Devs should abandon HDD completely. Look how much space they saved here by not wasting it on duplicated resources.
What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s.
NVME drives do at least ten times that for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.
I know they are. For something like database work, they’re amazing. Now go an look at some game load time benchmarks.
Because I can guarantee you they’re nowhere near that much faster for 99% of games. Once you get off spinning rust, CPU speed remains the number one factor in load times. Because nearly everything is compressed and has to be unpacked and processed into the right formats by the system before it can be used.
Picking whatever comes up at the top from googling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8
Just scanning though that video I can see the biggest difference is like a second.
DirectStorage was supposed to be able to make game loading faster on faster SSDs, but as far as I can see that hasn’t really happened. The PS5 does actually get noticeably slower if you cobble a slower drive into it, although not really enough to break anything. The decompression units in that hardware are actually pretty good, and can keep up with the faster SSDs.