I would rather have uncompressed highres textures, lossless audio and as high quality/resolution of prerendered cutscenes/cinematics (if the dev goes that unfortunate route instead of using in-engine cutscenes) as possible. It will prolong the game's life - replaying the game in a decade on 8k/whatever display will be so much more pleasing and enjoyable, not to mention it improves the upscales/modability of a game the higher quality assets it has. That's the reason why the so called remasters on consoles looks very close to how the game always looked natively on pc in high resolutions... because they were "optimized" for console media with their limitations, while often the pc version had original/source textures, high rendering resolution and more options+modability available that made the difference on the long run. We were not always so lucky, consoles were way too often the lowest common denominator and as a result we got shafted. PC versions have the potential to become the best version across all platforms and it's quite easy to spot those oldies nowadays that pushed the boundaries back then despite causing some bewilderment because of their hw requirements.

Artificially limiting pc release just because you don't want to let go of floppies, tapes and spindrives is pretty much like setting up games or other media for failure in future, to downright sabotaging them. I'm sorry but the bandwidth and esp. the latency penalty of physical read/write head seeking data clusters is just not there anymore. The ship sailed many years ago in fact, esp. with open world games or other genres featuring non-linear asset streaming.

Riiiigghht..... Personally, i think you have your head on backwards. It isn't just the power of the hardware you can buy that makes the game go, it's often the limitations in the hardware that game devs and designers have to work around that they find interesting unique solutions to bring the game to life, which become a core part of the game's feel look and personality. Having too much power and no limits often just makes devs lazy.

I WAS talking about layout of storage in binary packages/archives, when they start getting big enough and there's enough drawn out it may take considerably more to seek and find if they are spread apart vs put closer together or in the same file as a larger archive.

I've always personally advocated for a good respectable standard release of it being good fast and small and workable for say 90%+ of the community, and then you can get a high rez 4k texture-pack download or whatever for those that really wanted that; THAT would serve everyone rather than just those with high computer specs.

To me games over 20Gb seem really really hard to justify, especially with better technology for codecs, compression, and better engines now. And but believe it or not, 100Gb of data takes a loooong time for the majority of people to download; and takes a large portion of space. Likely the majority of gamers probably don't have $4,000 rigs (or to put down for said rigs) with high end video cards to play 4k resolutions. In comparison it's like having bought a package that fits in the back seat of a car, while you'd rather we just pull the whole damn cargo ship home with us, and then say if we don't have a high performance sports car to then drive on the ship's deck can just take the middle finger for it.

I generally agree with you (especially in your later comment about having the option to download 4k/8k textures separately).

However, "putting all the textures in the same general location so it doesn't have to look far for them" is easier said than done. Remember that games don't control where on the HDD something sits - this is handled by the system itself (not sure if it's the OS or the HDD's controller) - but either way, for everything to sit in the same location on the hard disk, you're relying on the user to religiously keep the drive defragged (and even that never fully eliminates file fragmentation) - otherwise, the textures get sprayed across most of the HDD.

Pre-caching the textures into VRAM (or system RAM) is a good idea - you'll have a painful initial load but the rest of the experience won't be too bad - providing the user has sufficient available RAM. Where it becomes tricky is with large open-world games if you want a seamless environment with no loading screens.

You're right on the laziness though - compared to 25 years ago, there's so little optimisation.

Go easy on him tiger, his answer was more relevant than yours.

Topic isnt "Is SSD better?". Ofc its better. It can launch games faster. But honestly, the only game I really noticed a difference so far is Crusader Kings 3 (3+ mins to 1 min). Once loaded however, no difference at all. All my other games load almost instant. I am not gonna "fix" a system thats running supersmooth but thats not the question here anyway.
Topic is about this: Is there something in the Baldur's Gate 3 game's code to make sure that you cant load it from a normal (for you not normal apparently, but you knew what I mean, HDD) drive?

I am not complaining, I am just curious. I was interested in BG3 but its not a MUST-have for me. They say they are fine with 8 GB RAM. So what they wanna load, and where to? I am not a game programmer, I can barely code. If I was really loaded, I d just pay the 60 and find it out myself. Its weird. A quality title with its amazing real time combat in beautiful graphics like Plague Tale just recommends it, and a "cheap" title like BG3 with its antiquated turn based combat and Skyrim-like graphics requires it? Again, my understanding of technical detail is limited thats why I was opening this topic, hoping for someone who might have the understanding and will to explain it.

This is far more likely with older drives which were smaller than today. If the OS can allocate a continuous block it generally will. At least when you're considering single drives. Get into RAID and the like, then it completely changes as multiple drives are done at once, or mirroring, or slowdown is also a hint of dries may be on their last legs with lots of errors. Etc. And then FAT12/FAT16 it would probably have taken the first block available which encouraged fragmentation when files were deleted.

When writing the earlier post, i was thinking about the MYST game, the commentary where they spoke of speed and everything running from a CD, and they had to lay out data close to eachother since the music layers were being actively played but it had to seek to a nearby sector to get a sound/image and then get back to the music without it hickuping, and they managed that; Which is a lot more the 'close together' logic. Unlike say the 8bit games Bard Tale and others which came on 4 disks, explore on one, get into a battle switch disks and fight a bat, etc.

A good middle ground, or textures that are generated rather than loaded may be better. I remember tinkering with the Unreal editor, and one of the things was a material editor, you can use premade materials or make your own putting in C++ code which is compiled. This resulted in very realistic and endless textures, said textures take a fraction of time to generate and take nearly no space. Though that only goes so far, at some point you'll need pictures and fixed textures. Unless you're Kkrieger which generated 2Gb of textures from a 100k demo.

Thanks for sharing. Would you go a little further into detail? What monitor were you using? Full hd, 4k? What RAM had your computer and was the operating system on SSD when these bad bad things happened?

You seem to know what you are talking about.

I understand that everyone will have to download the full package. But they sure will use some load on demand, no? Lets say 115 out of 150 GB are for 4k cutscenes and stuff and I use a full hd monitor. Will the game really load all the 4k stuff and overwhelm GPU and CPU for no benefit? I would think the 4k stuff will left undisturbed on the drive. Am I wrong?

Do you realize that moving 150GB around takes a while? Makes no sense for a game you will play -maybe- every once in a while. Also, I like to keep the operating system and the more important stuff separated from games that dont matter much to me. I dont buy a new computer every year. I bought the current one because I wanted to play the Witcher 3 on max settings. Back then, 222 GB SSD drive and 1,81 TB normal one seemed to be very reasonnable and they still are if your budget isnt unlimited. CPU, GPU and monitor are more important and always will be. The computer served me very well so far, no reason to replace or "fix" it. I will rather avoid those developers for now. Still I d like to know how a game can be just fine with 8 GB RAM and require 150 free SSD. Doesnt make any sense to me but again, I am not a game programmer.

1080p monitor
32 GB DDR4 3200 Mhz
I didn't have an SSD, so the OS was on the hard drive as well (I'm sure the specs are whatever the average is for a 7200 RPM drive)

Nowadays, a 1 TB SSD but nearly twice as fast costs under 60€. That's less than half of what I paid for mine a couple of years ago.

Thank you.

I understand that SSDs arent very expensive any more, but I dont like changes in general. I change, when its necessary cuz not working any more, not, while its working just fine.

If BG3 didnt have this awful turn based combat, I d still try it I guess. But this and your observations, I ll better avoid it and when I buy my next computer in 5+ years I ll either get BG3 real cheap or have better options.

Weird, that the game doesnt know to use the RAM and (apparently) instead relies so heavily on ssd.

I'm the type to delete unnecessary voice and language packs from games where i can only make use of English (and C-type languages.. ha ha).

I'm not sure, depends on the game. It may make more sense to have the highest texture possible, then downsize on the fly when it's loaded up; While others will have multiple version mipmaps of the texture at different sizes and use the ones as needed (faster but takes nearly twice the space). But it's more than just if the 4k stuff is untouched, each level up takes vastly more space.

I'm sure most games when you enter an area it will have a list of possible textures and load those; along with the next sectors nearby so as you enter them the textures are already loaded, and unload any unneeded textures. Course the area of interest is also based on view distance, and more view distance means even more to have loaded...

Ultimately, resolution has outpaced hardware ability, they are already pushing 8k gaming and videos/movies and we don't have the processing power to support it at workable prices. (though a 8k TV would likely work just fine with multiple inputs for say security cameras and multiple inputs, but that's unrelated). Maybe in another 20 years we'll have what we need and this whole problem of space and size and internet speed will all get thrown out the window, and games that you could fit on a cartridge or CD/DVD will be something to laugh at.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart PC version is out...

And Alex B. of Digital Foundry goes into issues w/ HDD when streaming during cut-scenes & also how it kills performance when doing Portal-related stuff:

-> Alex B. in full on R&C: RA PC - https://youtu.be/11VTtIwboe8
-> Alex B. in particular on the problems on HDD w/ this game - https://youtu.be/11VTtIwboe8?t=1088

It takes a while, depending on your pc (50 seconds? 5minutes?). So what? You have an option to play the game from cheap and relatively fast albeit small ssd resulting in a better experience but you have to move/install the game there first and "wait" a couple of minutes. You don't have to twiddle your thumbs asking "are we there yet?" while it moves the files anyway.
I did exactly that back when I had 240GB ssd, I bought them in 10pcs bulk in 2013 for all my devices. I don't know about you but when I play a game, I focus pretty much on that single game until I complete it (or loose interest) and maybe have another 2 small games (like arcade genres) on the side for shorter sessions, but that's it. Also had a separate ssd for just one game, DCS world, to guarantee I/O performance without interference when I needed it.

½TB-1TB sata ssd drives cost next to nothing nowadays - Samsung 870 Evo 500GB is whopping 36€, so I don't really share much sympathy towards stubborn dudes expecting games to be optimized for hdd without knowing what it entails, in times when current gen consoles aren't using them and for good reasons at that.

No idea what it has to do with anything here but I don't build a new pc every year either, far from that actually. Btw you can have more drives too, y'know... no reason to throw away your pc when it runs out of storage space. My earlier post was meant as a good advice for dudes on tight budget who might have not realised how cheap ssd have become in recent years, occasional stupidity and persistent stubbornness of some in this thread aside. TYL what "SSD required" means going forward, it's here to stay for new games. May it not catch you by surprise next time.

I don't care at all about how "cheap" SSDs are; what I do care about though is that all SSDs have a fatal flaw already built into them, which is called "write endurance," which means they are already predestined to fail, guaranteed for sure, after a certain amount of re-writes. That point alone makes SSDs garbage and inherently inferior to HDDs, since HDDs do not have that fatal flaw.

That is not say to that HDDs last forever, they don't, but at least they don't die for sure after exceeding a "write endurance" threshold, like the crappy technology which is SSDs do.

And I've been gaming just fine on 7200 RPM HDDs always, and they never cause any of my games to stutter or slow down or take a long time on loading screens, or anything like that. Sometimes those kinds of things happen, but they are due to the games stressing the GPU and/or CPU, not the HDD.

I do not think you have to worry regarding the write endurance of a small or medium sized SSD. My current Notebook "only" got a 250 GB SSD inside and there is still about 80% of write left... after around 2-3 years of use. In order for this SSD to drop to 0% i would have to use this SSD 10-15 years, almost nonstop which is very unlikely...

If the size of the SSD is even bigger than this, the endurance will drastically increase. A usual Notebook nowadays got 1 TB, which means 4 times the write of this "weak Notebook".

On my gamer PC, the main OS-SSD is 2 TB in size, this SSD already is able to provide 8 times the writes of my "weak Notebook". However, now there is a trick this SSD is using: It can use 666 GB as a single level cell (SLC) which means, as long as this drive is operating in SLC mode the write endurance is drastically increased. In any practical means, this SSD with my OS stored will by far outlast the entire PC when it comes to write endurance. The thing i rather would worry is if the SSDs in general may become defective, for example the controller chip could become burned (and yes, they can get really hot). In this case the entire SSD may die, along with the data, no matter how much endurance is left on the cells.

So... you do not need to worry the endurance on any practical terms, rather you should worry the general quality and cooling of any device, including the SSD.

Besides; On my gamer PC, every single SSD (2 TB OS, 2 TB game and 4 TB game) got still 100% of endurance left, and it has already been 3/4 years. All the gamer drives are almost full of data and the OS is only using a few hundred GBs in single level mode.

And yet you forget just a few years ago 20Gb drives for your 360 was as big as they supported, change out with a different drive and you got blocked on Xbox Gold and couldn't play multiplayer because it wasn't a signed/supported device.

Then there were the 100Gb drives (WWhhoooh!!) huge at the time.

I also remember having a 5Gb drive and could only put 2 games on it; Morrowind and Diablo 2. Nothing else would fit.

Not sure about the cheap part, and not sure about the size either. They considered SSD's back early 2000's and earlier, but there was some issue about having that many chips, either the power needed or the heat generated or it was the reliability wasn't that high. It's a reason Thumb Drives were more a thing and less SSD's.

As for 'cheap', as i remember they were generally 5x to 10x more expensive for the same sized drive. So i don't know about 'cheap' Maybe used, at which point they may have been heavily used in crypto mining and may or may not be reliable.

Something close to 200,000 times if i remember right, which if you're using SSD for temporary files, can easily be used quickly and unexpectedly. As well as SSD's will have a much higher erasure rate if not energized/plugged in. We're talking like a few years, compared to HDD's which is considerably longer.

Long as you aren't constantly swapping out games/movies i can see it not being much an issue. Playing games on the other hand, depends on how often you swap out files. The Chromebooks i've been revamping tend to have 10-16Gb drives. Mostly enough for the OS and programs. Sorry if i can't afford a $4k notebook to play games on.