4 ms·

> video game assets are often enormous in size because developers refuse to implement even very basic compression because of the supposed performance impact Th

> video game assets are often enormous in size because developers refuse to implement even very basic compression because of the supposed performance impact This claim needs some real world evidence to back it up (and usually it's not about a performance impact, but instead a perceived image quality impact). IME a lot of care is taken for compressing asset data, and if there would be a chance to reduce the asset size by another few percent without losing too much detail (that's the important part), it would be done. In the end, textures need to end up in memory as one of the GPU compatible hardware compressed texture formats (e.g. BCx) - which is important not only for reducing memory usage, but mainly for increasing texture sampling performance on the GPU (reduced memory bandwidth and better cache locality when reading texture data from GPU memory). Those hardware-compressed texture formats rule out any of the popular image formats like JPEG, PNG etc... that might have a better overall compression, but are hard to decode on the fly to one of the hardware texture formats (but there are now alternatives like https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal), but even a generic lossless compressor (even good old zip) on top of BCx is already a good start.

bscphil 4y ago
> This claim needs some real world evidence to back it up (and usually it's not about a performance impact, but instead a perceived image quality impact). We're talking lossless compression here, so image quality is not the issue. Fortunately someone else has already done this research. There's a tool for Windows to control the compact.exe behavior for individual folders called CompactGUI: https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI They maintain a database of compression results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJUGaoUzhC5titIC1rzQHI4yI/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJ... Reductions in storage use of greater than 50% are so common that they're hardly even worth remarking on. My experience with compressing a bunch of games is that the biggest gains come from compressing bloated asset packs. Hard to know what else could be taking up more than 50% of the storage space in a particular game.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  Very interesting list, thank you! From glancing over it, poor compression mostly seems to be an 'indie phenomenon' though (which is a bit surprising, because I would expect that Unity automatically takes care of asset compression, but maybe not).
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    It may have tools that let you, but an indie project has 500 other fires to put out, and filesize is rarely a bottleneck.

bscphil 4y ago

> This claim needs some real world evidence to back it up (and usually it's not about a performance impact, but instead a perceived image quality impact). We're talking lossless compression here, so image quality is not the issue. Fortunately someone else has already done this research. There's a tool for Windows to control the compact.exe behavior for individual folders called CompactGUI: https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI They maintain a database of compression results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJUGaoUzhC5titIC1rzQHI4yI/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJ... Reductions in storage use of greater than 50% are so common that they're hardly even worth remarking on. My experience with compressing a bunch of games is that the biggest gains come from compressing bloated asset packs. Hard to know what else could be taking up more than 50% of the storage space in a particular game.

flohofwoe 4y ago
Very interesting list, thank you! From glancing over it, poor compression mostly seems to be an 'indie phenomenon' though (which is a bit surprising, because I would expect that Unity automatically takes care of asset compression, but maybe not).
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  It may have tools that let you, but an indie project has 500 other fires to put out, and filesize is rarely a bottleneck.