188
HELLDIVERS 2 Tech Blog #2 - Opt-in install size reduction beta (from 154Gb to 23Gb)
(store.steampowered.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
188 points (100.0% liked)
Games
22163 readers
644 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
The much faster speeds of NVMe drives is often dictated by the smart use of caching. Once the cache runs out, the benefit is gone.
In games specifically, NVMe drives were repeatedly shown on par or a little bit faster than SATA SSDs.
There are workloads where NVMe drives boost performance dramatically. Gaming, however, isn't one of them.
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.
I've looked, what you say is mostly accurate but getting a bit dated - the NVME performance gap with SATA SSDs keeps widening especially with DirectStorage games (eg Spider Man 2 - triple the load speed vs SATA).
This gap will continue to widen as devs focus performance improvements on the tech available to them, and as the price difference between SATA SSDs and NVME is diminishing rapidly (only a 5% difference in common mid tier models now) there is very little reason to recommend SATA over NVMe for cost reasons - which was kinda the focus of this thread. I'd not advise anyone today to buy a SATA SSD over NVMe for gaming unless the cost saving was large.
First article I could find from a website I recognised (there are so many SEO-stuffing AI-generated trash sites today to wade through its truly frustrating) - https://www.techspot.com/article/3023-ssd-gaming-comparison-load-times/
The performance improvements outside of load times, eg during gaming are significant but harder to benchmark, because pop-in of assets during gameplay is not something we can currently easily measure, it's something you need to compare side by side videos of and there are many that show significant stuttering and pop-in for DirectStorage games like Ratchet and Clank. Another analysis with some videos double, triple or longer wait times in-games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8wXT8F3W4
Yeah, PS5 games are made with the assumption that they'll have access to a 5GB/s drive. It makes sense that they might actually benefit from that. I saw a test of Ratchet and Clank running on a HDD and the main difference was the portals that mask the load times were comically long.
And it's true the difference in price isn't that great any more. Personally I've got an older SATA in my PC and a NVME. I try to install to the faster drive where I can, but since my PC actually has a worse CPU than my Legion Go S, I'm not likely to see a lot of benefit from it. I suppose you've got a better chance of picking up a used SATA drive on the cheap if you really need to save money.