And as memory expands, people keep doing higher and higher resolution textures.' 'Content will be authored at a very high resolution no matter what game you're making, and then you res it down to what will fit into memory. 'One of the quickest ways to make your game look better is to up the texture resolution,' says Gibson. Environmental meshes and textures? 17.4GB. Jump to Killing Floor 2 (opens in new tab), which released last year, and sound now accounts for 1.1GB of the whole. ('People would complain if we did a 100 megabyte patch,' says Gibson.) Sound only accounted for 327MB of that release, and environmental meshes and textures weighed in at 1.4GB.

In the mid-2000s, Red Orchestra 1 released at 2.6GB, which players thought was awfully big at the time. A breakdown of Tripwire's games tells the story. Those objects-their meshes-are increasingly complex, too. So not only are you using a higher-resolution texture, because video card memory increased, and computer memory increased, but you also have three of them for every object.'Ī visualization of Killing Floor 2's elements by size, captured with Stardock's SpaceMonger (opens in new tab) application. Note the large. 'And then in the next generation, you have a diffuse texture, a normal map texture, and usually a specular-like a 'shininess' texture. 'In 2005 you had a texture, just a texture, which is what later people would call a diffuse texture, but it's just a texture,' says Tripwire Interactive president John Gibson. On top of that, textures are also growing in complexity.

'They only use local block compression, and thus yield at best an 8-to-1 compression.' And regarding Hanish's specific work on Stardock games, ' images have to use a GPU friendly memory layout,' he writes. Images can be heavily compressed-as with jpgs-but artifacting would be noticable. Like video, textures are increasing in resolution, except unlike video they aren't fond of being compressed. One element does check all the boxes for exponential growth: textures. So while high-quality audio and high-resolution video have helped bulk up games, they alone can't account for the leaps in size we've taken since 2000. '1500x compression factors are not unheard of,' says Stardock lead developer Nathan Hanish, pointing to the H.264 codec. Video, on the other hand, has broadly increased in resolution-from 640x480 cutscenes way back when all the way up to 4K-which has notably increased its footprint on game sizes. We expect voiced characters and high fidelity audio far more than we once did. The use of 5.1 surround sound audio over mono or stereo audio has been one reason games are getting bigger, but the simple inclusion of more audio has probably had a greater effect.

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