Skyrim - 6Gb HDD Space Explained

[Dhruin]

Bethsoft has reponded to all the commentary about the 6Gb hard drive space from yesterday's Skyrim system requirements announcement. From the Bethblog:

We’ve seen plenty of comments relating to the game only requiring six gigs of HDD space. Don’t worry… there’s still a ton of game in there. The total HDD space relates more to the compression opitmizations we’re able to do with The Creation Engine. Not only are do we think you’ll be impressed with how the game looks, but also how much faster it runs..

...and the forums:

Noticed several comments about the game size. New engine and we’re much better at compression on all things from art to voice to world data. It’s huge yet more optimized than we’ve had before.

More information.

 

[basharran]

Most people are worried to be stuck with console sized textures due to the multi platform development. For me personally I will see what it will be in the real product, no need to get fussy up front as far as I'm concerned.

 

[turian]

there will be mods!

 

[Motoki]

Oh sure, it's all the compression and not the fact that the PC version might be getting low res console textures. Yep, really buying that one.

That said, because of the ability to mod and a strong modding community, it's not much of a concern unless you absolutely must play the game on day 1.

 

[Kefka]

Oh sure, it's all the compression and not the fact that the PC version might be getting low res console textures. Yep, really buying that one.

That said, because of the ability to mod and a strong modding community, it's not much of a concern unless you absolutely must play the game on day 1.

I always wait for Beth's games, I will wait at least 6 weeks for SR. I waited 5 months to play New Vegas, but I don't think I can wait that long for SR. Plus SR will have a much better mod community anyway.

 

[Motoki]

I always wait for Beth's games, I will wait at least 6 weeks for SR. I waited 5 months to play New Vegas, but I don't think I can wait that long for SR. Plus SR will have a much better mod community anyway.

Oh I'm sure it won't take very long to get at least an early version of a decent texture mod. Those usually come quickly. A good quest mod will take time, but the facelift stuff will be fairly soon.

 

[Kefka]

Oh I'm sure it won't take very long to get at least an early version of a decent texture mod. Those usually come quickly. A good quest mod will take time, but the facelift stuff will be fairly soon.

I don't care about the texture mod much, never installed one for Oblivion. When it comes to graphics draw distance is the thing I care most about improving, altering the ini to increasing beyond max is awesome. I love seeing npc's/monsters from very far away, it makes the world feel so alive.

The mod I most want is a giant options menu mod like FWE and Project Nevada.I wish every game had a giant options menu, these 2 mods are by far the best I have ever downloaded. But barring that I am looking for the following:

Slower xp mod, 2x global dmg, duel wield blocking and HUD overhaul. I think all of those but duel wield blocking will be out for sure very soon after release, depending on the creation kit the blocking mod could take longer.

 

[screeg]

Uh, I thought from the headline that people were going to be worried because 6GB was a lot of space. Behind the times I guess. My first PC, a Pentium 100 had 1GB of storage total.

 

[KapitanUnterhosen]

Bioware said the exact same thing about DA2.

 

[CountChocula]

Uh, I thought from the headline that people were going to be worried because 6GB was a lot of space. Behind the times I guess. My first PC, a Pentium 100 had 1GB of storage total.

Tell me about it!

I learned how to edit feature films working on a PC with 4 GB HDD. You had to only edit once scene a time and keep deleting and digitizing new footage.

 

[CountChocula]

Bioware said the exact same thing about DA2.

Fortunately they released an official high res texture pack at launch.

As much as I enjoyed Qarl's Texture Pack 3, I very much hope Bethesda does this, because the fan-made texture packs seem to result in a major reduction of fps.

Bioware's official high res texture pack for DA2 looked fantastic IMO and the impact on framerate was negligible.

 

[Motoki]

I must be blind because I didn't think the DA2 hi-res pack made much difference.

On the other hand Qarls, which admittedly was demanding, did make a huge one. Some of the further optimizations and revisions to Qarls pack made by others did cut the rescources required significantly without reducing much image quality.

 

[CountChocula]

I must be blind because I didn't think the DA2 hi-res pack made much difference.

Really? Were you using a DX11 enabled graphics card? IIRC, some features of the texture pack only worked with DX11.

It seemed to be quite noticeable for me. The textures for rocks, architecture and terrain, as well as character clothing were pretty bad without the patch.

 

[Motoki]

Really? Were you using a DX11 enabled graphics card? IIRC, some features of the texture pack only worked with DX11.

It seemed to be quite noticeable for me. The textures for rocks, architecture and terrain, as well as character clothing were pretty bad without the patch.

Yep I have a DX11 card. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places or didn't notice. *shrug* Qarl's pack was radically different and I couldn't help but notice.

I also have an Nvidia card and it seems like DA2 was more optimized for ATI AMD since they were doing some promotion for it and it ran like ass on Nvidia on release until they patched it and Nvidia brought out newer drivers.

 

[Couchpotato]

Just maybe they learned there lesson from Oblivion when it launched. The majority of pc users could barely play.

I'm happy its not another 13-30 gig download like most new releases lately. Bandwidth's not free and caps are everywhere now.

 

[guenthar]

Since most games don't even use compression (besides on the disc) the game taking up only 6 GB on the HD doesn't mean much depending on the amount on compression. Also unlike most other games their games don't have many videos so there isn't much space taken up by that.

 

[bjon045]

Sounds good to me.

 

[CountChocula]

it seems like DA2 was more optimized for ATI AMD since they were doing some promotion for it and it ran like ass on Nvidia on release until they patched it and Nvidia brought out newer drivers.

I really despise this practice.

I have an AMD card and it seems that for every other AAA game, either AMD or NVIDIA makes payouts to devs to deliberately screw people over who are using the other brand of card.

I read that Crysis 2 used ridiculously high tessellated polygon counts for flat surfaces to no apparent purpose other than the fact that it was something that the AMD drivers couldn't handle.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404/2

 

[vurt]

Since most games don't even use compression (besides on the disc)

That's just not true. Name one game you have on your HDD where all textures, meshes, levels etc arent compressed?

 

[jhwisner]

I really despise this practice.

I have an AMD card and it seems that for every other AAA game, either AMD or NVIDIA makes payouts to devs to deliberately screw people over who are using the other brand of card.

I read that Crysis 2 used ridiculously high tessellated polygon counts for flat surfaces to no apparent purpose other than the fact that it was something that the AMD drivers couldn't handle.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404/2

Wow - poor use of tessellation (such as the concrete road divider being the most densely tessellated object in the game and dynamic water tessellation meshes extending throughout the maps even where there isn't water) certainly harm AMD users more. They also harm the performance of anybody enabling tessellation by needlessly creating additional demand on the GPU (AMD 32-38% drop, nVidia 17-21% drop in frame rates). I hope that crap is just lazy and sloppy work because it would be disgusting to think they'd intentionally damage the performance of their product just to make one GPU vendor seem better.