Titanfall is finally out on the Xbox One and PC, and it’s getting a lot of good buzz. Unfortunately, PC gamers are noticing that the size of the Origin installation is a whopping 48GB. Over on the Xbox One, the installation is only about 20GB. So, why the disparity in size — is it the high-res textures? A lack of optimization? No, it’s all thanks to roughly 35GB of uncompressed audio.
Respawn Entertainment’s Richard Baker sat down with Eurogamer, and explained why PC gamers are burdened with the massive 48GB installation. Fundamentally, the decision to stick with uncompressed audio on the PC comes down to sheer processing power. The game’s minimum CPU requirement is a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and that simply isn’t enough horsepower to run the game and decompress audio at the same time. Baker explains that even modest quad-core machines wouldn’t have a problem decompressing the audio on the fly, but clearly the company is focused on running on as many machines as possible.
While it’s nice to see major games like Titanfall support older hardware, it’s absolutely bonkers that people with higher-quality machines have to pay the price for that. For those of us installing our games on relatively small solid state drives for performance reasons, 48GB seems completely outrageous. Hopefully, the developers will see fit to patch in a compressed/uncompressed toggle in the installation wizard in the near future. That way, PC gamers could choose between raw performance and overall disk usage.
Reportedly, the Xbox One download size of Titanfall is 16.39GB while the PC version is a whopping 21GB. Once installed, the PC version expands to over twice its original size, but the Xbox One remains relatively small. A 21GB download is much easier to swallow than 48GB, but it’s still uncomfortably large for those of us with monthly bandwidth caps.
This is a perfect example of how games are growing too fast for our lackluster internet connections.
Akamai’s state of the internet report from Q3 2013 shows that the
average connection speed in the US is a mere 9.8Mbps down. Downloading a
21GB game over an average connection will take nearly five hours to
complete. The global average is only 3.6Mbps, so the less fortunate
among us will need upwards of 13 hours to download the PC version of Titanfall.
If it’s faster to drive to the local GameStop and buy a disc, why even bother with digital distribution in the first place? Games are growing too fast, so it seems we’re stuck with physical media for the foreseeable future.
If it’s faster to drive to the local GameStop and buy a disc, why even bother with digital distribution in the first place? Games are growing too fast, so it seems we’re stuck with physical media for the foreseeable future.
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