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The next wave of major video games will be SSD storage hogs

The next wave of major video games will be SSD storage hogs

The next wave of major video games will be SSD storage hogs

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Storage space will never stop being a nuisance for modern gaming, at least until the streamer grabs us all with its slender cumulus claws. Games easily exceed 100GB, if not 200GB for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare(Opens in a new tab), and it looks like those storage needs will swell with the coming wave of video games. When they do, you better be prepared.

The rapid increase in the cost of 3A storage today may mean that storage space, not strictly storage speed, is the real concern for the “next generation”. Sure, all this talk of SSDs replacing next-gen consoles and engines with their super-fast NAND is enough to send shivers down any HDD-powered PC, but it’s the cost per gigabyte for every major game that’s going to let you play Knees in prayer to the cloud, a sweet respite from this somewhat conscious hell.

The only downside I see is the exponential increase in the install size of games, even though some games are now approaching 100GB or more in install size.

Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios

That’s not to say storage space hasn’t always been a precious commodity, but at least there’s no clear need for it quickly storage space. Sure, you’ll be stuck in the loading screen for a while, but your humble HDD can be managed just fine as a Steam library in a pinch. If the responsibility for texture streaming falls to SSDs using next-generation engines, such as the one touted by Unreal Engine 5, then there’s even more reason to choose faster solid-state capacity than spinning platters.

Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios, warned me in a chat about Unreal Engine 5(opens in a new tab) that he expects the only downside from today’s advancements, which is “multiplied game installs” .

You don’t have to look too far to see the start of this trend: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Microsoft Flight Simulator.ok these are maximum As examples I can think of, not all games are inherently this massive, but as the constraints of physical media are lifted and high-res textures flood in, the scalability of game installations is bound to happen.

But if the game looks good, we’ll take it, right? At least NAND prices have stabilized at a favorable low. Solid-state drive prices have been dropping significantly since 2018, which means you can get half-price SATA SSDs for as little as $0.10/GB and NVMe drives for a little more.

(Image credit: Vital)

However, I still don’t find myself rushing to buy 4TB in Samsung’s SATA 870 QVO (Opens in a new tab) drive for $500 (which is far from the fastest SSD).

As always, I move my data around, delete games early, and keep combing through my app list to find any laggards or what have you trying to get into pro audio mixes in the past to make room for another update space or installation.

But at least PCs offer the option to expand storage, with a high degree of flexibility and choice – hitting capacity limits is a bigger concern for consoles. The Xbox Series X comes with 1TB of storage and the PlayStation 5 825GB. Both will reportedly have an expansion slot for more bytes.

The Xbox Series X appears to be limited to 2TB, internal, and a single Seagate-made memory card at launch, while the PlayStation 5 will likely open up a wider range of NVMe SSDs, thus offering more capacity with a small investment. Still, one of my deep-rooted concerns is that a handful of next-gen video games will run out of storage capacity right away.

Now I have to admit, those who like to play games on PCs are not lucky, because the developers think about storage capacity as much as they do on consoles. The overall file size of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is much smaller on console than on PC, where the final file size recently reached over 200GB.

So I wouldn’t worry about the consoles, they’ll handle it just fine. Those of us also stick with our PCsโ€”albeit with a slight nervousness when game installations make demands on our catalog.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a requirement for a smaller game install. I want better, bigger, better video games, and I know I have to pay for it. The market will eventually adapt and turn to consumer demand, and storage that is both spacious and fast will eventually hit rock bottom prices. At the same time, our system is well suited for modern gaming, which worries me a bit.

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Wilbert Wood
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