Samuel_1 wrote:jiggles wrote:Samuel_1 wrote:jiggles wrote:Samuel_1 wrote:jiggles wrote:Samuel_1 wrote:jawa_ wrote:Samuel_1 wrote:Kraken compression actually not being a bullshit marketing ploy is perhaps the most surprising thing.
Good call, Samuel - I'd forgotten about that tech and it does seem to be working really well in a lot of cases.
Yeah, it does mean the PS5 does not need as much SSD/HDD space as the PS4, PC and other consoles, which is quite nice. Actually, is that the case for PC, I'm not sure?
The patch last night I downloaded was like 49GB which I assume was the whole game again
on PC?
Yeah, I can check the size of the install when I’m back on it.
so how do you know what compression your pc uses?
Well any game can use whatever it wants. It definitely uses one of the Oodle libraries, because there’s a logo for it as you start up, but whether that’s Kraken, Leviathan, Mermaid or Selkie, I dunno. The thing with PS5 is that all games use Oodle Kraken automatically because they’ve baked it into the SSDs IO controller chip, giving it the compression and decompression for free at a ridiculous speed. Even if PC gets it down to the same size using the same compression library, it’s ultimately going to be a little more impactful to unpack on all but the highest spec machines because it has to use some resources do that work itself.
EDIT: The install folder is 63.9GB
Ah, OK thanks. So any console could (within reason) use kraken, but at a cost, that right?
Exactly, yeah. The actual CPU cost of it is supposed to be minimal, but the developer would have to license and implement the library themselves on any other platform.
There’s a decent explanation of it here, if you can forgive the clickbait title:
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/3230 ... esnt-touch RAD claims that Kraken is a “reinvention of dictionary compression for the modern world” and details various benefits over Zlib in a several thousand word blog post that dives into multiple low-level aspects of the compression algorithm’s design. One point that RAD makes is that while Microsoft uses a different method for compressing textures on the Xbox Series S|X, BCPack, Oodle Texture can run on the system. The difference between the two platforms is that Sony paid for a platform-wide license for Oodle Texture and built a hardware Kraken implementation directly into the platform to accelerate an algorithm that can run in software on the PC.
It’s possible that Microsoft consoles will receive similar, storage-crunching updates in the future, and not every game is going to support Oodle’s compression methods. But for titles that do, the savings are clearly substantial. Might make the PlayStation 5’s limited capacity feel a bit roomier until Sony starts clearing third-party SSDs to be added as storage options.
I would *love* to know how much that license earned RAD/Epic.
