alt Hacker News> our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
They basically just made the numbers up. Wild.
Replies
It's like the story of a young couple cooking their first Christmas ham.
The wife cuts the end off of the ham before putting it in the oven. The husband, unwise in the ways of cooking, asks her why she does this.
"I don't know", says the wife, "I did it because my mom did it."
So they call the mom. It turns out that her mother did it, so she did too.
The three of them call the grandma and ask "Why did you cut the end off of the ham before cooking it?"
The grandma laughs and says "I cut it off because my pan was too small!"
On the flip side I don't remember who did it, but basically extracting textures on disk fixed all the performance issues UE5 has on some benchmarks(sorry for being vague, but I can't find the source material right now). But their assumption is in fact a sound one.
Non-made up numbers from Vermintide 2 (same engine): On PS4 when an optimized build took around 1.5 minutes to boot to main menu, the unoptimized version would take 12-15 minutes [1]. A different benchmark than SSD vs HDD, but shows that the optimization was certainly needed at the time. Though the PS4 was partially to blame as well, with it's meagre 5400 RPM spinny drive.
For their newer instalment, Fatshark went with a large rework of the engine's bundle system, and players on HDDs are complaining about long loading times expectedly. That game is still large at ~80GB, but not from duplication.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/hxkh0x/comment/...