• loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
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    8 months ago

    It depends on what the video talks about exactly. There are some games like Call of Duty that are over 80GB in size for no reason other than the devs do not bother optimising for size, either because they do not give a shit or because the deadlines that the publishers give them do not allow it. To get extremely political about it, hardware is as cheap as it is because of imperialism. The minerals mined in Africa under harrowing conditions is a big reason why. If it was mined by Americans (for example), then Americans would not be able to afford it which is a sad irony. It would be impossible a PS5 that costs 400 to 500 USB to have the 500 to 1000 GB SSD space which it has to host the game if the dirty work was not being done by the global south for dirt cheap.

    Software in general has become liberal about utilising hardware resources as hardware has become cheaper and more efficient. I am not sure how a computer engineer of 20 years ago would react if you told them that today’s web browsers consume 500 MB of RAM while idle. That’s not to say that software has not gotten better. Software has gotten faster and more efficient as well. But optimisation is not prioritised as it was back when hardware was more scarce. For example, the “hello world” binary of Rust is several megabytes in size. Rust is the programming language that Google recently said should be used instead of C++ now. But out of the box it is optimised really badly for disk space usage. You can cut down the binary size but as I said optimisation in that department is not prioritised because how cheap disk space is because of imperialism.