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HELLDIVERS 2 Tech Blog #2 - Opt-in install size reduction beta (from 154Gb to 23Gb)
(store.steampowered.com)
- loads more slowly on HDD
- now small enough for your SSD
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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The problem I see with it is that we've gone the full circle.
First games loaded slow on HDDs, but SSDs solved it.
Then, seeing how SSDs are faster, game developers decided they could fit more read/write operations.
Now games load slow on SSDs.
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Anyone find anything nefarious in the EULA after this update?
Great for steam deck users
Now replace a badly modified version of FSR 1 with support for FSR 3.x, 4.x and DLSS, as we are in 2025 please.
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Whenever they first said they were using data duplication, I said that modern hardware doesn't benefit from that anymore. It used to work like that on old hardware and consoles, but not anymore. Glad they finally learned.
If you're still using HDD for games in 2025 then what the fuck are you even playing at?
Even the consoles abandoned that.
filthy SSD gamer! so pathetic. real gamers play from ramdisks! what wooden pc are you even playing with less than 200 GB RAM?
Bro have you seen the prices on large SSDs?
Nobody is buying a 256gb drive for games anymore. That's like 1 to 1.5 games nowadays. Instead 2-4TB drive is the most common purchase for a 'games drive'. AI has roughly doubled the cost in two years for such drives - even higher for premium quality drives.
I'm not gonna poor-shame people who still play on spinning disk HDDs. AI hype continues to make gaming more expensive by the day.
A 2TB Drive is just over £100, even with the crazy memory prices lately. I've got one in my PS5 ffs. A bog standard SATA drive will do practically the same load times as NVME. It's all about the access time.
Devs should abandon HDD completely. Look how much space they saved here by not wasting it on duplicated resources.
What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s.
NVME drives do at least ten times that for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.
Edit - commenters have fairly pointed out that the difference in actual load times is not as huge as I thought, it might be triple as fast but it's not a huge deal as it's still sub-second. However, it is noticeable and increasing as games develop more for the new tech. Most PC builders do not recommend a SATA SSD over a NVME because the price difference is now minimal and they will be more future-proof as more DirectStorage and similar tech is utilized by modern games.
The much faster speeds of NVMe drives is often dictated by the smart use of caching. Once the cache runs out, the benefit is gone.
In games specifically, NVMe drives were repeatedly shown on par or a little bit faster than SATA SSDs.
There are workloads where NVMe drives boost performance dramatically. Gaming, however, isn't one of them.
I know they are. For something like database work, they're amazing. Now go an look at some game load time benchmarks.
Because I can guarantee you they're nowhere near that much faster for 99% of games. Once you get off spinning rust, CPU speed remains the number one factor in load times. Because nearly everything is compressed and has to be unpacked and processed into the right formats by the system before it can be used.
Picking whatever comes up at the top from googling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8
Just scanning though that video I can see the biggest difference is like a second.
DirectStorage was supposed to be able to make game loading faster on faster SSDs, but as far as I can see that hasn't really happened. The PS5 does actually get noticeably slower if you cobble a slower drive into it, although not really enough to break anything. The decompression units in that hardware are actually pretty good, and can keep up with the faster SSDs.
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