Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
Games want to be more photorealistic and the hardware to fake it is getting faster and cheaper.<p>I remember in 2008 when Intel demoed ray tracing[0] for Quake Wars. It ran on a quad-socket (4 CPUs x 2.7GHz) at around 25 FPS, and even Intel admitted that ray tracing is just &quot;brute forcing&quot; the complex optical physics of a scene.<p>Considering between then and now, we have much prettier looking games that do NOT require ray tracing for their visual effects (and can run on much fewer CPU cycles), thanks to much more &quot;clever&quot; techniques and algorithms (DoF, bloom, subsurface scattering, PBR, etc), and if it weren&#x27;t for the RTX graphics cards setting the precedent, there would probably be more research into making things prettier without having to &quot;brute force&quot; things.<p>Nowadays, you can drop a 100gb mesh into UE5 Nanite[1] and skip a lot of the work involved in making things pretty. You don&#x27;t need to generate or even understand displacement maps if you can just add more polygons to the model. You don&#x27;t need to billboard the mountain way in the distance if Unreal does it on the fly. Who cares if that means including a 250mb mesh in your assets, versus a 5mb HDRI.<p>So yes, producers have either become lazy or are simply unable to meet the demands of the hardware by coming up with better algorithms. That&#x27;s unlikely to change until either hardware stops advancing and either A) can&#x27;t run the latest games or B) games become too large that they&#x27;re impossible to download.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamedeveloper.com&#x2F;programming&#x2F;sponsored-feature-light-it-up-quake-wars-gets-ray-traced" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamedeveloper.com&#x2F;programming&#x2F;sponsored-feature-...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.unrealengine.com&#x2F;5.0&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.unrealengine.com&#x2F;5.0&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;nanite-virtualized-g...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mariobrothblog&#x2F;status&#x2F;1636040893764362241" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mariobrothblog&#x2F;status&#x2F;163604089376436224...</a>