It's bait for the non-discerning customer who is more likely to empty their wallet for microtransactions because they have less experience with games so don't know what is normal :)
Everything is getting slower and slower, and nobody cares.
When I played the Atari 2600, I had to wait for the TV to warm up, but otherwise there were no games with anything approaching load times (with 128 bytes of RAM in the console, who would know). The NES didn't have much in the way of load times either, but you did have to fiddle with the cartridge slot. SNES and Genesis didn't usually load (Air Buster being a noticeable exception). CD based systems sure did like to load, but that's somewhat understandable. In the mean time, more and longer boot screens. The Switch uses a cartridge (or system flash/SD cards), but it likes to load forever too.
PC Gaming has had loading for longer, but it's been getting longer and longer.
Some arcade games have lengthy loading sequences, but only when you turn them on while they read their entire storage into RAM so they can be fast for the rest of the time they're on (which in arcades is usually all day).
It really depends. The latest crop of games I’ve played (Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk) loads way faster than games from a few years back (aforementioned GTA-V, Shadow Warrior 2…).
This is also on the same machine, so it’s not the hardware that makes it faster.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi...
I think, but I’m not entirely sure, that Linux can do the peer to peer DMA trick. One nasty bit on any OS is that, if a portion of the data being read is cached, then some bookkeeping is needed to maintain coherence, and this adds overhead to IO. I wouldn’t be surprised if consoles had a specific hack to avoid this overhead for read-only game asset volumes.
Also you're probably going to want to do multithreaded decompression anyway, and it'll be more efficient if you have the threads completing the reads do the decompression themselves. So in any case you probably want multiple threads handling the completion events.
With a sufficiently low overhead async API (ie. io_uring) you can saturate a very fast SSD with a single thread, but I'm not sure it would actually make sense for a game engine to do this when it could just as easily have multiple threads independently performing IO with most of it requiring no synchronization between cores/threads.
"Hey we have this great new tech that makes things even faaster!!"
2 years later
"GTA 6 found to have double online load times, denies claims that game performs worse than GTA 5, tells people to upgrade their systems"
4 years later:
"Tech blogger reverses code, realizes someone managed to loop access between hard drive and gpu despite extremely common modern tech, gets 10x boost after spending a day fixing junk product"
Better technology just hasn't met its match from dumber management and more bureaucratic dev shops...
>Everything is getting slower and slower, and nobody cares.
Yes, modern games are so inefficient and laggy nowadays. Once your game world reaches a certain size it becomes unplayable and that's just in single player. Once you add 10 players you start to hit performance limits very quickly.
I can’t recall the name, but I had the hack and slash adventure game variant. The connector on the custom cartridge was fiddly and required a stout rubber band to reliably work.
GTA has achieved tremendous success both as an entertaining game and as a business. It's enjoyed by millions of people and generates billions in revenue. As per this article, it has startup problems (which don't seem to actually really hurt the overall product but I agree sound annoying) but the bigger picture is: it's a huge success.
So - Rockstar has nailed it. What exactly is your platform for analyzing/criticizing their processes or even having a shot of understanding what they are? What have you build that anyone uses? (not saying you haven't, but.. have you been involved with anything remotely close to that scale?)
And if not, whence he high horse?
I and most other customers would argue that 6 minute loading times are atrocious, and if there is an easy fix like this, it makes me lose a lot of respect for the developer who doesn’t fix it. It maybe would even make me avoid them in the future.
A reputation is built over years, but can be lost pretty much instantly. Companies have to continue serving their customers to enjoy ongoing success.
The fact that GTAO is so popular should make most HNers rethink what they know about the commercial necessity of optimization vs building a compelling product.
This really only goes to show how much you can get away with if you have an outstandingly popular product that has no direct competition. Chances are that your product is not that compelling, if it performs poorly, that will hurt adoption. It will never become outstandingly popular in the first place.
They're basically saying that GTAV's massive commercial success should grant it immunity to criticism.
Maybe it got better in recent releases, I kind of stopped following after GTA4.
If one really examined the accounting for GTAO, I would bet that most of the billions of dollars that were earned in micro transactions went to marketing, product research, and to middle management in the form of bonuses.