Comment by baobun
11 hours ago
It goes all the way back to tapes, was still important for CDs, and still thought relevant for HDDs.
Basically you can get much better read performance if you can read everything sequentially and you want to avoid random access at all costs. So you can basically "hydrate" the loading patterns for each state, storing the bytes in order as they're loaded from the game. The only point it makes things slower is once, on download/install.
Of course the whole excercise is pointless if the game is installed to an HDD only because of its bigger size and would otherwise be on an nvme ssd... And with still affordable 2TB nvme drives it doesn't make as much sense anymore.
So this basically leads to duplicating data for each state it's needed in? If that's the case I wonder why this isn't solvable by compressing the update download data (potentially with the knowledge of the data already installed, in case the update really only reshuffles it around)
It's also a valid consideration in the context of streaming games -- making sure that all resources for the first scene/chapter are downloaded first allows the player to begin playing while the rest of the resources are still downloading.
True!