没有更多空间可供虚拟磁盘
If you have downloaded a modern game recently, you may have noticed that the disk space requirements have increased dramatically over the past few years. In addition to just the raw storage capacity, the speed of the device is also becoming a lot more important. Just a few years ago, a normal hard drive was sufficient for almost every game. SSDs were new and expensive and if at all, regular consumers only had a small SSD for the operating system. And while SSDs have gotten a lot cheaper since then, they are still more expensive than HDDs, which means you can have fewer games on your device than you could have a few years ago. Given the importance of storage for modern games, it’s not surprising that a major focus of the PS5 announcement stream was the SSD, which is supposed to be up to 100 times faster than the PS4 HDD.
如果您最近下载了现代游戏，那么您可能已经注意到，过去几年中磁盘空间需求已急剧增加。 除了原始存储容量外，设备的速度也变得越来越重要。 就在几年前，普通硬盘几乎可以满足所有游戏的需求。 SSD是新的且昂贵的，而且，如果有的话，普通消费者只能拥有用于操作系统的小型SSD。 尽管SSD从那时起变得便宜很多，但它们仍然比HDD昂贵，这意味着设备上的游戏数量可能比几年前少。 考虑到存储对于现代游戏的重要性，PS5公告流的主要焦点是SSD，这应该比PS4 HDD快100倍就不足为奇了。
为什么游戏需要这么大的存储空间？ (Why do games need so much storage space?)
Let’s have a look at why games need so much storage space. The biggest reason is texture data. 4K textures are becoming common, and a single uncompressed 4K texture with an alpha channel is 67MB. Granted, most textures are stored in a compressed format, but modern games have thousands of textures, so things add up fast. And most models are going to use more than a single texture.
让我们看看为什么游戏需要这么多的存储空间。 最大的原因是纹理数据。 4K纹理正在变得普遍，具有alpha通道的单个未压缩4K纹理为67MB。 当然，大多数纹理都以压缩格式存储，但是现代游戏具有数千种纹理，因此事情累加起来很快。 而且大多数模型将使用多个纹理。
Let’s take a simple rock for example. The model itself probably has less than 1K triangles, which even stored in a bad uncompressed format is only a few KB. But when the rock is close to the player and can take up a large percentage of the screen, it may require a 4K texture. And this is just the color texture, which describes how the rock looks, think of it as an image of a rock surface. But just that texture alone isn’t going to look great. In nature, most rock surfaces are very uneven, they have lots of tiny bumps, cracks, and imperfections. These features are not modeled in the 3D model. Instead, they are saved in a normal map, which is another 4K texture, that describes the imperfections on the surface so the lighting calculation can include them and make the rock look a lot more realistic.
让我们以一个简单的例子为例。 该模型本身可能具有少于1K的三角形，甚至以不良的未压缩格式存储的三角形也只有几KB。 但是，当岩石靠近播放器并且可以占据屏幕的很大一部分时，它可能需要4K纹理。 而这仅仅是颜色纹理，它描述了岩石的外观，并将其视为岩石表面的图像。 但是，仅凭其质地并不会看起来很棒。 在自然界中，大多数岩石表面非常不平坦，它们具有许多微小的颠簸，裂缝和瑕疵。 这些功能未在3D模型中建模。 取而代之的是，将它们保存在法线贴图中，该贴图是另一个4K纹理，用于描述表面上的瑕疵，因此照明计算可以包括这些瑕疵，并使岩石看起来更加逼真。
And it doesn’t stop there. The rock can have a specular map, that describes how reflective the different parts of the rock are, a precomputed lightmap, that stores some static lighting information, or a secondary dirt texture, that is mixed with the rock texture to add more detail. And there are many other types of textures the rock could theoretically use.
而且不止于此。 岩石可以具有镜面反射贴图，以描述岩石不同部分的反射性；预先计算的光照贴图可以存储一些静态光照信息，或者是辅助的污垢纹理，可以与岩石纹理混合以添加更多细节。 理论上，岩石还有许多其他类型的纹理可以使用。
As you can see, just a single rock can have multiple textures, and there are multiple different rocks in a game, as well as hundreds, even thousands of other objects that also require multiple large textures.
如您所见，只有一块岩石可以具有多个纹理，并且游戏中有多个不同的岩石，以及数百个甚至数千个也需要多个大纹理的其他对象。
The PC version of a game is also generally bigger than the console version, at least for the current console generation (PS4 and Xbox One). Because the console hardware is known and every player has the exact same hardware, developers can optimize the console version, so it has exactly the right amount of detail to run at 1080p 60 FPS. But PC players will have vastly different machines and to make sure the game looks as good as possible on the high-end systems, the PC download includes more details, even though the average player may not be able to use them. Maybe there could be different PC versions, so a laptop player could choose a smaller download, but I haven’t heard from any game that actually does it this way.
游戏的PC版本通常也比主机版本大，至少对于当前的主机版本(PS4和Xbox One)而言。 由于控制台硬件是已知的，并且每个播放器都具有完全相同的硬件，因此开发人员可以优化控制台版本，因此它具有适量的细节，可以在1080p 60 FPS上运行。 但是PC玩家会拥有截然不同的机器，并且要确保游戏在高端系统上看起来尽可能的好，即使普通玩家可能无法使用PC，PC下载中也会包含更多详细信息。 也许会有不同的PC版本，所以笔记本电脑播放器可以选择较小的下载量，但是我还没有听说过任何实际使用这种方式的游戏。
储存速度 (Storage speed)
Besides raw capacity, disk speed is becoming more and more important. A lot of games feature a completely open world, where the player can move through the entire map without any loading screens. The size of such a game is often above 100GB. However, even higher-end graphics cards only have 8GB of VRAM. VRAM is the fast memory on the GPU and it is shared between the vertex data, frame buffers, and textures. Now how does a 100GB game fit into only 8GB of VRAM? Obviously it doesn’t, which means that when the player moves, new data has to be streamed from the disk constantly. This is where the speed of the hard drive is important. When the drive is too slow and a lot of data is needed at once, some of the data may not be ready when it is needed, which causes objects to pop in very late, and in the worst case even game freezes.
除了原始容量外，磁盘速度也变得越来越重要。 许多游戏都具有完全开放的世界，玩家可以在其中浏览整个地图而无需任何加载屏幕。 这种游戏的大小通常超过100GB。 但是，即使是高端显卡也只有8GB的VRAM。 VRAM是GPU上的快速内存，在顶点数据，帧缓冲区和纹理之间共享。 现在，一个100GB的游戏如何仅容纳8GB的VRAM？ 显然不是，这意味着当播放器移动时，必须不断从磁盘上流式传输新数据。 这是硬盘速度很重要的地方。 当驱动器速度太慢并且一次需要大量数据时，某些数据可能在需要时就无法准备就绪，这会导致对象弹出时间很晚，甚至在最坏的情况下游戏也会冻结。
I’ll also mention Nanite, which is a system in the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo that can crunch down cinema-quality models to game quality in run time. It’s able to handle a large number of triangles, which removes the need for normal maps or LOD models (LOD = Level Of Detail, the further away from the camera a model is, the less detailed it is). The tech demo is running on the PlayStation 5 with its fast SSD and it is safe to assume that Nanite wouldn’t work with an old and slow HDD.
我还要提到Nanite，这是Unreal Engine 5技术演示中的系统，可以在运行时将电影质量的模型压缩为游戏质量。 它能够处理大量的三角形，从而消除了对法线贴图或LOD模型的需要(LOD =细节水平，模型离相机越远，其细节越少)。 该技术演示在具有快速SSD的PlayStation 5上运行，可以肯定地认为Nanite无法与旧的慢速硬盘一起使用。
微软飞行模拟器 (Microsoft Flight Simulator)
A recent example of a game that I really wanted to try, but couldn’t due to storage space limitations, is Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s an extremely demanding game for the whole system, but my PC should be able to run it on lower settings. However, it requires 150 GB of disk space plus some additional cache for streamed content. I only have a small SSD for my OS at the moment so it doesn’t fit on there. Maybe I could run it from an HDD, but I’m not sure how well that would work. Therefore, the next upgrade to my PC is going to be a decently sized SSD, so I can check out how good my local area looks in Flight Simulator.
我确实想尝试但由于存储空间限制而无法尝试的最新游戏示例是Microsoft Flight Simulator 。 对于整个系统来说，这是一个极其苛刻的游戏，但是我的PC应该能够在较低的设置下运行它。 但是，它需要150 GB的磁盘空间以及一些额外的高速缓存来存储流内容。 目前，我的操作系统只有一个小型SSD，因此它不适合放在那儿。 也许我可以从HDD上运行它，但是我不确定这样做的效果如何。 因此，对PC的下一次升级将是尺寸合适的SSD，因此我可以检查一下Flight Simulator中本地区域的状况。
Another game that I wouldn’t mind trying is Call of Duty: Warzone, but it needs a staggering 175GB of disk space. Warzone is free-to-play and Flight Simulator costs $1 to try in the Xbox Game Pass. For these games, the limiting factor isn’t the price, but rather the amount of free disk space you have available.
我不介意尝试的另一款游戏是《使命召唤：战地》 ，但它需要惊人的175GB磁盘空间。 Warzone是免费游戏，Flight Simulator的价格为1美元，可在Xbox Game Pass中试用。 对于这些游戏，限制因素不是价格，而是可用磁盘空间的多少。
While a big HDD was sufficient for every game just a few years ago, these days, an SSD is required for many games. High-resolution textures are becoming the standard and when systems like Unreal’s Nanite are taking over, games may be using cinema-quality models soon. High-quality models, but especially textures add up very quickly and are the main reason for the huge storage demands. Besides raw storage space, these large assets also require fast disk speeds, so they can be streamed and processed on the fly. In the past, we only looked at the CPU, GPU, and RAM to judge a gaming system, but now the SSD is just as important as the rest of the system, maybe even more so.
尽管仅几年前，一个大型硬盘足以满足每个游戏的需求，但如今，许多游戏都需要SSD。 高分辨率纹理正成为标准，当诸如Unreal的Nanite之类的系统接管时，游戏可能很快就会使用电影品质的模型。 高质量的模型(尤其是纹理)会非常Swift地累积在一起，这是巨大的存储需求的主要原因。 除了原始存储空间外，这些大型资产还需要快速的磁盘速度，因此可以即时进行流传输和处理。 过去，我们仅通过CPU，GPU和RAM来判断游戏系统，但是现在SSD与系统的其余部分一样重要，甚至可能更重要。
没有更多空间可供虚拟磁盘
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