So for example, videogames are super heavy on disk space. And aparently most of that space is just the sounds, textures, models, etc. But the code takes very little space.
Why can something as complex as a physics system weight less than a bunch of images?
Code takes very little space, media takes more. But an image is just code that tells the computer how to draw something (I think)
So how come some code gets to be so small in size and some code doesn’t?
In: 53
Uncompressed audio, images, and video take up a surprising amount of space.
Let’s start with audio. The human ear hears roughly up to 20,000 Hz frequency. You want to play samples at least double that to recreate that frequency. Let’s say you have 44,100 samples a second, a common sampling frequency. CD quality gives you 16-bits or 2 bytes per sample. And there’s 2 channels of audio for stereo, one for each ear.
Now for each second of uncompressed stereo audio, this is 2 bytes x 44,100 samples x 2 channels = 176.4 kilobytes per second. A song 3 minutes long is roughly 31 megabytes! Now let’s add up all hours of spoken dialogue, sound effects, and music in a game and it gets large, fast.
Many games don’t compress audio to save the CPU from having to decompress it. This can lead to huge game install sizes.
Images get ridiculously large in uncompressed form too. Let’s say we use 4k resolution (3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400 pixels). Each pixel has 8-bits for each red, green, and blue values so 3 bytes each. Each uncompressed 4k image is at least 3 bytes x 8,294,400 pixels = ~25 megabytes.
Now let’s make a video of 30 images per second. Each second of video uncompressed is 25 megabytes x 30 images/secknd = 750 megabytes/second… This is why video compression is almost always done to avoid dealing with these massive uncompressed video sizes.
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