Sony’s compression tools for the PS5 are finally paying off and gamers can hopefully look forward to smaller game files in the future. The Dying Light 2 file size shows a substantial difference across consoles. The game, which is set to release on 4 February 2022 is one of the first games to make serious use of the PS5 compression system and in comparison to Xbox, the game file is three times smaller on the platform.
According to the PlayStation 5 Database tracker, the Dying Light 2 file size on PS5 is roughly 20GB. PlayStationGameSize also reports that the game is 21GB on PS5. However, on the Xbox Store, Dying Light 2 is listed at a whopping 72GB in total. That is huge compared to the PS5.
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So how does this happen? Well, the Sony PS5 makes use of a special compression tool called Kraken in order to shrink game files. This allows developers to make their games as intended and still use high-quality assets and textures without worrying about game files getting too big.
Developers can then compress these files using Sony’s Kraken tool which then tells the PS5 IO how to handle the decompression while the game runs. This means the game files are compressed and decompressed on the fly without the need for bloated storage.
In a recent interview with Wired, PS5 system architect Mark Cerny shared how this works and gave some explanation on Kraken and the integrated IO.
“The biggest feature of the integrated IO, at least from a developer standpoint, is invisible compression. Developers have to spend a lot of time and effort, loading data in, off of media, whether that’s a hard drive or an SSD. With the integrated IO, we take care of all of that. The developers hand off their data to our publishing tools. And then the game runtime just asks for the data, and we handle the decompression for them.”
It is unclear yet whether or not the Dying Light 2 file size on the PS5 will increase before launch. 20GB is tiny for the game and would be great. However, a day one update might change this.
