PC gamers who have had their eye on Titanfall are probably well-aware that if they didn’t buy the physical copy of the game, they’d have to download the installer which is a little over 20GB in size. That and combined with the fact that game takes up about 48GB after installation is a little astounding, especially since the Xbox version of the game is around 17GB.
So what gives? Why is the PC version of Titanfall so much bigger than that of the Xbox? Well it turns out that the size is due to uncompressed audio files which accounts for a huge chunk of the memory that it is taking up.
If you have ever recorded music or dabbled in music production, you know that audio files, especially the high-quality ones, tend to take up way more storage than your average MP3. The choice to go with uncompressed audio is also because Respawn were worried about gamers running on minimum specced computers, in which these machines would spend a good chunk of power decompressing the audio, thus leading to a poor experience.
This is according to the game’s lead engineer, Richard Baker, who was quoted as saying, “We have audio we either download or install from the disc, then we uncompress it. We probably could have had audio decompress off disc, but we were a little worried about min spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio.”
We guess in a perfect world, everyone would have computers running the recommended specs (if not higher) to play games, but unfortunately not everyone can afford a new computer, let alone a gaming rig which tends to cost a bit more.
Either way we guess PC gamers of Titanfall should take comfort in knowing that at least your computer’s processors are being dedicated to the game itself, not the audio, so if you can afford to spare 48GB, this shouldn’t really be an issue for you.
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