jdreyer wrote on Mar 12, 2014, 17:49:
Ah, "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." So you're saying, b/c they've got the extra bandwidth, they're going to use it.

Yeah, pretty much. Memory for PCs hit some super cheap points in the last few years, and as I also said in the Titanfall thread even my Sandybridge does well in gaming versus the newest Haswells. Basically, there was ample opportunity for people to get a quad-core and 8+ GB of RAM.

As soon as the next generation ("now-current") came out it was pretty much inevitable that they would use all of that CPU power and memory if it was available since the PC market is tiny for these developers. That's the Parkinson's law part - anybody gaming on a PC can afford to play a game that makes use of the CPU and memory, so there was little reason for console developers to optimize.

In Titanfall's case, the massive amount of space used for audio was to help optimize the game towards dual-cores. That optimization is because the developers in that case are PC-friendly. It is the exception rather than the rule. I think most people would sacrifice bandwidth and space to get a game to run on their older system, but someone like myself who can afford SSDs for online gaming would rather have the option of a smaller install for heftier requirements.

This comment was edited on Mar 12, 2014, 18:06.