PS5 SSD's compression tech shrinks game installs by 50%

Thanks to Kraken's compression tech, Alan Wake Remastered is half as big on PS5 as it is on PS4.

Some cross-gen games are smaller on PS5 than they are on PS4--Avengers, Hitman 3, Control Ultimate Edition--and Remedy's new Alan Wake Remastered is no exception. The game's install size is roughly 28GB on PS5 versus 57GB on PS4, which is a reduction of nearly 50%. The PS5 version includes 4K textures and all the hardware-based optimizations intact.

The significant shrink is all thanks to the PS5's utilization of RAD Game Tools' powerful Oodle Kraken compression technology, which is also now owned by Epic Games--the same billion-dollar company who's publishing Alan Wake Remastered on PS5 and PC.

Epic Games has praised the PS5's SSD in the past, calling the console's storage architecture "truly special." The PlayStation's custom SSD utilizes a 12-channel memory controller (Marvell Titania 2) over PCIe 4.0 Gen4 x4 lanes to deliver compressed data throughput of up to 9GB/sec, complete with a hardware-based decompression block to significantly reduce CPU overhead.

The result is, as we're seeing now, smaller, more compact games that load much quicker than last-gen hardware. This is great news considering the PS5's built-in SSD only has 667GB of useable memory (and PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives still aren't cheap).

Alan Wake Remastered releases on October 5.