Gran Turismo 7 could be the PS5 game that forces your SSD expansion
The next Gran Turismo game is a big one
Gran Turismo 7’s file size has been revealed, confirming that the upcoming racing game will eat your console’s storage space much like the cars it features would eat your wallet.
According to the game’s PlayStation Direct listing page, a minimum of 110GB of space is required to play the game on PS5 and PS4.
That figure is slightly higher than the 89GB that Twitter account PlayStation Game Size, which regularly reveals the size of upcoming games before they're announced, had posted.
Its tweet also revealed Gran Turismo would receive a day-one update, which may account for the difference in storage size, and would be available to pre-load on consoles from February 25.
Although it’s not uncommon for triple-A games to require huge amounts of storage space, with the upcoming Horizon Forbidden West clocking in at over 85GB and Call of Duty: Vanguard tipping the 90GB mark, Gran Turismo 7 is big.
The PS5’s factory SSD only contains 825GB, and only around 667GB of that is usable for storing games – which means Gran Turismo 7 will be eating up around a sixth of your console’s space.
Analysis: SSD compression wouldn’t go amiss
It’s somewhat surprising that the PS5 version of Gran Turismo 7 doesn’t appear to take advantage of Sony’s SSD compression tech. Not only does the console’s SSD load games faster than the hard drives of past console generations, but the boffins at Sony HQ have developed a system to reduce the required file size of the console’s games.
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Using the compression tech, which has been dubbed Kraken, PS5 games can require significantly less storage space than their PS4 equivalents. Subnautica, for example, will take up 14GB of space on PS4, but only 3.5GB on the PS5. Similarly, it provides an advantage over the Xbox Series X, with games like Control: Unlimited Edition taking up 42.5GB on Microsoft’s console, but requiring only 26GB on Sony’s.
With triple-A games becoming increasingly greedy in their demands on players’ SSDs and hard drives, the continued implementation of Sony’s compression tech would be welcome. Smaller files mean you can store plenty of games on your console at once, and don’t have to factor SSD space into your purchasing decisions, or rotate through your collection of single-player titles while humongous live-service games eat up the majority of your space.
The fact that Gran Turismo 7 doesn’t appear to take advantage of that compression tech will be disappointing to those particularly concerned about their SSD. Although its large size should come as no surprise – the last mainline Gran Turismo game, Gran Turismo Sport, takes up close to 100GB with all of its patches and updates.
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Callum is TechRadar Gaming’s News Writer. You’ll find him whipping up stories about all the latest happenings in the gaming world, as well as penning the odd feature and review. Before coming to TechRadar, he wrote freelance for various sites, including Clash, The Telegraph, and Gamesindustry.biz, and worked as a Staff Writer at Wargamer. Strategy games and RPGs are his bread and butter, but he’ll eat anything that spins a captivating narrative. He also loves tabletop games, and will happily chew your ear off about TTRPGs and board games.