The God of War franchise has kept fans captivated for years. Now, finally, the latest installment, God of War Ragnarok, has made its way to PC. AMD has prepared its GPUs with drivers supporting it, and Nvidia is also on the same page. This is great news for those waiting to play it on their desktop PC, but there is a price to pay, and I’m not talking about how much you’ll have to spend to purchase it.
The file size of God of War Ragnarok is almost tear-jerking, which is surprising and not so surprising at the same time, given how modern big AAA titles are. The biggest comparison I can draw is the download size and the following update patches of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. At one point, Call of Duty was taking over 200 GB of space on my PC, and that is when I decided that it had to go.
A question that many are asking is why God of War Ragnarok is taking almost twice as much space on PC as compared to PS5, which needs approximately 106GB of space. In this article, we’ll explore the answer to this question and some possible solutions, as well as tackling the issue of download time.
GOW Ragnarok on PC requires 190GB of free space, but why?
God of War Ragnarok, according to its system requirements, requires around 190GB of free space, which is kind of crazy. For comparison, the God of War 2018 game only needed 70GB of free space, which would suggest double the size. Well, Ragnarok itself is actually 100.1GB – with the total space required to download being 175.7GB on our end for unpacking reasons.
Why is there such a dramatic file size difference between GOW Ragnarok on PC, and its PS5 counterpart? While we don’t have a concrete answer, the reason could be improved in-game graphics, higher-quality textures, or uncompressed sound.
That said, if you’ve got an Nvidia RTX 4000 series GPU, you should be able to have a smooth gaming experience as Nvidia has released benchmarks for this title with and without DLSS, and the results are pretty impressive at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.
How to speed up God of War Ragnarok download and unpacking – make sure you use an SSD
Since we were looking forward to the game ourselves, we went ahead and preloaded it – all 175.7GB that was required on Steam. This equated to just over 100GB in terms of download. Unfortunately, you are at the mercy of your ISP’s download rates if you want to speed this up, but make sure nothing else is interrupting your network as much as possible. We’d also recommend using a wired connection and ensuring you don’t have any download restrictions in your Steam settings.
Following the download, there was more to unpack before we got to the finish (or rather, start) line. This seems to have caused some dismay online, and it certainly makes for an excruciating wait if you’re the kind of person who’s been waiting to play on PC ever since the PlayStation launch.
But don’t worry, you’re not alone. Reports on the Steam Community forums show plenty of people stuck in unpacking limbo, it’s a normal process and one that can take some time for large file sizes like this. Just like the game’s system requirements would suggest, we 100% recommend using an SSD for God of War Ragnarok, an HDD probably isn’t going to cut it and will slow you down – a lot.
We put the game on a SATA drive and it took over an hour to fully unpack, close to 1.5 hours in the end. So, we’d suggest using an NVMe drive if you have the chance to do so as this will allow for the fastest and smoothest download & unpacking process possible; having a good CPU will help pick up the pace too.
What can you do to make space?
After waiting so long for God of War Ragnarok to release on PC, I don’t think low storage space would stop anyone. PC gamers are a different breed and have more flexibility with options and upgrades than those on consoles.
That said, whether you pre-ordered it or grabbed it as it is now live, the better option would’ve been to make space for it beforehand so you can simply download it without worrying about space. However, it isn’t a big deal, so here are a couple of steps and options to make space.
Uninstall unplayed games
The first and most obvious method to free up space for God of War Ragnarok is to uninstall games that you haven’t played in a while. Yes, I understand that it can be difficult to do that, as you just might be in the mood to play that one specific game someday, but that day hasn’t come for months, and there is a high likelihood that it won’t come around for months after as you’ll be invested in God of War Ragnarok, so it’s better to remove it.
I can also relate to this as I still have Counter-Strike: Source on my PC, and I refuse to get rid of it because I just might want to play it someday and don’t want to wait for it to download again. However, doing so will free up plenty of space, which is necessary if you want to fight the entire cast of Norse Gods.
Reorganize your storage
We strongly recommend using an SSD for Ragnarok, but if you do only have an HDD, you can defrag it to free up space; we strongly advise against defragging an SSD. Defragmentation rearranges the data on your storage device, helping improve performance and eliminating issues like freezing and slow speeds.
You can also reorganize your data by uploading it to Google or One Drive and deleting their copies from your desktop, freeing up space. The more you upload, the more space you’ll have, and the basic limit for the cloud storage options is 15GB each, but you can purchase more space by subscribing to a monthly or annual payment plan.
Increase your storage
If the two options above don’t pan out for you, the only option left is to purchase an SSD and connect it to your system. We recommend opting for the best NVMe SSD or even portable SSDs.
The reason I recommended portable SSDs is that their read and write speeds are impressive, and if your motherboard doesn’t have the space to add an internal SSD, you can connect an external SSD, download the game on it, and play from there.
The only aspect you’ll need to look at is the read and write speeds, as they must be fast enough to avoid stuttering and lag issues. Also, remember to connect it to your PC via the fastest port available, such as a USB 3.2 port.
That said, if your motherboard has an extra slot or connector, you can mount an HDD or SDD to increase your storage. The HDD will be slower than the SSD, but you can get a huge amount of storage, like 4 TB, comparatively cheap.
