Ahhh yes and no. Compressen is a thing, mostly for console games. Why? What do you think uncompressing takes most? Right! Ram & CPU. Somewhere we have to store all the uncompressed files. RAM! Right.
Why more on consoles and not on pc? Where do you think it is easier to get to the uncompressed files in ram?
This seems right. I/O on consoles is super limited. The worse your I/O limits, the more time data compression will save. It also depends on compressibility of your data, but most data you need to load (pictures, character models, sounds) is fairly compressible. Also you will find putting multiple files into an archive file saves loading time because it avoids seeking. You will find games with at least one version that comes on optical media, which incurs a huge seek penalty, use this strategy. Often you will find the same file within multiple different archive files because each archive file is targeted at a given loading situation.
Even when RAM is limited, it makes sense to use data compression for the file image of your game. Once decompressed, the compressed copy within RAM can be deleted. PSP RAM is super limited. But I/O from the UMD is even more limited than RAM is, so you see data compression used in most games to speed up loading.
Decompressing data is not very hard on the CPU, and is very fast. You need around 10 instructions (40 cycles) on PSP to decompress 1 byte of data, and the PSP processor runs at 200 million cycles per second. Decompressing 1MB of data you would need 40 million cycles (0.2 seconds). On modern processors, you need less instructions because there are special instructions that can handle many bytes at once. Also, modern processors need about the same number of cycles per one instruction, but are clocked much higher. To make up for that, they have bigger RAMs meaning more data needs to be decompressed (usually). It ends up being about the same.
32GB carts for the Switch. But that's an "up to" figure. I'm pretty sure there are smaller carts available if you don't need all 32GB, and the reason to use a smaller one is that empty carts of smaller size cost less.
Not sure how many polys are in character models, but assume 30,000. For each poly there 3 vertices and three numbers for each vertex. There are other numbers associated with each poly of a model too, but I don't know what they all are. If you assume 20 numbers per poly, you end up with 600,000 numbers for one model, which usually could be stored in that many bytes. Then you need the texture image, normal map image, and specular map image which specify how the polys should be colored. Compare that to video, which is 30 or 60 images per second, but compression algorithms to reduce the size a lot. I don't do 3D modeling, someone who knows more care to correct me on this? 3D model data ends up being a lot smaller, even if you have many characters and objects in the scene.
