When you use git repo like github, why would you want to use git-lfs? What benefits does it brings to the user? Correct me if I’m wrong, git-lfs only benefits the hosting server, not the user. In the end, as a user, it doesn’t matter whether i use git-lfs or not for versioning large file; right?
It does. Without LFS, git stores all revisions of files for every user. Now, imagine that there are 20 revisions of 4k RGBA texture in the repository. If stored uncompressed, all these revisions would take almost 1,5GB of disk space of every person working with the repo.
If such texture is stored with LFS, git downloads only the needed revision of the file to your disk, so only 1/20th of the space is used compared to plain git repo.
Now imagine, that with bigger projects, there are thousands of such assets. Suddenly, with plain git, every team member needs all versions of all assets (that’s inherent to git architecture).
It’s not much of a problem with small projects, but with bigger games, it’s common for all revisions of the the whole source data of the game to exceed tens of terabytes. Now, each one of team members working on the project needs large array of disks on their workstation, and checking out the project without 10GbE network takes days.