Why does SVN take so much space?

I am working on a large sized project that is about 1020 MB in size. This is because, apart from the code, we have other resources, like graphics, XML configurations, etc. in the version control.

The size of the .svn-base files is about 998 MB, making the total checkout size about 2 GB. By my understanding .svn-base is meta information and its size shouldn't be that much.

Why does SVN need so much space?