lzbench VS CompactGUI

For a benchmark on a standard set: https://github.com/inikep/lzbench/blob/master/lzbench18_sort...

You can crunch the numbers yourself with this: https://github.com/inikep/lzbench

Note that a benchmark in the README refers to zstd 1.1.1 and brotli 0.5.2, which are very old (the current versions are zstd 1.5.2 and brotli 1.0.9). The same author maintains lzbench [1], which is more or less up-to-date.

[1] https://github.com/inikep/lzbench

u/zertillon, maybe you could use lzbench, so you could compare it with a lot of other compression libraries. The problem is that it requires including the library in a single executable, so it might be more difficult to integrate than a C library (the benchmark is in C++).

Are you sure about that? That's not what I see on https://github.com/inikep/lzbench and I tried to run that myself, although I have no idea which lzo to try so I went with what seemed the fastest...

You can chuck compact.exe at it by hand (use the /exe option), or if you'd prefer to avoid the command line there's my Compactor tool, or the venerable CompactGUI.

Look into compact. Or the tool compactGUI. It uses windows inbuilt compression which doesn't impact performance noticably. The less well optimised a games files are the more space you get back. For many games you get nothing, maybe couple mb per gb. But for things like Ark? Install went from 186.5gb to 68.8gb. Runs just as fine no problems. But takes up a third of the size so it's absolutely noticable and demonstrateable that filesizes are in certain circumstances a result of lazy dev work

You can also just use compactGui smaller filesizes without having to remove dialogs or cutscenes or anything. Obviously how much space is regained depends on how well it was compressed originally. With triple A titles perhaps getting 10% back, while things like ark can literally be shrunk by hundreds of gigs.

> This claim needs some real world evidence to back it up (and usually it's not about a performance impact, but instead a perceived image quality impact).

We're talking lossless compression here, so image quality is not the issue.

Fortunately someone else has already done this research. There's a tool for Windows to control the compact.exe behavior for individual folders called CompactGUI: https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI

They maintain a database of compression results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CVXd6PTIYE9XlNpRsxJ...

Reductions in storage use of greater than 50% are so common that they're hardly even worth remarking on. My experience with compressing a bunch of games is that the biggest gains come from compressing bloated asset packs. Hard to know what else could be taking up more than 50% of the storage space in a particular game.

*For anyone curious, using CompactGUI is the easiest way for average users

You can claw back a lot of it by marking the folder as compressed, or using Compactor/CompactGUI periodically.