Total size of your installed games folder(s)?
That was true of the older methods.
However, the newer algorithms used by Compact are much more efficient.
Testing is ongoing by the community but the general consensus (here, for example) seems to be that any performance degradation is negligible with this method with the titles so far tested (assuming your hardware is reasonably up to date). I personally can attest to this on the titles I tested myself. Exceptional cases are always possible, of course.
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It always does, but there are compression algorithms that are super cheap to apply, such as LZ4 or LZO that are primary algorithms e.g. for compressing swap in zswap module on Linux.
In this case it's actually beneficial to use one rather than use no compression at all, since less data needs to be written on HDD (and read from it). The speed of compression/decompression is faster than the speed of reading raw data from I/O, so there is actually speed increase in this case. Compare this as if you'd read then decompress a zip archive written on 1.44 MB floppy drive, compared to reading 5 of such floppy drives for entire content. It's good to imagine this on real-use scenarios rather than in theory.
When it comes to compressing entire filesystems like here, then we mainly read, not write, so as long as algorithm is good enough then there will be little to no performance degradation, so yes, it has negligible difference for end-user.
(I'd still not use any solution like that since it's not in-filesystem compression but third-party tool that utilizies FS routines. I prefer fs-compression such as e.g. in ZFS filesystem on linux)
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Not sure what the problem is but try the steps described in the Important Information of the Wiki.
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I think what they're saying is that if you compress a 25GB game down to 20GB, it still decompresses on launch and thus takes up the 25GB when you're playing it. So it could potentially be useful when compressing many games to reclaim some space, but you need to allow enough free space remaining for the largest game to be able to decompress.
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Oh, it doesn't? The linked app description says "they'll just be decompressed on the fly at runtime", so I assumed that they would be decompressed at runtime. If they don't decompress to disk, then what do they decompress to? RAM? Swapfile? Both?
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Find some file in your system that is only some hundred bytes in size, and check it's properties.. It'll say something like Size: 308 bytes (308 bytes) and Size on disk: 4,00 KB (4 096 bytes). Now if you compress that file it's size may become smaller, but it'll still take that 4 KB from the disk. Now imagine that there are thousands upon thousands of files like these in your system, and compress doesn't really help at all with them.
Also, you really should defrag the disk after compressing the files. That'll help to make the freed up space available for use. Doesn't help with the issue above, though. (It's just how the filesystem works.)
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Thanks for sharing this. I wonder what performance may be like on an SSD, but it may be beneficial for the games I have stored on an older HDD.
It's also interesting to see how efficiently compressed Ubisoft and Blizzard games are to begin with - there's almost no benefit to further compressing their games, while other games look downright wasteful in their disk space utilization.
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Yeah, I noticed that about the Blizzard games, no real point in compressing those. The Ubisoft games don't compress as much as some others but I got a solid double-digit GBs after going through with it, all those AssCreeds and open world whatnot add up :)
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Bump. Surprised not more people seem to be using this. Might as well mention that the new version (2.3) displays estimated compression results directly in the tool once you choose your target folder, this is very convenient.
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I haven't seen this mentioned here before so I thought I'd share. There is a tool for Windows 10 (sorry, older OSes) that utilises compression to shrink down the size of your installed programs and games without affecting performance. It sounds like magic, but it actually works.
Behold: CompactGUI
I've tested it on a few games and haven't run into issues or a noticeable degradation in performance, so I proceeded to use the tool on a large section of my installed programs and games, saving literally hundreds of GBs of disk space.
It works better for some games than others. You can check the compression results for over 1.5K games and programs as compiled in the database so far here. UPDATE: Now displays estimated savings in the tool once you choose a game folder based on user-submitted results--very cool. Keep in mind there are apparently a few issues with certain titles like Guild Wars 2 (huge compression but decompresses again each time on start), and you will need to run the compression again when your games update for max savings. Also, see Important Information on the tool's wiki here.
EDIT: Apparently some users with non-English Windows installations are reporting system corruption when using compact.exe (the built-in Windows function this tool uses), so proceed with caution and at your own risk.
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