What is Reddit's opinion of CompactGUI?

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On a side note: After installing, you can compress the game from 74GB back to 21.3GB using CompactGUI. The game can still be played normally with no performance loss.

Info: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Here's a list of games with results from compression

Not every game gets compressed very well, but some of the results are almost mind boggling.

Note that if a game/file is updated it gets decompressed, so you'll have to rerun the tool after a major update to your game.

Just added this to the Wiki:

It's compression, so extra CPU power is required to decompress the program files as they're needed, however the XPRESS algorithm is highly efficient and designed for minimal CPU overhead. Any reasonable CPU will have minimal to no performance impact, and those using slower HDDs may even see a performance improvement as the smaller files can be transferred to the CPU much faster for processing. See the Microsoft doc here

The Windows 10 OS has a compact file function. You can download the UI for the function using this link: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

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The game will still be functional, and shouldn't have any performance changes. Cut my ARK file by about 40%.

Have a look here if you want a program that's easier to use. I've set it up intentionally so that you can't mess with system files, so just run it on the program or game folders of your choice. Otherwise just run "compact /?" from the command prompt and it will show you what you can do, and there's more information here and here:

You're welcome :)

If you have a look at Disk 3, you'll see it's absolutely pegged. I'm not sure if you read my bit about performance, but basically your CPU is blitzing along much faster than your drive can give it information, resulting in low CPU usage. If you were to try compressing on an SSD, the CPU would be a lot more hard hit :)

Also, when you've finished compressing, would you mind sending me a screenshot of the final compression, or opening an Issue on GitHub and posting the details? I want to add it to the wiki list even if the compression isn't great so other can see if it's worth compressing their games :)

You can use CompatGUI after you install the game, it will reduce the size to about 70~ gbs with all the DLCs i guess. And yes, the game will run just as fine, even better tbh, it improves loading times and helps with the stutter for me at least.

CompactGUI can also bring down sizes considerably, varying per game, with minimal performance impact. For example, Payday 2 compresses to 30GB from 53GB.

All it takes is a few mouse clicks (and Windows 10).

You can use the compression tool built into windows and save about half of the space for ARK with little effect on performance. Idk how the dlc will scale but you can see how the base game will compress in the results sheet.

This is basically a much faster, smarter alternative to CompactGUI, written in Rust rather than Visual Basic, and using DeviceIoControl() syscalls rather than shelling out to compact.exe.

If you're willing to be a guinea pig and verify it works on machines other than my own, you can find binaries on the releases tab - you want the non-i686 versions unless you're on 32-bit Windows.

While I doubt there's that much risk of data loss, please keep backups and take care of what you compact with it. App and game folders yes, your entire Documents folder, best not.

PSA There is a program on GitHub called Compact GUI. It uses the built in compression algorithms that ship with Windows 10 to reduce file sizes on your disk. An added benefit is since these files are compressed and decompressed in RAM as needed, your load times will improve.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Anything more powerful than a potato should be able to utilize this and benefit from it. If not, it’s easy enough to decompress a file.

use this thing if you are on win10: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Cut a brand new install by 60GB with zero perceptible change by compressing the filesystem (e.g. removing duplication)

If you're on Windows 10, you can usually shrink the disk space used by a game that's not well-compressed, generally without losing performance (even potentially gaining loading performance if your drive is slow), though you have to manually rerun it when the game gets updates.

It can also unshrink them as well if there actually are performance problems.

My personal results:

CompactGUI just a user interface for built in Windows 10 compression tools and can be used for anything. List of other games compression results here.

>There is a bit of overhead with having to decompress the data, but with recent CPUs this is basically negligible and probably won't ever be tangible unless your program is extremely heavy on the CPU.

>The files are decompressed on the fly so the data is never written to disk. This is why some people actually see loading improvements on HDDs since the CPU can read the compressed files and decompress them faster than loading the original sized file. - /u/japzone

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Use this program that is technically already in windows but this gui let's you control it better and easily. It will compress your games files a ton. My ark install dropped like 100gb alone using the normal compression rate and the game still runs great.

I wonder how this compares to CompactGUI which I havent used in quite a while?

I used CompactGUI because it was the first ui for compact.exe I heard of and it has a DB of compressed games/apps. The author of Compactor mentions they have recently improved folder performance, retains modified file datetime, and now locks files to prevent file updates during compression process - But I dunno if Compact GUI has any of that.

Glad theres choice and development around such a useful command line tool in Windows! Hope to try this on my 5600X to see if it compresses any faster with my 5600X versus my 3570K.

You can buy more hard drives and put them inside your PC. Regular hard drives (not SSD) are fairly cheap, and they store a lot of games.

There are also external drives that connect via USB, and not inside your PC, but these tend to be more expensive, slower, and generally not as good. Buy internal drives if you can.

You can use a tool like CompactGUI to make your game's size smaller, but it will only help a bit.

Yes you can compress it. But with every larger patch you might want to recompress again.

i'm using CompactGUI https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/releases

Depends on how many and what mods/maps/dlc your client has downloaded but I can half my install size using the highest compression (takes a few hours on my i7 3770k)

https://i.imgur.com/zwfzTJ6.png

Depends on what maps you install. Base game(Island) is significantly smaller. You start adding on the Centre, Scorched, Rag, Aberration, Extinction...ya, it gets huge.

Post-Install you can use a windows 10 feature to compress the ark folder. It provides substantial space savings and no performance loss: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

As a matter of fact, you can!

Check out this tool: CompactGUI

I saved 23 GB for Titanfall 2 with no discernible issues so far. Actually used it on a whole load of other games saving me literally hundreds of GBs of disk space.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/ win 10 best solution https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/37o86k/windows_10_protip_new_transparent_compression/ stick to games data, program files and program files (x86), theres a list out there of other safe directories but other system directories compression can cause no boot. https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/22088-compress-uncompress-windows-10-compact-os.html#post386565

Probably the most useful utility I've used lately is CompactGUI, a tool for compressing your games with no loss of performance. Depends on the game but the savings can be huge. List of games and expected savings on the Wiki

To make things clear, ComptactGUI is only a GUI for the Windows 10's new Compact feature written by /u/TheImminentFate. You can accomplish this from the command line but his software makes it very easy and intuitive. You can download it from his GitHub here.

The best part about it is so far there hasn't been any impact on performance. In fact, it's been widely reported as having faster load times and the compression can sometimes be insanely good. The best I've seen is upwards of 99%!

I'll be trying this out when I get home today for sure. I'm only worried about how this will work out when an update is released. Will it break the compression or will Windows automatically compress it into the current file?

Algorithm | Game | Before | After | Savings

XPress16K | Napoleon | 23 GB | 13 GB | 10 GB

XPress16K | Attila | 24 GB | 15 GB | 9 GB

XPress16K | Rome II | 27 GB - 16 GB | 11 GB

XPress16K - Shogun 2 | 23 GB | 16 GB | 7 GB

XPress8K - Warhammer | 33 GB | 21 GB | 12 GB

XPress16K - Warhammer II | 38 GB | 29 GB | 9 GB

CompactGUI just a user interface for built in Windows 10 compression tools and can be used for anything. List of other games compression results here.

Unfortunately it actually was the Size on Disk that Windows got wrong in the first place - here's the original issue on GitHub where NekuSoul found the problem. Seems like they've fixed it now which is great.

I elected to use compact.exe since I didn't trust myself to not break peoples' files by trying to operate on them directly, electing to let compact.exe handle all those issues. And, even with that, a few people have still had issues where compact's broken their computer to the point of needing a restore.

They added a whole lot more content, thats why.

BTW, i recommend using Windows' compression feature on the game files, you save a whole lot of space that way. Up to 17GB of space if using CompactGUI

This might slow down the game loading speed though, especially if your CPU is slow.

the gw2.dat is actually compressable under windows 10 compression algorithms into an absurdly small rate (<10% of original size) the problem is that the game dictates that it has to uncompress when it relaunches making it pretty pointless

I agree with you. This probably reduces the population after updates.

They should compress the packages and let Epic Launcher de-compress them then install them. With LZX compression, the game could be shrunk to 52 % of the total size. From 18 GB > 8.6 GB. Source

you can try this out . It has marvel listed on the games page, and here is a reddit thread for it.

For those who don't know about CompactGUI - it's a tool that uses a built in compression method exclusive to Windows 10 that works well with pretty much anything without any big performance drawbacks.

I compressed 40 games and i was able to save close to 150GB. Some of the results are from my own tests.

I highly recommend you guys try it out and submit your results. The best part of it is i've experienced zero performance difference in my tests.

Don't download the ZIP, that's the source code. Just download and run the EXE from the releases page. No installation necessary since it's just a GUI for existing under-the-hood Windows functions.

Then just choose the folder you want compressed, choose the third compression setting(the fourth "LZX" setting isn't recommended for files you use a lot), and click "Compress Folder". Sit back and wait.

Keep in mind that if the game gets updated you have to run the compression again for the new files.

You could try https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI , It's a tool that allows you to access a compression algorithm already in win10 which compresses files in such a way that the decompression is practically instant. Depending on the game you can achieve anything from 0% to even 50% size reduction without affecting performance. And on slow hdds it can even increase loading speed if the bottleneck is the speed of the hdd. Haven't used it on dota yet so I don't know how much it ends up compressing but I would suggest you give it a try. It's possible to revert the process too if there's any kind of issues.

> Isn't this the same option you can use for a drive or partition on windows by going to > Computer > selecting a drive > Properties > Compress this drive to save space?

No, that's the old 1990's LZNT1 system, which is implemented quite differently - it compresses less well and creates fragmentation, but does support writing to compressed files and is backward compatible with earlier versions of Windows.

Compactor uses the same mechanism as compact.exe with the new /exe flag, which uses alternate data streams, reparse points and overlay filter drivers to avoid modifying the NTFS on-disk format.

> Did you write this to take advantage of the compress utility without compressing your entire drive, just some programs you may want?

Pretty much. I used to use CompactGUI but it has serious unresolved performance issues which made it unsuitable for larger trees of files. I was having fun with Rust over on FreeBSD and thought I'd give some Windows programming a try for a change.

> Also, I like the additional info you added! It's helpful. I like how you called out the report you had of data corruption in a specific instance.

Aye, I want people to be able to make an informed choice about it. And with tens of thousands of users each with tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data on random consumer hardware, someone's going to lose something even if the software is perfect. I want them to be a little paranoid.

copy paste because this comes up like every day:

use this or this to use win 10s built-in on the fly compression. both use the built-in Windows program to do the same thing and just provide a user interface.

my install is 224.9gb normal, 107.5gb after, which is a 52% size reduction.

use this or this to use win 10s built-in on the fly compression. both use the built-in Windows program to do the same thing and just provide a user interface.

my install is 224.9gb normal, 107.5gb after, which is a 52% size reduction.

> One thing though, I think you ran into the same issue I did, where Windows actually reports compressions greater than multiples of 4GB incorrectly, leading to grossly overstated savings. For example, a file of 17GB that gets compressed to 14GB will be reported as 2GB; Any difference from a multiple of 4 just gets dropped. I can't remember if this is exactly right, but I think for some reason it stores the compressed file size as an Int32.

Hm, I've not noticed anything that looks unreasonable - I'm doing more or less the same thing you are - GetCompressedFileSizeW on each entry. Though your error handling looks wrong, and I'm not rounding to the nearest cluster size.

CompactGUI says 47.6^(GB), Compactor says 47.59 GiB, Explorer says 47.5 GB (nice rounding there, Microsoft).

What were you doing before? I don't recall seeing this information directly exposed in metadata, hence the extra syscall.

> That's why CompactGUI ended up being so slow, not because it's in VB but because Windows never fixed it's reporting of compressed sizes, and I only half-assed the check to compensate (every file has to be analysed independently rather than running one check over the whole folder structure).

Well, another thing you're doing for each individual file is an WMI query, I can't imagine that helps :)

> As it stands I'm currently completely rewriting the project in WPF anyway because making something look nice in WinForms is just too hard

That will be interesting. Sadly GUIs are easily one of the weakest aspects of Rust, hence using a rather wonky webview library that's basically an embedded IE11 window.

You can download compactgui to make the size much more reasonable, I experience close to zero performance loss with the game folder compressed. I got the 190gb down to 103gb with it.

You can check for dlcs here, from the steam library folder: https://i.imgur.com/vuKQGbz.png

The game will always be big, you can significantly lower it by compressing the files using a tool called CompactGUI, there is almost no performance loss for me using this: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

From another thread a user suggested the following, which I have done and tested:

The Windows 10 OS has a compact file function. You can download the UI for the function using this link: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Took the game from 127GB (which is size of mine with only extinction and mods, no other optional maps, idk why yours is so much larger) down to 62GB on disk. Someone further in the thread mentioned that updated will fuck it up and decompress it but idk if he meant id have to compress it again or if its automatic but I guess ill have to wait for an update to see. I notice no differences in game performance though.

Yeah, my install is 179 GB. Crazy amounts of file space needed.

However ..... you can use the Windows 10 Compact tool to reduce that to around 80 GB of disk space used.

You can find tutorials around or use CompactGUI

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

nah, game was always installed as a complete package, unlike it's PS4/Xbone counterparts. I know there is a program which can lessen the sizes of certain games, it was like a hard drive space compressor with a community who created a table with how much every game was compressed by.

I'll do some digging and reply here when I find it

Edit: as soon as I hit comment, I found it haha. It's called CompactGUI. No idea how much it'll compress by but I hope it helps.

Indeed, just look at how compressible they are https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/wiki/Archived-Compression-Results:-Games

(Be aware that the results aren't 100% accurate due to a serious bug in Windows)

Since you do full disk compression, you might wanna look into Compact GUI - it hooks into the inbuilt disk compression that Windows uses, but allows a user to choose higher methods of compression. You can save gigs on a large library and I haven't noticed any slowdown in what I've tested it on.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

This is a GUI for a compression algorithm that cane with Windows 10. Otherwise you would have to use the command prompt.

I have had pretty good results with this. Now I know it sounds odd, increasing performance by adding a layer of compression, but it actually works with minimal CPU overhead. I have compressed my entire steam library and saved ~70 Gb and shaved 6gb off Windows itself.

It’s most notable on a HDD however, there is no lost performance on an SSD. Since it actually works by transferring the compressed file to your RAM before working, it is actually faster.

I did a horrible job explaining. The GitHub page can explain better with performance numbers

For others, it has reduced loading times. It does this by only uncompressing the files you need, meaning the whole 15GB isn't needed on launch, instead only 300MB might be uncompressed and used to startup the game. Resulting in a faster launch time for some (normally old hard-drives).

Read more here: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Compact is more of a hidden cmd function in win10. It can greatly compress files and decompress them when they are needed (and compress them again when they are not needed) with no performance loss.

A guy wrote a guitar for it and it's great. https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

if you downloaded version 1.3.5, I accidentally broke it when I tried to fix localisations.. Whoops. If your games were on a secondary drive then it failed and just tried to compress the folder that CompactGUI was in. It's fixed now in 1.3.5.1 :)

The files that get updated get decompressed unfortunately, so over time you'll get compression decay (the folder will grow back to its original size) - the game won't break though. Read here

1. Yep, this wiki on Github
2. I don't use any fancy tools to gather stats, it's just the output from the compact.exe command that analyses the folder's contents :)
   
3. it attempts to compress each individual file within a selected folder, but will skip over any that have already been compressed. That's why if you run it again on a folder after a game has updated, it will be much faster as there are fewer files that need compression.
4. Documentation has been pretty scarce, but there's the official Microsoft one that I could find, and a few links on scattered forums to the developers who added this functionality in. The best I can say is whip out your Google-Fu I'm afraid, there's too much scattered information for any one resource to be enough.

CompactGUI

Using this my install is Size: 125 GB but Size on disk: 66.9 GB.

I use the the 8k compression.

But you can only do this on the Steam and Epic installs.

my game goes from 340GB to ~150GB doing that, i have all dlcs installed but the center and a few mods, i do this to almost any game that gets a big reduction in size, you can see a list with some games here to see if its worthy to you doing that
https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/wiki/

Some games are already compressed so you dont need to do it

I have a 500gb SSD and have ark installed with all maps (aside from genesis as I don’t have money for them yet and I’m not too concerned about the maps right now) and still have 209GB left. I don’t have anything else installed on my laptop however, aside from Hearthstone so that does play into this, and all my pictures and other media are on my storage drive

What I did once I installed the game and only had like 70GB left was to compress the game files using CompactGUI. It took quite a few hours, but it gave me a lot of space back and the game runs perfectly fine still (I play single player with about 15ish mods). Provided you need the space to install the game in the first place, but if you’re able to do so and compress the files, you’ll have a lot more free space. Hopefully this works for you and I explained it well lol.

It should make any difference gameplay wise, I used to use one program for that, I think it was this one https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI. Also in steam you can select the DLC's you don't play, to free up space that way.

You can compress the ark folder with this: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/releases

Just keep in mind when big updates happen you'll likely have to re-compress it again. Well worth it though my Ark folder goes from 350GBs to around 171GBs after compressing it.

The PAYDAY 2 (and PDTH, RAID) bundle format is really inefficient. You can compare it with a primitive zip archive file, but without any compression. If you open one in an editor, you can see the raw files, one after another. To make things worse, there's lots and lots of duplicate files across the bundles.

You may get some easy compression done using the Windows filesystem compression tools (e.g. use CompactGUI), but don't expect too much. The larger files are most likely already compressed (textures, sounds, etc) and you won't gain much by compressing them again.

Large games take up a lot of space, that's just how it is. It's wasted space if you have a low spec pc and play everything on the lowest quality, but you gotta store those 4k textures and high bitrate sound clips somewhere. It's also why some of the modern titles take so much disk space. If you don't like that, then maybe consider those game streaming services? Those come with a bunch of disadvantages as well, though.

I juat delete and redownload because fast and cheap internet.

The backup tool just skips a few clicks for you.

Theres three things you need to keep: the game folder, the appmanifest for it and the save/data folder if youre not using cloud saves.

If you want to save space you should use something like CompactGUI.

If you have an usb 3 external drive you can play games from it without problems since there is enough bandwidth.

This worked fine for me. Though obviously and sadly you will need to redo it every now and then because of updates to game and mods, but it reduces the size significantly anyway and makes it even run faster on HDDs iirc

You may find CompactGUI HERE.

To use, simply select ARK's root folder and let it go. It took just over two hours to compress the game on my Ryzen 7 2700X.

You need to recompress after updates. You may also uncompress it via CompactGUI for them.

I haven't, but my knee-jerk expectation is that many mods may have less attention paid to compression so could be good candidates. Try it and let us know how it goes!

In principle this use-case would be a good candidate for deduplicated WIM images, but you'd need to be quite adventurous to try that, and the effort might be more than it's worth.

I remember when it was around 15GB, and on top of that, you could use CompactGUI to compact it down to something insane like 5GB or so. Still have it on my Switch and it's somehow around 15GB compared to the 90GB on PC or home consoles.

Hey! Just wanted to reach out and say thanks! Got the Fortnite folder from 80GB to 45GB leaving enough room for my other games - no more delete and install.

Also, I didn’t use the softpedia link, I got it direct from github https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

CompactGUI

And here are the results , just scroll down to ARK.
btw, it doesnt affect your ingame graphics AND switching maps goes faster as well...extra bonus

CompactGUI has a database of game sizes before and after compression, though it's a bit old at this point since like the app itself it doesn't appear to be maintained.

Self plug: I wrote Compactor as a faster, smarter alternative to CompactGUI.

CompactGUI. On some games you might only save 10mb but on others you might save 10gb. It also works for non-gaming stuff. Heres an example space saved.

Or Compactor as alternative.

CompactGUI is an interface for Windows 10's native compression program, compact.exe.

Results vary widely from game to game, but I was surprised to learn that I could compress BT's game files by half, saving me 15GB on my SSD when using the "XPRESS16K" setting!

Visit CompactGUI at the earlier link for more information on how it works.

Well to get space now, if you have windows 10 use compact.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor

Those are two gui that will help using that built in utility.

Most game files will compact up to 50% or so believe it or not.

Please read about it and don't compact windows files or your user profile.

I watched a video on youtube about a guy using the compact.exe utility to compress the Fortnite folder in half the space it used, he used this utility

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

If you are on windows 10 you might try 'Compress GUI' it's an application which allows you to compress folders/files in a way that they are still useable by the system. If you try it out please post the results here.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/releases

There was a program that would compress and uncompress gamefiles for you and they would still work

I'll try find it

Edit: compactGUI https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Sorry for the lack of hyperlinks I'm on mobile

Edit 2: results for other games https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/wiki

It also seems to not be officially supported anymore so an alternative is Compactor: https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor
I think this was the one I was originally thinking of as it sounds familiar

The only option you have on PC is something like CompactGUI which compresses the files, but even then it only saves about 7.5GB and that compression doesn't carry over when files are overwritten during updates.

You really need to use CompactGUI!

Its a gui for a built in windows compression function which often reduces file size of games by a decent amount with practically no noticable performance change.

For reference to how well it works it turned my ARK Survival Evolved from 125gb to 60gb on a low-moderate compression level. Give it a shot.

Just a heads-up: Many of the listed compression results in your readme are very likely the result of a Windows bug that affected all files that were >4GB after compression and showed insane compression ratios for them. As far as I've tracked the bug it was only fixed with Win10 1903 and those tests were probably made on an earlier version.

Full disclosure: I discovered the bug when CompactGUI made the rounds on reddit.

PS for OP: With all that said, it's still worth it to compress these files. Just keep in mind that they'll become uncompressed whenever they get a patch.

You can make a game use up less space, but not in the way you want. You can't edit RDR2 texture files to be lower quality because the game doesn't really have modding tools for that, but you can use the "compact" function within Windows 10 to compress files. You can do it through the command prompt or a 3rd party tool, like CompactGUI.

The compressed game will have a reduced size, but you will be able to play as normal, and all textures and sounds will have the same quality. Your CPU usage might increase slightly because the files will need to be decompressed when playing.

Don't expect a huge space saving though, you're probably looking at a few GB at most.

They have a list with results that were submissed by the community. https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/wiki I couldn't find warzone on there, but other recent Call of Duty titles save about 7-8 gigs on the total files size.

As long as it's a lossless compression, yes. .zip, .rar, .7z will all work.

Do you know of CompactGUI?, it's a tool that uses a Windows 10 feature which compresses files while allowing you to use them normally, including playing compressed games. It will not be as good as packing the entire game folder into a .7z archive though.

CompactOS for compressing Windows files:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/save-disk-space-compact-os-windows-10/

CompactGUI for compressing games and programs:

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Both have 0 impact on performance.

ark/steam requires all files to be reloaded during a patch instead of download just the patched files themselves

what you can do is to compress the files first https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

1: Download Compact Gui app https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/releases

2: Open app and select game folder

1. Select XP8K compressing method and then wait, after its done it will tell you in right side how much it managed to save.

Additionally, when using any type of remote storage it is desirable to make it as small as possible. Once mentioned CompactGUI (https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI) will do the trick. Shadow is powerful enough to handle on-the-fly decompression of game data with almost no visible slowdown (on x8 and x4 setting in application)

yup my Ark install is 180gb normally. You can try the Windows 10 compressor if you have Win10, it works wonders. My Ark install went down to 120gb and seems just as fast to load. Zero impact on in-game performance too.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

Decent price, but keep in mind that this is a CPU from 2012 (hopefully new old stock and not some used ting the dealer slapped into a new case). It's fast enough for most current AAA titles and MMOs, but there aren't any viable upgrade paths for it, you have to get rid of CPU, board and RAM if you want to get a better processor. And no, you can not use DDR4 RAM, this CPU only supports DDR3, another downside.

My current CPU (i5-4590) is very much comparable to this old i7 and it's still holding up well enough, although I'm eyeing a replacement at some point near the end of the next or the beginning of the year after that, since the new console generation might benefit from a more powerful CPU.

As a package though, it's not too expensive for what it does. It can handle pretty much every game at a decent level of quality (medium to high) and 1080p. The 1050Ti is still the best budget GPU. Don't expect it to be capable of higher resolutions or frame rates beyond 60fps however, except with very simple games. The most demanding titles will be limited by the CPU and the GPU's lack of VRAM, but all this means is that you have to drop settings a little. In most cases, the difference is not too dramatic and visual fidelity will still be at least as good as with a current-gen console.

One issue this PC has is the very small SSD. Some games are larger than 100GB already, so 240GB (of which only 180 or so are actually usable after taking the amount of space into account that Windows, formatting and essential applications need) might turn out being a little tight. You can use this tool to compress installed games without any performance penalty, but keep in mind that you have to redo the compression after each update. Still, you'd have to be very disciplined with the storage and put everything that doesn't actually need fast access times onto the slower HDD.

Just want to echo /u/Kozonak about compactGUI, especially if you have 6 or more cores and an SSD, for many games the load times are indistinguishable.

It adds a user interface to Windows 10 drive compression and allows you to do it on a per folder basis instead.

I found some UbiSoft games were picky, like the division, but plenty of steam games and origin games took the compression just fine.

Always do it on a per game folder basis, don't just compress you're whole steam library as some games don't work well with it.

Also some games are already compressed, so if you find it only saves a few percent, just uncompress it again it's not worth it. The main savings come from games like TitanFall which included something obscene like 15gb of uncompressed audio including 3 languages you didn't fucking need.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

a handy gui to do this trick, its amazing to do it on my steam folders etc :D

https://imgur.com/Npozmnv

this is when i compressed my uplay copy of Uno with xpress 16k

Download it

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/releases/download/v2.6.2/CompactGUI.exe

run it, select folder

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI#screenshots

press compress, wait a lot

Everybody keeps saying how good SSD’s are, but I really find it dependent on what you’re doing. Even with gaming, certain things just don’t benefit the same.

Over half my steam library is on a HDD because I don’t play them often or the difference in loading times (like well compressed games or small games) is so minimal that it doesn’t bother me.

You can also look into real-time compression using the windows compression system. Compact GUICompact GUI is a open source program that uses Windows 10’s built in compression to save disk space. It works real-time and actually speeds up transfers between drives (and ram) because the files are shrunken and are packed/unpacked in RAM.

Not for download size, but in terms of install size, have you checked out the Win10 'compact.exe'? It'll compress any game that isn't already compressed entirely. It's really fast to read the compressed data too, no noticable difference in loading times whatsoever.

https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor is a great GUI for this. Or you can use the older https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

I find Freaky's is a lot faster. I compacted my nearly full 1tb 2nd hard drive where most of my games are, it freed up over 200gb of space!

You can try using this tool which compresses files using windows utilities, Tekken 7 compressed to half the size.

https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/wiki/Compression-Results:-Games-p3

Updating files increases the files sizes again so you'd have to run it again.

Most of the size is because of the DLC. I suggest just downloading the maps you want to play and no others. Apart from that there is a program called compactgui which can compress arks file size by about half, that's what I have done and it works perfectly fine. Here is a link to compactgui https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

If you're using Windows and disk space is at a premium, consider using transparent NTFS compression through a tool like CompactGUI.

On Mac there is also Apple File System Compression. I'm not a Mac user however so you'd need to look into this yourself.

>How does that compare to just asking Windows to compress the files itself?

Way better .

In short.

Windows 10 added a new compression method that cant be used by that only via "Compact.exe" its Multi threaded and faster.

&#x200B;

While the one you said is extremely old and single threaded and will hurt your performance

here you will find a few benchmarks and longer explanations https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

I'm working on something to help with that. Will need testers soon.

There's also CompactGUI, but it's rather slow, particularly with larger folders.

What you try to sense can also be a Placebo-Effect that compression (in whatever form) creates an overhead which means it can't be faster due to uncompression involved unless you have 6+core state-of-art PC of today. Think of this way, Developers are not stupid and could have put their game files in "Compressed Form" (lots of compression formats and tools aside that) if they choose it to be. But they decided not to because they weighed the pro-con of injecting compression into their games and eliminate compression out of the equation for "Faster Loading" where you insist you know better than they do and force compression nonetheless. So it's a hit-n-miss as for games that didn't do their homework, compression can (not must or should) cause speed increase but for calculated games it won't as there are many posts about it on Google Search. It's to save space, not speed.

Also you better read https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/wiki/Important-Information because as "feared" it decreases the Life Expectancy of SSD drives explained by the author himself as Windows Compression is known to decompress and recompress already compressed files not on memory yet on disk if needed thus causing unnecessary writes on SSD which could be wearing.

Author belittles wear as he "assumes" all Consumers have SLC drives that have Life Expectancy that' beyond their biological lifetime so that wear caused by his Program would be negligible but for TLC drives (most common, cheapest) 1/100th of SLC's endurance can be affected by such if user was not careful enough. Even if it looks like an extreme scenario, it could very well happen for drives that's used for constantly downloading stuff from Internet and trying games (install+delete) much frequently.

So yes it's a good little app to use yet one who decides to use should also be careful/aware of its outcomes and take necessary precautions.

I've got a magic trick for you, if you want to get some more mileage out of your drive. Ever heard of CompactGUI ? I use it with LZX on my SMR disks, based on Windows Explorer's properties dialogue, it's crunched 1.23TB of games into 944GB, so about a 24% reduction in size for me!

I don't really notice a change in performance, but I'm on 2TB of spinning rust.

It has been updated recently-ish though. If you run compact /? everything below /Q was added with Windows 10/Server 2016. The /EXE-options are quite good for compressing stuff with minimal performance loss (well, the XPRESS variants). I use it for my Steam library with this GUI for ease of use: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

CompactGUI is a convenient program that can compress folders with minimal to no performance hit.

You can find more information on it here, as well as a list of games/programs with their compression results here.

There is zero reason to uncompress most files. In fact there is some executables made by the community to compress games to save space on SSDs.

These were auto compressed by windows when it detected low space on your drive.

I wouldn't recommend compressing the whole disk when using an SSD. It's going to both hurt your sequential reads by quite a lot and will kill your disk faster.

You should instead try compressing specific folders with compact.exe. So get something like Wiztree to look for large folders then use Windows' compact.exe to compress them manually.

There's also an unofficial GUI for compact, but it'll be slow as shit for lots of small files.

Unfortunately the game takes alot of space to install yes

But! you can shrink is by half very easily by using the W10 compression function called compact through command prompt, there is also a GUI version available that someone made.

My game size is 170 GB but it only takes 80 GB because its compressed I use this and run the command as a bat executable whenever there is an update to shrink it down again, it does not take long running it in the command prompt as opposed to compactGUI > compact /C /S:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\ARK" /I /EXE XPRESS8K * &&pause

Picture of my Ark folder properties CompactGUI

Ark and Atlas is extremely compressible, usually a 50% or more reduction in size.

>Any reasonable CPU will have minimal to no performance impact, and those using slower HDDs may even see a performance improvement as the smaller files can be transferred to the CPU much faster for processing.

It's really light, but still effective compression