It’s no secret that trendy video games eat up a ton of disk house. Beforehand, it was usually recreation belongings like high-resolution textures and 3D fashions with super-high polygon counts that had essentially the most influence. Nonetheless, trendy video games additionally incorporate ray tracing, and ray tracing shaders are an enormous hog on the subject of space for storing.

For these tight on house, fortunately, there are compression instruments accessible on the market and a kind of occurs to be CompactGUI. The utility is predicated on Home windows’ personal compact.exe command line software that helps optimize for space for storing by compressing and decompressing information and folders on NTFS file techniques.

Thus, CompactGUI, because the title suggests, supplies a easy GUI answer for compact-based instructions. The developer of the app has defined the way it works and claims that there’s little to no efficiency loss as a consequence:

Home windows 10 launched a little-known however very great tool known as compact.exe that permits one to compress folders and information on disk, decompressing them at runtime. With any trendy CPU (I’ve examined as outdated as an i3-370M from 2010 with negligible influence), this added load is hardly seen, and the house financial savings are of most use on these with smaller SSDs.

As program folders and video games might be shrunk by as much as 60%, this has the added bonus of doubtless lowering load occasions – particularly on slower HDDs.

Moreover the discuss of efficiency, the dev additionally claims vital disk house financial savings for each video games in addition to productiveness apps. For instance, within the case of ARK-Survival Advanced, a 54% or 0.54x compression ratio has been claimed. In the meantime, within the case of Adobe Photoshop, that promise will get even larger at 50.6% or 0.506x:

• Cut back the dimensions of video games (e.g. ARK-Survival Advanced: 169 GB > 91.2 GB)
• Cut back the dimensions of applications (e.g. Adobe Photoshop: 1.71 GB > 886 MB)

Not too long ago, XDA examined CompactGUI in among the supported video games to see how good this free software is.

The outcomes had been usually nice and in some instances customers can anticipate to save lots of so much. The outlet additionally says that it didn’t notice any vital efficiency loss or visible distinction post-compression.

Baldur’s Gate 3 noticed vital financial savings particularly within the case of XPRESS compression algorithms. XPRESS4K is the default one which Home windows makes use of, and additionally it is the quickest, so it might probably present a baseline.

In the meantime, L777-based Lempel-Ziv Prolonged (LZX) compression engine is a common lossless (compact) information compression algorithm for NTFS. This, nevertheless, additionally requires extra processing and reminiscence bandwidth than the XPRESS algorithms.

Recreation	Compression sort	Measurement earlier than compression	Measurement after compression	Compression ratio
Baldur’s Gate 3	XPRESS4K	142.62GB	130.78GB	0.92x
Baldur’s Gate 3	XPRESS8K	146.18GB	129.92GB	0.89x
Baldur’s Gate 3	XPRESS16K	145.9GB	129.78GB	0.89x
Baldur’s Gate 3	LZX	152.71GB	134.54GB	0.88x

Counter-Strike 2 was subsequent and it supplied even larger financial savings by way of percentages:

Recreation	Compression sort	Measurement earlier than compression	Measurement after compression	Compression ratio
Counter-Strike 2	XPRESS4K	39.44GB	29.34GB	0.74x
Counter-Strike 2	XPRESS8K	36.18GB	26.28GB	0.73x
Counter-Strike 2	XPRESS16K	37.73GB	28.13GB	0.75x
Counter-Strike 2	LZX	38.17GB	27.04GB	0.71x

Lastly, a bunch of miscellaneous titles had been additionally examined:

Recreation	Compression sort	Measurement earlier than compression	Measurement after compression	Compression ratio
Little Kitty: Large Metropolis	XPRESS16K	13.76GB	6.34GB	0.46x
Little Kitty: Large Metropolis	LZX	13.43GB	5.44GB	0.40x
Cities: Skylines	XPRESS16K	13.06GB	7.08GB	0.54x
Cities: Skylines	LZX	13.27GB	6.3GB	0.47x
Half-Life: Alyx	XPRESS16K	72.93GB	61.6GB	0.84x
Half-Life: Alyx	LZX	72.52GB	58.08GB	0.80x

Therefore, there appears to be a sample. It seems that AAA titles, that are very heavy in visible results, noticed the least financial savings, and this suggests that the default compression in such conditions should already be fairly environment friendly. Regardless, there are nonetheless conditions the place a software like CompactGUI may help save a lot of house.

In case you want to strive it out, you may head over to the app’s GitHub repo right here to obtain it. Not too long ago, the app was up to date to make use of .NET 9 so you’ll prompted to obtain that. CompactGUI writer, although, has cautioned to not strive it in case of DirectStorage titles since they bypass the CPU and therefore, the utility would not be of a lot assist.

Supply: XDA