Compact GUI: Resize your Games/Programs by 60% or more

Discussion in 'Game Tweaks and Modifications' started by NvidiaFreak650, Oct 16, 2017.

  1. sverek

    sverek Guest

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    Oh man, I guess 256GB SSD would be enough for gaming after all. Well, no regrets for buying 512GB, SSD speed scales up nicely with space.

    I am looking forward to use this tool, once 512GB won't be enough for gaming though :D
    Hopefully Valve and other vendors will provide such tools built-in platform (Steam etc...) to save space without tinkering.
     
    fantaskarsef likes this.
  2. NvidiaFreak650

    NvidiaFreak650 Master Guru

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    Shadow of War save me 8.3gb, Sniper Elite 4 save me 11gb & The Witcher 3 GOTY 7.2gb so i call that a win.
    [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]
     
  3. BuildeR2

    BuildeR2 Ancient Guru

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    @NvidiaFreak650 - I'm definitely glad that it has helped you and countless other people, I was just sad that the games I have installed right now didn't really benefit. I have Shadow of War with the 4k textures and cinematics, so using this compact tool took it from 100GB to 100GB. Once it is updated to where you can tell it to compress all new files in a folder I will give it another try, since that will help keep the decay away after patches.

    Also, one of the things that I haven't seen tested is whether or not games have any texture quality difference after compacting. It has obviously made a difference for Fallout 4 (yes, old crappy engine being pushed to far) where compacting the texture pack leads to tons of instances where the game will drop to 5 FPS and remain there until exiting. If I uncompact the files or reinstall the game it runs fine. From what I've seen on the wiki most games don't have these issues and launch just fine as well.
     
  4. NvidiaFreak650

    NvidiaFreak650 Master Guru

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    Did you use compact /c /s after Compact GUI finish the compress the game? that command add any updates files to compress in realtime so the folder never go back to normal.

    Note* Once Compact GUI is done with the game you pick, go to the folder in Windows where the game is at, highlight the very same folder of the game you use in Compact GUI, then hold shift while pressing right mouse a menu going to show open Powershell.

    Once Powershell is open enter compact /c /s & wait until it's done. after you compress it, it marks the folder so that any changes get compressed as well.

    *This step is for games that update a lot & does not break the compressed folder each time there a update. If you want to know if compressed work in Powershell, you going to see two little blue arrows in the folder. now when the game update it's going to compress the file in realtime so there no need to rerun Compact GUI.
     

  5. brysigue

    brysigue Guest

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    I tried this for both Witcher 2 and Witcher 3.
    For Witcher 3, it reduced the folder size from 41GB to 39GB (-2GB)
    and the 2GB was added to the free space of my HDD.
    However, for Witcher 2, it reduced size from 20GB to 10GB (-10GB)
    but I did not see the 10GB added to the free space of my HDD.
    What do you think is the problem? Thanks!

    -----EDIT-----

    I also tried in NBA 2K18 and Resident Evil Zero HD.
    Almost same results, RE0 reduced size by 2GB and it added to free space.
    NBA 2K18 reduced size by 25GB but didn't add to free space.
     
    Last edited: Oct 18, 2017
  6. slickric21

    slickric21 Guest

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    Looked interesting this thread.

    After reading the redit thread think i’ll give it a miss.

    Increase in loading times and massive increase in time to apply patches/updates just for some free space, kinda negates the point of having an SSD in the first place.

    I’d rather just buy a new SSD when space becomes tight
     
  7. mameira

    mameira Guest

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    how long does it take to compress a 11gb game folder? Its stuck at 0%
     
  8. BuildeR2

    BuildeR2 Ancient Guru

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    Same thing happening here. I downloaded DOOM and had 80.5GB free space. Compacted the game folder from about 65GB to about 38GB, yet my drive only shows 84.8GB free space. Not sure where the space is or isn't going, but it sure is odd.
     
  9. Neo Cyrus

    Neo Cyrus Ancient Guru

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    Works pretty well, saved me a ton of space, but it's 100% causing some stuttering and even several second freezes, even if it's only occasional. I'm using it only because I have a bunch of games installed which I'm not going to play in the immediate future but also don't want to uninstall. I'll probably decompress any of them I'm going to play consistently. That's still faster for me than uninstalling then reinstalling when I'm ready considering a lot of my stuff is not on Steam and so I'd have to manually patch a lot of things.

    I'd assume this has more to do with the individual file sizes rather than total size of the game. I've compressed games ranging from 8GB to 48GB and they took almost the same amount of time if I'm not mistaken, a couple of minutes, about 2-3 mins. It's not properly multi-threaded though, it appeared to only be using a single core in my case, so with your CPU it might take a while.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    For those wanting to save space, take your game video files and put them on a storage HDD and set them as Symbolic Links to their original location on your SSD. It's like a shortcut but it treats the files as if they're natively where you place the link.

    Here's the program I use to just add the functions to the right click menu to make the process easy: http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html
     
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2017
  10. gerardfraser

    gerardfraser Guest

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    Darn I did my games folder.
    8 hours later saved 155GB.
    HMMM have to try it again I guess to see what happens.
    [​IMG]
     

  11. wavetrex

    wavetrex Ancient Guru

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    [​IMG]
    (Steam is in there as well)

    Good gains, but that's probably because I play some older games, and MMOs, which are notoriously inefficient.
    I have two modern games as well, they had almost no compression at all and reverted to uncompressed.

    Games that don't compress is because they are already stored as archive/compressed data, something which normally ALL developers should do ! Unfortunately, that is not the case for many ... they are saving a bit of money by just storing textures and world data in raw format...
     
  12. Athlonite

    Athlonite Maha Guru

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    Oh my that takes me back
     
  13. sybnios

    sybnios Guest

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    I don't understand why this doesn't work for me. It takes a decent time to compress the game folders on my ssd (850 evo) and when it finishes in example lets say Dark Souls 3 with XPRESS16K we have original size 25GB and compressed 13GB. When I right click->properties to the folder its still 25GB and the space in my ssd hasn't changed. Same for PRO18. 25GB->15GB on Compact GUI but in reality nothing changed! I even tried within Powershell and while procedure finishes the space amount is not changing! :( Any help with this obscure issue. Can't find anything online about this issue.
     
  14. WhiteLightning

    WhiteLightning Don Illuminati Staff Member

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    damn , this is quite impressive!
     
  15. WhiteLightning

    WhiteLightning Don Illuminati Staff Member

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    I tried this on The evil within 2. All sounds are at super fast speed. dont know if anyone else has this problem ?!?
     

  16. Scarecrow7

    Scarecrow7 Guest

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    One could also take a look at btrfs + LZO (hopefully zstd soon), for transparent compression and compatibility between OSs.
    I don't know how winbtrfs is performing in terms of speed and stability though.

    CompactGUI is actually pretty cool (and surprisingly fast given the ratio), but the inability to access the compressed files outside Windows 10 can be a deal breaker for backup reasons (you can't boot a distro linux and save your crap). So would be wise to avoid it if this is even a concern, or stick with "pure" NTFS compression.

    Some results at CompactGUI wiki are really impressive.
    Final Fantasy X/X2 HD's result is more offensive than Tidus, wtf
     
  17. MaCk0y

    MaCk0y Maha Guru

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    Happened to me with Doom. Should be 10GB but only around 2GB were added to the free space.

    [​IMG]

    For GTAV the estimate was way off :D
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    But it worked really well for Killing Floor 2, Rising Storm 2 and BF1. All saved space added to the Free space; 14GB, 12GB and 7GB respectively.
     
  18. BuildeR2

    BuildeR2 Ancient Guru

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    Yeah, this is exactly what kept happening to me. I was "supposed" to save ~47GB but the free space under My Computer showed a savings of ~4GB. I just decided to uncompact everything and stop wasting CPU and SSD cycles on testing this. I knew it was too good to be true when I first heard about it! "Free" space is never really free......
     
  19. MerolaC

    MerolaC Ancient Guru

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    Do not use the estimate and use this instead:
    https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI/wiki/Compression-Results:-Games

    If the game is not there, the test if you want or search around..

    Also:
    [​IMG]

    Depends on the game's structure, files, etc.
    This cut it more than half the space.
     
  20. NvidiaFreak650

    NvidiaFreak650 Master Guru

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    Well i use SSHD for my testing & it did give me a lot of free space back to my 1TB SSHD. maybe it don't work well on SSD since I didn't try it on SSD & i don't install games on SSD, just Windows.
     

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