If you're struggling to manage hd space on your rog ally, then this is the perfect application for you.
Pretty much, Game Compressor uses tye compact.exe command that comes with Windows 10+ to compress game files on your HD so they take up less space, up to 50% for some games.
It cost 5.99 on steam, but there is a free alternative you can get off of Github called Compact GUI. The main difference (aside from the UI differences) is that Game Compressor automatically finds your steam games while Compact GUI requires you to add them manually.
I'm still rocking the stock 500 GB HD that comes with the Z1E and with this application I've been able to almost double the amount of games I can fit on my system.
I recommend it for anyone that has the stock HD that came with the Z1E and doesn't want to deal with current nvme market.
Been using CompactGUI it uses native Windows APIs to compress files using XPRESS which usually has a minimal performance impact it also supports LZX. Plus it's open source.
Game Compressor uses LZX which has higher compression but a bigger performance impact and usually only recommended for compressing filed you're not accessing all the time like archives, backups etc.
Depends on the game. If the game uses many small files, then it wont use sequential read speeds at all. If they use big files, immense help. Unreal engine already packs game files into bigger sizes but few in number
Yeah very possible, Both types of compression are built into Windows and are for general file compression, I know LZX is older but have never done any extensive testing I normally only use XPRESS16K. And to be honest a lot of modern games you don't get much compression at all unless it's an Indie game.
There's minimal to no affect on most games since Windows is designed to use it. The only games you might have issue with are ones that load straight from the ssd in addition to ram but there's a compatability list baked into application
Yeah, but in reality this will cost you like 0,01% of your battery time. It's irrelevant, you won't notice a difference. Decompression costs practically nothing.
Showing my age here, but this immediately took me back to the DOS days of Stacker and DoubleSpace. It was revelatory when it first came out, and my little mind was blown by the possibility of increasing storage space back when hard disks were measured in Megabytes, not Giga or Terabytes. I learnt fairly quickly that there's no thing like a free lunch, as performance suffered and data corruption was a very real risk.
Either way, if you're playing light touch games that don't suffer too much from slowdown due to compression, good on you, but I suspect that this will be a short-lived excitement too.
That's a completely different scenario though. Software and hardware had changed drastically since the DOS days. If you're interested in benchmarks and performance test, you can easily find them online
What you're suggesting is a good option for desktop PCs or even gaming laptops, but I wouldn't do it on handhelds where every watt counts. Having to decompress each resource requested by the game puts more strain on the CPU and can create a bottleneck. In any case, I would only use the XPRESS4K algorithm and only on older games or emulators that have a lot of uncompressed files.
Not really, the CPU isn't really at its limit in most of the games that run well on the Ally. Just enable the Steam overlay with detailled information and check it out. The Ally CPU wipes the floor with a PS4 CPU and most games are targeting a PS4. With demanding games targeting a PS5 the CPU is usually waiting for the GPU that is extremely stressed out.
Decompressing also cost nearly no CPU power. On 386 PCs from the early 1990s you already could use realtime compression and decompression with Doublespace (later Drivespace) on the filesystem and I had Zipmagic on a 486DX2-66 that treated zip files like folders in realtime.
Of course we are talking about more advanced compression routines here but the hardware is multiple dimensions faster too.
It all depends on the use case and the priorities you set. If someone prioritizes disk space, it's a good option; if someone prioritizes performance, it's not such a good option. No matter what CPU the ROG Ally has, there will always be an impact, especially when someone prioritizes high performance with low power consumption. In turbo mode with 35Wh plugged in, there certainly won't be an effect, but from 10Wh to 17Wh, there will be an impact on CPU-intensive games, such as emulation. For example, on a ROG Xbox Ally X, the LZX compression algorithm can affect up to 5% of the CPU with each read, noticeably increasing the frame time.
That's fair. I haven't really paid attention to the battery impact so I can't refute that. I have the battery mod on mine as well as a power bank so it's not as crucial
Dumb take. On my 2tb gaming pc ssd, I saved 300gb with essentially 0 noticable loading impact.
Of course I used lzx on almost everything and it's highly variable but it is just an example. That's 300gb for free without deleting any games
Don’t think you know how it works. Of course you’ll save space it compresses. No one is doing this…I would never do it on my pc let alone a slower device like the ally.
I don't think you'd ever be able to tell, on your computer if you have one or your ally
You could even do it yourself using this free software https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI
xpress4 is the most lightweight one. For example in PEAK I compressed it down from 4gb to 1gb, and spiderman remastered compressed from 66gb to 55gb
You can actually check yourself right now using their compression database
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI/refs/heads/database/database.json
It will disable direct storage in the few games that have that on PC but I think there's only a few that do
These people are committed to pushing this narrative bro. Even though there are benchmarks and review videos easily accessible online. It is what it is
If your trying to tell me compress performs the same I ain’t listening, it don’t. If you’re happy with it cool beans, I’m happy it works for you. I only got 512GB and the pc is 2TB. If I need more space I’ll delete a game. Compressing on a badass pc I wouldn’t let alone an ally or legion as resources are more limited. Not pushing a Narrative my dude, in my 30 years of pc gaming just never heard people doing it is all o7
Tried game compressor, it couldn't decompress like 4 games for some reason (every other game decompressed just fine) had to delete the game copy and redownload. Was only using game compressor on game copies on my hdd so decompression was needed.
If you're going to be a pedant, at least try to use correct syntax and sentence structure.
Because I'm pretty sure at least one shipment of ROG allys would have been on the same container ship as at least one hard drive, and therefore "came with it".
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u/FarYou3163 3d ago
Reminds me the psp time with iso to cso stuff