Any way to compress game files on linux? I know that all games vary, content vary and so on, but is there any things i can look out for in like an average steam game which I can compress, and the game can still run fine, tools or programs or anything?
Have you measured the difference? Is it huge? I’m curious to understand what the trade-offs are and how many more games can you store on the same drive.
My main goals are efficient space usage and portability, so I’ve never measured anything. I’ll get some stats for you.
I would appreciate even not very accurate comparison just to get the idea. A brief search meanwhile showed me it’s a great idea actually. But having someone who uses that to comment would be great too. Thanks.
I’ll be away for a while, but I’ll get some stats, because now I’m also curious.
No problem, take your time. Feel free to comment on here, or in private, whatever you’re comfortable with.
Turns out that you have to explicitly mount btrfs with the option compress=zstd (or compress=lzo as you prefer) to get any compression done, and I was not doing that. Also, to apply compression to existing data, you have to defragment with compression enabled. Alternatively, you can create a subvolume and set the compression property.
This explains it quite well.
It’s nice to have you back! Thanks for letting me know! I’m glad my curiosity triggered you to discover this thing. Net positive for both of us! :)
Depends on the game. A title like dota will have a lot of savings (tens of gigabytes last I checked it). Most other games it seems don’t have obviously and easily compressible assets from a generic compression algorithm, and therefore will yield extremely minor savings.
Checked some installed games. DotA is down to 36 gb from 67. Almost 54% the original size.
RoboCop rogue city is 37->37gb. Negligible savings.
Btrfs is usually last in perf benchmarks, so I wouldn’t do it myself
in fact, I have regretted using btrfs because it made my laptop noticeably slower
the phoronix benchmark posted in this thread uses artificial loads and doesn’t compare performance against other file systems, just compression on vs off for btrfs