Comment by fizzbuzzbarbazz
3 hours ago
I think you misunderstood his question.
Given two files, a compressed file which must be uncompressed to play, and an uncompressed one which does not require extra processing - why would the game ever bother uncompressing te compressed file when the same data is already available uncompressed?
There's no true use case for that that I can see.
With hard disks, I could see reading the compressed version from disk and decompressing giving you the bytes faster than reading the uncompressed version. With SSDs that advantage likely went away.
Yep. If you had the CPU overhead available, you could speed up your entire computer by enabling full-disk compression and then defragmenting. It's difficult to accurately describe just how slow it was to move data to and from a spinning platter over a PATA interface.
I would guess to save on installed size?
It's not about size or file count or disk space consumed. The question is about why would you require the extra overhead of playing the compressed version which involves decompressing it on the fly in some way, versus just playing the already decompressed version.
In this case it was stated that both the compressed and decompressed versions live side by side. So there is no install size saved.