windows NTFS compression

[aminmehdipour2014]

how much CPU does it use when you open files or run games that are compressed by windows? does decompressing game files make it run faster? specially in games like Assassin's creed: Origins. can it help with the bottlenecking?

 

[jasonkaler]

There are many factors here and the only way to be sure is to test it, but here's some factors to consider:

A lot of loading in games is textures or video, which is already compressed, so compression will do nothing in those cases.
Also, because bandwidth and therefore file size is a cost to the vendor, most will compress all their game files.

Compression can only help when it's your hard drive that's bottlenecking the system. If either RAM or CPU are under high use, compression will make everything slower.

So, basically, compression will usually not even work with a game, but if it does, the odds are that it will make things slower.

 

[BFG-9000]

Very little, because NTFS compression is, by design, not very compact or CPU-intensive. Tom's did a test and concluded compression of an entire OS drive doesn't really impair performance. On the other hand this also means you don't get much extra space--compressing an XP system disk only gets you 12.5% more space. Windows 7 is a bit more compressible so you get 17.5% more. Windows 10 files are already compressed so you get about nothing.

If the disk is particularly slow then compressing it can indeed make reads faster, but most people ask about disk compression because their small SSD is running out of space. In that case reads can only be slower, plus you end up with more writes to the SSD because even a 1-byte change to any file will result in rewriting ALL 64k blocks holding the compressed version of that file.