this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 77 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (15 children)

Note plenty FitGirl repacks are lossless; as in, she isn't taking less important files out of the game, she's compressing it better. 90GB→35GB seems accurate; you often see ~1/3 of the original size, like this. And it shows plenty game devs

  1. do an extremely bad job at basic tasks like compression.
  2. give no flying fucks about players, who might have really slow connections.

And then those same developers get amazed at the fact FitGirl is so popular. "Maybe we're doing something wrong? ...nah."

[–] fiestorra@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I wouldn't really say that. The kind of extreme compression Fitgirl does comes with the tradeoff of really long decompression times. Depending on which games, nearly 45 minutes (with a 7800x3D)

Some games lack compression but I would not want those long install times by default, if you have a speedy internet connection they usually take longer to install than to download. Don't get me wrong, for people with really slow internet those repacks are a godsend but they are not "better" on every aspect.

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 12 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Steam gets around this problem by doing the decompressing on the fly as you download. Go check out your CPU usage next time you install a game.

Edit: I think this is also why it defaults to not downloading while you game. Steam doesn't want you to have a bad experience from the decompression.

[–] Timbits@lemmy.ca 7 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

More like check your hdd. Steam goes like this for me download, download, download, pause downloading to extract and smash my hdd, download, download, downloand.

[–] bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah I think it ends up waiting for slower storage if your cpu or HDD are too slow. I experience that with slower sdcards on the Deck.

But on a decent NVMe with a balanced CPU the download and disk are full bore and the CPU usage goes really high.

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Ahh yeah this could be. My system isn't by any means crazy but it is modern. A tuned 5600x (draws about 115W at full load) and an nvme 3.0 ssd. I'm being bottlenecked by internet bandwidth at the moment.

collapsed inline media

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Is this why steam is so insanely slow to download games.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago

It can be, spinning iron has pretty bad throughput.

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 1 points 3 hours ago

Could be a variety of things but yes. It also depends on the game and how compressible it's assets are.

[–] thejoker954@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Honestly I can't remember the last time a fitgirl release took longer to install than an 'official' copy.

And pretty much as long as I've had a computer it's been "bottom of the barrel" hardware.

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