We’ve seen 7z come on the top of file compression benchmarks time and time again. The winner by pure compression is 7z, which isn’t surprising to us. 7z (7-Zip): 734 MB (85% of the original size) RAR (WinRAR): 746 MB (86.4% of the original size)
Zip (WinZip): 745 MB (86.3% of the original size) Zip (Windows 8.1): 746 MB (86.4% of the original size) Games incorporate graphics, music, text files, executables, and various other different types of files, so they’re a good real-world dataset with various different types of files.įirst, we installed Bastion and compressed its folder - about 863 MB in size of music, graphics, executable files, and various different types of documents: Rather than messing with some of the usual file types here - like Word DOCX documents, which already use a form of Zip compression, and JPG images, which also use a form of compression - we decided to compress a few installed PC games. We stuck with popular applications at their default compression settings to simplify things.
How much compression you achieve will depend not only the on the archive type you create, but on the application you use to compress it and the settings you use. Some of these formats are just easier to use because they’re integrated into desktop operating systems, while some require third-party software.
It’s time to compress some files, so what format do you use? Zip, RAR, 7z, or something else? We performed some benchmarks to determine which format gives you maximum compression.Ĭompression ratio isn’t the only factor, of course.