Steam is working on adding zstd compression for game chunks (every game file is split into 1MB), it currently uses LZMA.
Wonder how much of an overall improvement it will be.
Bet that’ll save Valve on some server costs too. Storage is much cheaper than compute (though I imagine they’ll probably keep LZMA around for clients on slow connections).
Hmm true. I was thinking that steam has a lot of games and respective builds it has to compress, even if the decompression benefits are clientside only.
Each new game update would also be compressed too - I have no idea how Steam handles the update to work out what files need replacing on their end though, which might involve decompressing the files to analyse them.
Bet that’ll save Valve on some server costs too. Storage is much cheaper than compute (though I imagine they’ll probably keep LZMA around for clients on slow connections).
Doesn’t decompression only happen client-side? I don’t imagine them compressing the files multiple times.
Hmm true. I was thinking that steam has a lot of games and respective builds it has to compress, even if the decompression benefits are clientside only.
Each new game update would also be compressed too - I have no idea how Steam handles the update to work out what files need replacing on their end though, which might involve decompressing the files to analyse them.