Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

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Cororon
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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by Cororon » July 9th, 2019, 10:20 am

.package files are compressed files, but are they more like WinRar or 7-Zip? I wonder because I'm reading reviews of the new AMD processors and look at how well they compress and decompress WinRar and 7-Zip files, but I don't know what .package files would compare to. Reviews like this: https://www.techspot.com/review/1869-am ... zen-3700x/

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by igazor » July 9th, 2019, 11:54 am

If there is any correlation to be had, that would more likely be to the process we use to create and add content to package files such as by merging. Not for their overall usage by the game. I'm not sure even that is entirely relevant to the compression processes being discussed there, though.

I guess usage patterns differ, but I don't see myself creating and dissecting very large and complicated package files on a daily or other routine basis nor do I typically go around Rar-ing or 7z-ing incredibly huge file collections on a regular basis like a professional graphics designer might need to do. What I believe they are doing is benchmarking the processes under discussion to demonstrate the advantages of one series of processors over another generally.

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by Cororon » July 9th, 2019, 12:49 pm

A hardware site compared the loading time for a game when they used a fast CPU and a slower one, the rest being equal. The difference was 25%. It's not that noticeable for most games, because they load pretty quickly, but for me and Sims 3 that would mean several minutes. They explained it by saying that a fast SSD can only make games load faster up to a point, and then the CPU will bottleneck it because of all the decompression of game files going on when the game is loading.

I'm sure that any good modern CPU will be better than my almost ten year old Phenom II X6 1100T, but it would be interesting to know what type of test I should look at when I want a processor that is fast at decompressing/compressing files. I know, most gamers are only interested in the frames-per-second stuff, but I'm mainly a simmer and don't really play that many other games. :P I have most of the parts for my next PC, and have only the motherboard and CPU left (I'm going AMD).

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by igazor » July 9th, 2019, 1:35 pm

I didn't mean to imply that faster, stronger CPUs do not have a very positive impact on game load time, package file read efficiency, and performance. Quite the contrary. What I meant was, I don't think there is a direct way to mathematically correlate the precise kinds of decompression routines being benchmarked to that of package files and the game's operations to yield statistically meaningful results to show which metric is a "better" one to be looking at for comparison purposes.

But I could be mistaken, I don't have any scientific data one way or the other, and would be happy to be corrected by anyone who has found otherwise.

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by Cororon » July 9th, 2019, 2:16 pm

I just thought it was worth mentioning, because it isn't widely talked about. Yeah, I get what you say. I wondered if maybe EA used an already existing compression method or at least based on or similar to those two, like 7z with .package as an extention. :)

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by SimAd » July 17th, 2019, 7:45 am

The .package files aren't so much of a compressed format, as far as I've noticed, but they are indeed a sort of "package" telling the game what it is and where it should go/how it should be processed.

My own impression is that the game does a LOT of processing, I remember looking at saving/loading games and I noticed actual "disk time" was a surprisingly small part of the time needed to save/load a game. An SSD does make a difference, because of its low latency, but my impression is the vast majority of the time goes into stuffing the contents of the package into the appropriate place in memory and making all the necessary linkages. Of course, that is totally different from a (relatively) simple decompression.

I can think of reasons to recommend a fast CPU, but I'm not sure Sims is one of them. My Core I7 875K @ 3,8 GHz may be old but it still packs quite some punch, but loading an old game can take up to 10 minutes or more (from SSD). Sims 3 isn't very efficient, you can't live without at least enough RAM (at least 6GB for the total system if you do nothing else than play Sims) but for the rest there isn't much you can do. Also, it runs on a single core, modern CPUs have lots of cores but that's meaningless for the game.

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by Chain_Reaction » July 17th, 2019, 4:38 pm

Indeed package files are a database. However there is some compression occurring. For example, if you export all files with S3PE, the total size is larger. Of course some of this is S3PE writing metadata to allow easier human readability but certain file types are indeed compressed. The game uses 2 different compression methods depending on the size of the data. I guess you could say it's more like rar since rar uses special formats per data type where as zip is a one size fits all deal. However it doesn't have recovery data like rar so you can't quite make the comparison and I'd bet the methods aren't nearly as efficient given EA wrote them. But yes, the compression is but one of the reasons it uses little disk. Most things get dumped into memory thus exacerbating the 32 bit limit.

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by Cororon » July 20th, 2019, 2:26 am

Thanks for the replies! Hm, yeah, if Sims 3 isn't very efficient I wonder if I'm chasing seconds instead of minutes. I bought a good SSD two years or so ago (Samsung 850 Pro), but while it sped up loading Windows and made my PC snappier it didn't really make Sims 3 load faster. Maybe it did, but nothing that I noticed.

I kinda want the best processor, the Ryzen 3900X. It's about $200 more than the 3700X but might not make a difference for loading Sims 3. Especially if the extra cores don't matter for this game. :huh:And those NVMe SSD's are much faster than SATA SSD, but not for normal PC use and loading games. I have 16 GB RAM now and that should be enough for my next PC as well.

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by Cororon » July 21st, 2019, 4:26 am

Oh, forgot to ask: Does Sims 3 only use one core even when loading, or does it use more cores when loading and one core when running?

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Are .package files more like WinRar or 7-Zip?

Post by igazor » July 21st, 2019, 12:19 pm

We've always been told that TS3 "makes use of" and "is programmed to use" two cores, though I'm not sure it's ever been broken down into what the two cores are used for exactly. Quad core and higher processors are still helpful as those would allow system and other processes to use the others available to them.

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