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by dontlaugh 239 days ago
Exactly. Guaranteed SSDs and a spare CPU core have made compression almost always faster.
1 comments

Being able to rely on fast storage makes compression less necessary for performance reasons. But the higher price/GB of SSDs mean users have a stronger preference for games to keep the install size under control.
There was a time when console games would avoid disc seeks at all costs, even duplicating uncompressed assets. Compression can easily interfere with laying data out in blocks to read sequentially.

That’s not a problem with SSDs and most machines have more cores or even dedicated hardware decoders. Of course it’s also more worthwhile to compress since SSD storage is comparatively more expensive.