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Fitgirl repack? What exactly is it?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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Do you want a simple answer?
fitgirl repacks attempt to stress your cpu/gpu to the maximum and try to overheat your beloved PC, by making the data for the game astronomically compressed to the point where the decompression time can actually take longer than the time to download the original crack on USENET by as much as 4-8x.
If you have USENET, don't even bother. If you have unlimited Data on your ISP, just torrent the un-"packed" version. You will thank me in the longer time. Its not worth it in most cases.
Here is an example of a 75GB repack that makes it 56GB:
Did the time it took you to save <20GB download save you the additional 1.5 hrs to decompress?!
Okay, if the repack is under 20-30GB, its probably worth a shot. But even then...
Fair point if you have a high speed connection. But if your system overheats during decompression, the fault lies with your shitty technical skills instead of the repack. Clean your rig, man.
According to your example anyone with a Download rate below 3.5MB/s would still benefit from the compression. The 4-8x is also a lot of BS, assuming 10MB/s you'd be looking at 3x. For 4-8x you'd need 12-24MB/s. It's pretty ignorant to assume those speeds are common, let alone the standard for most people.
Besides what kind of potato CPU do you have that it takes 1.5hrs to decompress a 56GB repack? A quad core from 2013? That's about how long it takes to compress that amount of data to that extent, decompression is usually a lot faster.
Edit: looking at your screenshot instead of just the text, my quad core assumption was right on the mark.
Pretty, hypocritical to assume metropolitan internet speeds paired with a potato PC to make your point seem better than it is no?
I couldn't find the example I had in mind, but it was something that was over 120GB. and the unpack was 8+hrs on what is arguably a reasonable PC.
You forget most people do not have a CPU that has 24 threads, 12 cores. And on top of that, the amount of RAM required can be questioned. If you think your 64GB RAM and 16/32 CPU are "normal" then you are just kidding yourself, and its probably not your money you are spending on it to but it.
Then on top of that, most people have an ISP that can reach far higher speeds than you propose. Mine is a basic minimum of 25MB/s as a basic minimum. I'm sorry to hear that you cannot get even that, but that is as common as muck in most western civilised worlds.
As someone who only recently moved to somewhere with gigabit internet. At 15Mb/s (mind the mahoosive difference between megabits and megabytes), I can say I very much prospered from the significantly smaller repacks, not to mention the ease of mind of knowing my games were coming from a safe source. That said, even when living in the geographical 90s, my hardware was still competent. Even when I was running an i5 3470, I never encountered a decompression + installation time of more than 3 hours. I'm now running a hexacore Ryzen with 32G RAM and would struggle to use a whole hand for the amount of times I've spent more than a couple of hours on a Fitgirl installation so I'm not sure what you're doing wrong but it's not the repack.
Hoo boy. let's unpack this.
I'm not arguing high-specs are the norm, I'm arguing a quad core paired with fiver speeds is not the norm, even less so a quad core with a slow hdd and fiber speeds.
Most people will not see the 30 minute decompress time, neither will they see 1h 30m of it. No, most people will sot somewhere around 1h of decompression.
Regarding your comment on internet speeds:
The US Median in 2023 was 190~ MBps according to Ookla. Keyword being median. Median means that this is the ~~average excluding the top and bottom 1th percentile~~ 50th percentile, so exactly the middle of all measured speeds (thanks for the correction apotheotic). Meaning roughly half of the US gets slower speeds than that. Besides the rest of the "civilized" world (I can only assume you're american given the idiocy of that statement) has average speeds ranging from 100 to 200 MBps, the US is on the higher end there. Assuming everyone gets your "baseline" of 25MB/s is, again, pretty ignorant given that it is above average in a country with pretty high average speeds to begin with.
I'm not saying that 3.5MB/s is a common download speed to have, I was stating that it's the cutoff where it makes sense for a potato pc to use the repack. That number will be higher for a more average PC (Steam hardware survey has most people using 6-cores, with only a few percent using a 4-core over an 8-core for example). With a more "average" PC the cutoff speed would likely be around 6MB/s, which is ~1/3 of the Average US speed. It's easy to get there with other traffic congesting the line (like YouTube because what else are you going to do while that crack downloads) especially if you are not living alone and are sharing the connection with one or more other people.
I wanna say, I agree with you, but that's not at all the definition of median. A median is the middle most data point assuming you sort the data points in order. It might be that for this analysis they've chosen to omit the top and bottom 1% and then take the median of the remaining data, but that's certainly not the definition of a median.
you're right I meant to write mean not median
Edit: nope data said median
The mean would also not correspond to that definition, as the mean is just the way we would usually think of an average (add the data points together and divide by the number of data points).
The removal of the top and bottom 1% of the data isn't relevant to whether its a mean, median, or mode - its just a good way of getting a more representative measure of the population by excluding outliers. Often one might take what's called an "inter-quartile mean", the average excluding the top and bottom 25% of the data. In significantly large datasets (ie, the size of whole populations), it may be enough to simply exclude the top and bottom 1%!
Either way, your sentiment is in the right place, I just like maths and it's worthwhile making sure everyone is using the same words for the same things 😄
Well to be fair compression/decompression is EXTREMELY CPU intensive even on newest hardware. It was always that way and will always stay that way probably. The more you compress the longer and more CPU intensive it is to decompress No matter if your pc is 10 years old or if it's a rack server with newest hardware
Well yeah computer works computer gets hot that's how it works😂
I think everyone has different opinions about fitgirl repacks back when I hat a more shitty pc it was really sometimes hell to unpack it sadly it took for a couple of games more than 24 hours. But it was getting there I guess the main reason was obviously an old slow HDD for that but at that time I had no clue 😅
I mean yeah, decompression is resource intensive, but it's still retarded to say that the goal of it is to overstress your computer, especially considering that any reasonable setup will throttle itself before just burning up
I totally agree it is quiet dumb. The only thing that wants to stress/overheat your computer are stress tests and that's their job. And yeah 99,99% of hardware will thermal throttle either way so there's no way to really do permanent harm to It
I believe this is becoming less and less true with modern algorithms. Take for example ZSTD: while the compression speeds differs by several orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest modes, the decompression difference is only about 20%. The same holds true for flac, where the decompression speed is pretty uniform across all compression levels.
These algorithms probably aren’t used by repacked like fitgirl (so your answer is generally correct in the context of repacks). I do believe it is still interesting to see these new developments in compression techniques.
Definitely! I cannot even imagine what compression algorithm we have in a couple of years. They are probably much better and less CPU intensive while also giving other benefits I can imagine. But as always that's for the future ;D
Based on the response to your answer I think I'll disregard what you said entirely
Depends on one's downloading speed and cpu, Id much rather use a repacker on ADSL with a good pc