I’ve been using WinRAR and 7-zip on stuff enough to give a guideline on which is better on which.
7-Zip
Ultra Compression, LZMA, 64MB dictionary, 273byte wordsize
NWN2 Modules that have Exterior Areas (3D-freehand)
Civ4 and Orbiter Addons (Many .dds files)
X-Plane addons over 16MB (marginal or slightly in favor of WinRAR for addons<8MB)
Source code files
Misc. Text Files
Office documents (none have macros)
SQL Server Database backup files
.csv and other delimited text files
Entire Application directories over 8MB
WinRAR
Best Compression; 4096byte dictionary; Prediction Order 63 + 128MB memory for text files
NWNW2 Modules Lacking Exterior Areas (All Interior/tileset)
.exe and DLL files
.bmp and .wav files
8 and 16-bit console/handheld roms and GBA + N64 ROMs
Precompressed installer .exe, .msi, and .rtp files (.zip is best for highly compressed ones)
Notes
7-Zip is open source, but it is more bound to the windows OS than WinRAR is.
7-Zip wants lots more RAM and is about half as fast as WinRAR
Don’t worry about speed. If you want speed, use PKZip 4.5+ at compression level 3, or THOR if it is pre-tarred or just a single file.
7-Zip gets free benefit on very large archives (contents >16MB, especially >100MB) because it’s dictionary can be up to 128MB. WinRAR is limited to 4MB. PKZip 2.04g was 32KB, and deflate64 is 64KB.
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on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
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