Well, I'm done for tonight. Results so far haven't ben terribly promising. I was going to do a run of RK (which, from old tests I've seen, supposedly kicks the crap out of everything else) tonight, but it looked like it was likely to take over an hour, and I'd like to get some sleep rather than wait to time it. I'll edit this message when I get more information.
Compression tests were performed on a system with an Athlon XP 1800+, 768MB DDR SDRAM, and a Maxtor 45GB IDE HDD. YMMV.
All options are set to their defaults unless otherwise noted.
Compression programs used
=========================
WinRAR
------
Version: 3.00 Beta 1
Platform: Win32
Other Supported Platforms: Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, MS-DOS, OS/2
License: Nagware, free fully functional download
URL: http://www.rarsoft.com
WinACE
------
Version: 2.11
Platform: Win32
Other Supported Platforms: Linux, DOS
License: Shareware, free fully functional download
URL: http://www.winace.com
7-Zip
-----
Version: 2.30b12
Platform: Win32
Other Supported Platforms: None? (source is available, so independent ports are possible)
License: GNU LGPL
URL: http://www.7-zip.com
RK
--
Version: 1.04.1 Alpha
Platform: Win32
Other Supported Platforms: None?
The tests:
Street Fighter Zero 3
---------------------
Format: BIN
Uncompressed: 625,465,008
WinRAR (Best, 1% recovery record): 463,491,594 (74.1%); Approx. 9:42 (9:15 before recovery record)
WinACE (Maximum, recovery record, 4096K dictionary): 456,617,211 (73%); 16:55
7-Zip (7z Format, Maximum): 505,338,708 (80.79%); 24:33