I did some performance tests on an uncompressed 3.75 gb TIF file, 8 bit, single layer.
Photoshop PSB (compressed): 0:15 min, 3.03 gb
Photoshop TIF (ZIP): 40 min (!), 1.16 gb
Gimp TIF (ZIP): 4 min, 1.2 gb
I tested a 1.35 gb source file of the same image at lower resolution and both Photoshop and Gimp take 3 minutes to compress the file to TIF ZIP.
Then I duplicated the single layer to get two identical layers and saved as PSB and uncompressed TIFF. The PSB file came out at double the size (2.69 gb), quite expected. The uncompressed TIFF with RLE layer compression could not be created, though, with PS claiming to hit the 4 gb file size limit?! Using uncompressed TIFF with ZIP layer compression came out at 2.75 gb.
Next was ZIP compressed TIFF with RLE layer compression. This came out at 3.37 gb and only took 3:20 min even while a compressed image backup of my system was done in the background (SSD to NAS). Last was ZIP compressed TIFF with ZIP layer compression, resutling in 2.1 gb and tool 4:20 min (backup was mostly done by that time).
So what about the 40 (fourty) minutes ZIP TIFF save I reported earlier? That was at higher image dimensions (pixels). Turns out that Photoshop's ZIP compression performance drops *dramatically* when pixel count increases. And by that I do not mean that it takes longer to write more data, but data write speed drops significantly.
For example, my 19200 x 25200 px test image writes at 3.5 to 6 mb/s average. Changing dimensions to 25200 x 25200 px decreases write-rate to below 1.5 mb/s average. And it drops further in big steps the higher the resolution. The 40 min test file was 32000 x 42000 and write speed dropped below 0.5 mb/s average.
The same large resolution file exported from Gimp writes at about the same 3.5 - 6 mb/s average that the smaller file did, thus Gimp only takes longer for the larger file, because more data has to be written, not because it calculates slower.
So ZIP compressing layers to get around the 4 gb TIFF limit should work, but you have to watch your image resolution.