RAR offers better (smaller) compression than ZIP. The free RAR archiver happens to also be capable of handling ZIP formats and a large variety of other common compression formats. RARLab isn't "third party", it's actively supported, it's been around on many platforms and operating systems for many years and will be around for many more - WinRAR and Comparison of File Archivers on Wikipedia - but most people have only heard about ZIP instead simply because WinZip (along with numerous predecessors and successors, extensions, tools, and add-ons) are heavily marketed commercial software.

You may or may not have had a dedicated ZIP archiver (like WinZip) already installed on your PC. And you would never really need it anyhow: simple ZIP compression is built into Windows (as of WinXP-SP1, anyhow). WinRAR can also do the same job just as easily, a little faster, and much better.

7zip, much better than Winzip.

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Then just download a non-RAR version of the Afterburner software, lol, ZIP-compressed version from the official site. Most drivers and software are available in executable or non-executable formats - executable things will directly run in your OS or browser to setup and launch the thing, non-executables are usually compressed into a single package which the user needs to manually uncompress and install/run. ZIP is perhaps the most common compression format (because it's built into Windows), but sometimes RAR or other things are chosen instead (because they compress into smaller, more efficient packages). Maybe the guys at MSI chose this format yesterday, that one today, another one tomorrow - things change.

7Zip is indeed better than WinZip. And 7Zip is vastly inferior to WinRAR (which can handle all 7Zip formats). Although 7Zip is completely free, while WinZip and WinRAR can be used for free indefinitely but they are commercial wares and will start to relentlessly bug you for registration/payments after a while.