Andrew Peterson points out performance comparisons for various Hadoop file formats:
According to a posting on the Hortonworks site, both the compression and the performance for ORC files are vastly superior to both plain text Hive tables and RCfile tables. For compression, ORC files are listed as 78% smaller than plain text files. And for performance, ORC files support predicate pushdown and improved indexing that can result in a 44x (4,400%) improvement. Needless to say, for Hive, ORC files will gain in popularity. (you can read the posting here: ORC File in HDP 2: Better Compression, Better Performance).
There are several considerations around picking the correct file format, and it’s probably best to experiment with them in your specific environment.