basis_universal VS fpng

The author of the OP also develops Basis, which is designed to take advantage of GPU texture compression formats. GPU formats have a fixed bitrate which makes them efficient to sample but not the most efficient to transmit, so Basis layers on a second level of compression that unpacks into a GPU texture.

https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

You might find https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal interesting :)

Erm, aren't both WebP and PNG rather useless for games? How do you convert those formats into one of the hardware-compressed texture formats consumed by the GPU (like BCx, ETC or ASTC)? Without those you're wasting a ton of GPU memory bandwidth when sampling textures.

(there are some alternatives, like https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal, or http://www.radgametools.com/oodletexture.htm)

In addition to this, texture compression is optimized for random access and has to use a fixed amount of bytes per each block, but there is a possibility to further compress this during the delivery. This is called the supercompression and Basis Universal is a good example of this. JPEG XL is also based on tiles for parallel decoding, but those tiles are too large (128x128 minimum, compare with 12x12 maximum of ASTC) so it is not yet suitable for GPU as it stands.

Im interested to see what image format specific compressors go gpu. JpegXL, AVIF, WebP... who wants to show up & throw down? Or even just fastpng?

Meanwhile we dont really hear or regard many of the gpu-oriented compression techs. TIL Basis/KTX2 is itself zstd compressed (formerly LZ apparently?). https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

You could check out Binomial's basis_universal. After Google bought them, they open sourced it and allowed use for free.

Another alternative you should consider is https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

Simple, open-source, standardized and supports every GPU-oriented format around. And, built-in library support for https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

Yep. That lib is great. And, similarly https://github.com/nfrechette/acl and https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

When the QOI format was first announced it wasn't clear that was even possible while keeping PNG format compatibility. But the fpng and fpnge C/C++ libraries showed it was, and today you can take advantage of those advances in a general purpose PNG library in Rust!

CRC is a table and 5 lines of code. That's trivial.

>zlib is 23k lines

It's not needed to make a PNG reader/writer. zlib is massive overkill for only making a PNG reader or writer. Here's a tiny deflate/inflate code [2] under 1k lines (and could be much smaller if needed).

stb[0] has single headers of ~7k lines total including all of the formats PNG, JPG, BMP,. PSD, GIF, HDR, and PIC. Here's [1] a 3k lines single file PNG version with tons if #ifdefs for all sorts of platforms. Removing those and I'd not be surprised if you could not do it in ~1k lines (which I'd consider quite simple compared to most of todays' media formats).

>Of course they're not common formats so you're stuck with complex formats like PNG

BMP is super common and easy to use anywhere.

I use flat image files all the time for quick and dirty stuff. They quickly saturate disk speeds and networking speeds (say recording a few decent speed cameras), and I've found PNG compression to alleviate those saturate CPU speeds (some libs are super slow, some are vastly faster). I've many times made custom compression formats to balance these for high performance tools when neither things like BMPs or things like PNG would suffice.

[0] https://github.com/nothings/stb

[1] https://github.com/richgel999/fpng/blob/main/src/fpng.cpp

[2] https://github.com/jibsen/tinf/tree/master/src

This was actually considered, and other libraries do ignore checksums, or at least have options to:

https://github.com/richgel999/fpng/issues/9

In the other direction, you can target a subset of PNG to get less optimized images but with QOI-like encode and decode speed: https://github.com/richgel999/fpng

On specific operations like screenshots for example the new version is WAY faster though. We were using stb_image_write.h but switched to fpng which promised 12-19x faster compression at smaller sizes. That and the fact that screenshot saving have now been given it's own thread so it now longer causes a small stutter like when it was on the main thread, means that screenshot are now near instantaneous.

I think QOI inspired the creation of https://github.com/richgel999/fpng which creates standard PNGs and compares itself directly to QOI.

BTW, today I found this fpng-fast PNG writer. There is a comparison with QOI in the readme.