ETC1 and ETC1/2 Texture Compressor Benchmark

(This is a "sticky" blog post. I'll keep this page up to date as interesting or important events happen. Examples: When a new practical ETC encoder gets released, or when ETC codecs are significantly updated.)

The main purpose behind this particular benchmark is to conduct a deep survey of every known practical ETC1/2 encoder, so I can be sure basislib's ETC1 and universal encoders are very high quality. I want to closely understand where this space is at, and where it's going. This is exactly what I did while writing crunch. I need a very high quality, stable, and scalable ETC1/2 block parameter optimizer that works with potentially many thousands of input pixels. rg_etc1's internal ETC1 optimizer is the only thing I have right now that solves this problem.

I figured this data would be very useful to other developers, so here's a highest achievable quality benchmark of the following four practical ETC1/2 compressors:

• etc2comp: A full-featured ETC1/2 encoder developed by engineers at Blue Shift and sponsored by Google. Supports both RGB and perceptual error metrics.
• etcpak: Extremely fast, ETC1 and partial ETC2 (planar blocks only), RGB error metrics only
• Intel ISPC Texture Compressor: A very fast ETC1 compressor, RGB error metrics only
• basislib ETC1: An updated version of my open source ETC1 block encoder, rg_etc1. Supports both RGB and perceptual error metrics (unlike rg_etc1).

The test files were  ~1,500 .PNG textures from the larger test corpus I used to tune crunch. Each texture was compressed using each encoder, then unpacked using rg_etc1 modified to support the 3 new ETC2 block types (planar, T, and H).

Benchmarking like this is surprisingly tricky. The API's to all the encoders are different, most are not well documented, and even exactly how you compute PSNR (because there are multiple definitions each with slightly different equations) isn't super well defined. Please see the "developer feedback" notes below.

I've sanity checked these results by writing .KTX files, converting them to .PNG using Mali's GPU Texture Compression Tool (which thankfully worked, because the .KTX format is iffy when it comes to interchange), then computing PSNR's using ImageMagick's "compare" tool. Thanks to John Brooks at Blue Shift for helping me verify the data for etc2comp, and helping me track down and fix the effort=100.0 issue in the first release of this benchmark.

I also have performance statistics, which I'll cover in a future post. The perf. data I have for etcpak isn't usable for accurate timing right now, because the etcpak code I'm calling is only single threaded and includes some I/O.

This first graph compares all four compressors in ETC1 mode, using RGB (average) PSNR.

Error Metric: Avg. RGB

ETC1:

The next graph enables ETC2 support in the encoders that support it, currently just etc2comp and etcpak:

ETC1/2:

etc2comp in ETC2 mode really shines at the lower quality levels. At below approximately 32 dB it appears the minimum expected quality improvement from ETC2 is significant. Above ~32 dB, the minimum expected improvement drops down a bit, closer to ETC1's quality level. (Which seems to make sense, as ETC2 was designed to better handle blocks that ETC1 is weak at.)

etcpak doesn't support T and H blocks, so it suffers a lot here. This is why it's very important to pay attention to benchmarks like this one, because quality (even in ETC2-capable or aware compressors) can highly vary between libraries.

Error Metric: Perceptual

[IN PROGRESS]

Developer Feedback

• ISPC: I had to copy ispc.exe into your project directory for it to build in my VS2015 solution. That brought down the "out of the box" experience of getting your stuff into my solution. On the upside, your API was dead simple to figure out and was very "pure" - as it should be. (However, you should rename "stride" to "stride_in_bytes". I've seen at least one programmer get it wrong and I had to help them.)
• etcpak: Can you add a single API to do compression with multithreading, like etc2comp? And have it return a double of how much time it takes to actually execute, excluding file I/O stuff. Your codec is so fast than I/O times will seriously skew the statistics.
• etc2comp: Hey, ETC1 is still extremely important. Both Intel, basislib, and rg_etc1 have higher ETC1 quality than etc2comp. Also, could you add some defines like this to etc.h so developers know how to correctly call the public Etc::Encode() API:

#define ETCCOMP_MIN_EFFORT_LEVEL (0.0f)

#define ETCCOMP_DEFAULT_EFFORT_LEVEL (40.0f)

#define ETCCOMP_MAX_EFFORT_LEVEL (100.0f)

Notes

• 9/20: I fixed etc2comp's "effort" setting, added Intel's compressor, and removed the perceptual graphs (for now) to speed things up.
• 9/20: Changed title and purpose of this post to a sticky benchmark page. I'm now moving into the public texture compression benchmarking space - why not? It's fun!