ETC2Comp: fast texture compression for games and VR

For mobile game and VR developers the ETC2 texture format has become an increasingly valuable tool for texture compression. It produces good on-GPU sizes (it stays compressed in memory) and higher quality textures (compared to its ETC1 counterpart).

These benefits come with a significant downside, however: ETC2 textures take significantly longer to compress than their ETC1 counterparts. As adoption of the ETC2 format increases in a project, so do build times. As such, developers have had to make the classic choice between quality and time.

We wanted to eliminate the need for developers to make that choice, so we’ve released ETC2Comp, a fast and high quality ETC2 encoder for games and VR developers.

ETC2 takes a long time to compress textures because the format defines a large number of possible combinations for encoding a block in the texture. To find the most perfect, highest quality compressed image means brute-forcing this incredibly large number of combinations, which clearly is not a time efficient option.

We designed ETC2Comp to get the same visual results at much faster speeds by deploying a few optimization techniques:

Directed Block Search. Rather than a brute-force search, ETC2Comp uses a much more limited, targeted search for the best encoding for a given block. ETC2Comp comes with a precomputed set of archetype blocks, where each archetype is associated with a sorted list of the ETC2 block format types that provide its best encodings. During the actual compression of a texture, each block is initially assigned an archetype, and multiple passes are done to test the block against its block format list to find the best encoding. As a result, the best option can be found much quicker than with a brute-force method.

Full effort setting. During each pass of the encoding process, all the blocks of the image are sorted by their visual quality (worst-looking to best-looking). ETC2Comp takes an effort parameter whose value specifies what percentage of the blocks to update during each pass of encoding. An effort value of 25, for instance, means that on each pass, only the 25% worst looking blocks are tested against the next format in their archetypes' format-chains. The result is a tradeoff between optimizing blocks that already look good, and the time it takes to do it.

Highly multi-threaded code. Since blocks can be evaluated independently during each pass, it’s straightforward to apply multithreading to the work. During encoding ETC2comp can take advantage of available parallel threads, and it even accepts a jobs parameter, where you can define exactly the number of threads you’d like it to use... in case you have a 256 core machine.

Check out the code on GitHub to get started with ETC2Comp and let us know what you think. You can use the tool from the command line or embed the C++ library in your project. If you want to know more about what’s going on under the hood, check out this blog post.

By Colt McAnlis, Developer Advocate