etcpak 1.0

(Updated 2022-06-04)

The fastest ETC compressor on the planet

etcpak is an extremely fast Ericsson Texture Compression and S3 Texture Compression (DXT1/DXT5) utility. Currently it's best suited for rapid assets preparation during development, when graphics quality is not a concern, but it's also used in production builds of applications used by millions of people.

Compression times

Benchmark performed on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, using a real-life RGBA 16K × 16K atlas.

ETC1: ST: 407 Mpx/s, MT: 6730 Mpx/s
ETC2: ST: 222 Mpx/s, MT: 3338 Mpx/s
DXT1: ST: 2688 Mpx/s, MT: 8748 Mpx/s
DXT5: ST: 1281 Mpx/s, MT: 6667 Mpx/s

The same benchmark performed on Intel i7 1185G7:

ETC1: ST: 463 Mpx/s, MT: 2189 Mpx/s
ETC2: ST: 229 Mpx/s, MT: 1003 Mpx/s
DXT1: ST: 2647 Mpx/s, MT: 9173 Mpx/s
DXT5: ST: 1294 Mpx/s, MT: 5517 Mpx/s

ARM benchmark performed on Odroid C2, using the same atlas:

ETC1: ST: 23.6 Mpx/s, MT: 90.6 Mpx/s
ETC2: ST: 12.3 Mpx/s, MT: 48.4 Mpx/s
DXT1: ST: 93.2 Mpx/s, MT: 346 Mpx/s
DXT5: ST: 68.5 Mpx/s, MT: 256 Mpx/s

Why there's no image quality metrics? / Quality comparison.

Decompression times

etcpak can also decompress ETC1, ETC2, DXT1 and DXT5 textures. Timings on Ryzen 5950X (all single-threaded):

ETC1: 385 Mpx/s
ETC2: 358 Mpx/s
DXT1: 653 Mpx/s
DXT5: 515 Mpx/s

i7 1185G7:

ETC1: 344 Mpx/s
ETC2: 324 Mpx/s
DXT1: 1012 Mpx/s
DXT5: 720 Mpx/s

Odroid C2:

ETC1: 48.9 Mpx/s
ETC2: 44.4 Mpx/s
DXT1: 104 Mpx/s
DXT5: 84.5 Mpx/s

To give some perspective here, Nvidia in-driver ETC2 decoder can do only 42.5 Mpx/s.

Quality comparison

Original image:

Compressed image:

ETC1: ETC2:

More information