Updated Basis Universal Yields High Quality Compression, 3~4x Smaller Than JPEG/PNG

For those wondering what the buzz was about earlier this month when there was word of a high quality GPU compression codec going open-source, details on that have now been revealed.

Google and Binomial announced a high quality update to the Basis Universal texture compression format suited for web use-cases. The new high quality Basis Universal codec aims to support the modern high quality format of today's GPUs while having transcoding support for falling back to older GPUs. Images compressed with the new format are three to four times smaller than sending a JPEG or PNG file. The quality of this updated Basis Universal implementation is much greater than what previously has been available while still seeing widespread adoption by the likes of Godot and other game engines and software packages.

Binomial and Google are working to standardize the Basis Universal format within The Khronos Group.

More details on this achievement via the Google Open-Source Blog. The code is available via GitHub.