ETC1 encoder performance on kodim18 at various quality/effort levels

I'm trying to get a handle on how the available ETC1 compressors perform, using their public API's, at their various quality or effort levels. This is only for a single image (kodim18 - my usual for quick tests like this).

First, here's the performance of etc2comp on kodim18, in ETC1-only mode, multithreading enabled, RGB Avg PSNR metrics, on effort levels [0,100] in increments of 5:


Efforts between roughly 40-65 seem to be the sweet spot. Effort=100 is obviously wasteful.

Here's another graph (can you tell I'm practicing my Excel graphing skills!), this time comparing the time and quality of various ETC1 (and now ETC2 - for etc2comp) compressors at different encoder quality/effort settings:



Important Notes:

• To be fair to Intel's ETC1 encoder (function CompressBlocksETC1()), which is not multithreaded, I added another bar labeled "ispc_etc1 MT" which has the total CPU time divided by 20 (to roughly match the speedup I'm seeing using 40 threads in the other natively multithreaded encoders). 
• basislib is now using a variant of cluster fit (see previous posts). basislib_1 is lowest quality, basislib_3 is highest. Notice that basislib_3 is only ~2X slower than Intel's SIMD code, but basislib doesn't use any SIMD at all.
• basislib and etc2comp both use 40 threads
• etcpak's timings are currently single threaded, because I'm still using a single threaded entrypoint inside the code (BlockData::Process()). It's on my TODO to fix this. IMHO unless you need a real-time ETC1 encoder I think it trades off too much quality. However, if you need a real-time encoder and don't mind the loss in quality it's your best bet. If the author added a few optional SIMD-optimized cluster fit trials in there it would probably kick ass.

To get an idea how efficient etc2comp currently is at scanning the ETC1 search space for kodim18, let's see what effort level (and how much CPU time) etc2comp takes to approximately match two other encoder's quality levels:

• basislib Cluster Fit (64 trials out of 165): .115 secs 35.917 dB