Original Image by Erol Ahmed from Unsplash.com

Visual comparison of Basis Universal High Quality





By Stephanie Hurlburt, Binomial and Jamieson Brettle, Chrome Media





Today, Google and Binomial are excited to announce the high quality update to the original Basis Universal release.Basis Universal allows you to have state of the art web performance with your images, keeping images compressed even on the GPU. Older systems like JPEG and PNG may look small in storage size, but once they hit the GPU they are processed as uncompressed data! The original Basis Universal codec created images that were 6-8 times smaller than JPEG on the GPU while maintaining a similar storage size.Today we release a high quality Basis Universal codec that utilizes the highest quality formats modern GPUs support, finally bringing the web up to modern GPU texture standards—with cross platform support. The textures are larger in storage size and GPU compressed size, but are still 3-4 times smaller than sending a JPEG or PNG file to be processed on the GPU, and can transcode to a lower quality format for older GPUs.Best of all, we are actively working on standardizing Basis Universal with the Khronos Group.Since our original release in Summer 2019 we’ve seen widespread adoption of Basis Universal in engines like three.js, Babylon.js, Godot, and more, changing what is possible for people to create on the web. Now that a high quality option is available, we expect to see even more adoption and groundbreaking applications created with it.Please feel free to join our community on Github and check out the full demo there as well. You can also follow standardization efforts via Khronos Group events and forums.