H-ETC2: Design of a CPU-GPU Hybrid ETC2 Encoder

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel CPU-GPU hybrid encoding method based on the ETC2 format, commonly used on mobile platforms. Traditional texture compression techniques often face a trade-off between encoding speed and quality. For a better trade-off, our approach utilizes both the CPU and GPU. In a pipeline we designed, the CPU encoder identifies problematic pixel blocks during the encoding process, and the GPU encoder re-encodes them. Additionally, we carefully improve the base CPU and GPU encoders regarding encoding speed and quality. As a result, our encoder minimizes compression artifacts, increases encoding speed, or achieves both of these goals compared to previous high-quality offline ETC2 encoders.