[gaazoh]

The inclusion of QOI in the lossless benchmarks made me smile. It's a basically irrelevant format, that isn't supported by default by any general-public software, that aims to be just OK, not even good, yet it has a spot on one of these charts (non-photographic encoding). Neat.

[shdon]

GameMaker Studio has actually rather quickly jumped onto the QOI bandwagon, having 2 years ago replaced PNG textures with QOI (and added BZ2 compression on top) and found a 20% average reduction in size. So GameMaker Studio and all the games produced with it in the past 2 years or so do actually use QOI internally.

Not something a consumer knowingly uses, but also not quite irrelevant either.

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

That feels a little sad. If qoi had anything good (fast single-threaded decoding speed for photographic content) adding bz2 most certainly removed it. They could have just used WebP lossless and it would have been faster and smaller.

[pornel]

Oof that looks like a confused mess of a format.

bz2 is obsolete. It’s very slow, and not that good at compressing. zstd and lzma beat it on both compression and speed at the same time.

QOI’s only selling point is simplicity of implementation that doesn’t require a complex decompressor. Addition of bz2 completely defeats that. QOI’s poorly compressed data inside another compressor may even make overall compression worse. It could heve been a raw bitmap or a PNG with gzip replaced with zstd.

[lifthrasiir]

And yet didn't reach the Pareto frontier! It's quite obvious in hindsight though---QOI decoding is inherently sequential and can't be easily parallelized.

[gaazoh]

Of course it didn't, it wasn't designed to be either the fastest nor the best. Just OK and simple. Yet in some cases it's not completely overtaken by competition, and I think that's cool.

I don't believe QOI will ever have any sort of real-world practical use, but that's quite OK and I love it for it has made me and plenty of others look into binary file formats and compression and demystify it, and look further into it. I wrote a fully functional streaming codec for QOI, and it has taught me many things, and started me on other projects, either working with more complex file formats or thinking about how to improve upon QOI. I would probably never have gotten to this point if I tried the same thing starting with any other format, as they are at least an order of magnitude more complex, even for the simple ones.

[theon144]

>I don't believe QOI will ever have any sort of real-world practical use

Prusa (the 3d printer maker) seems to think otherwise! https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware-Buddy/releases/tag...

[lonjil]

> Of course it didn't, it wasn't designed to be either the fastest nor the best. Just OK and simple. Yet in some cases it's not completely overtaken by competition, and I think that's cool.

Actually, there was a big push to add QOI to stuff a few years ago, specifically due to it being "fast". It was claimed that while it has worse compression, the speed can make it a worthy trade off.

[p0nce]

It can be interesting if you need fast decode on low complexity, and it's an easy to improve format (-20 to -30%). Base QOI isn't that great.

[phoboslab]

As far a I understand this benchmark JXL was using 8 CPU cores, while QOI naturally only used one. If you were to plot the graph with compute used (watts?) instead of Mpx/s, QOI would compare much better.

Also, curious that they only benchmarked QOI for "non-photographic images (manga)", where QOI fares quite badly because it doesn't have palleted mode. QOI does much better with photos.

[lonjil]

Actually, they did try QOI for the photographic images:

> Not shown on the chart is QOI, which clocked in at 154 Mpx/s to achieve 17 bpp, which may be “quite OK” but is quite far from Pareto-optimal, considering the lowest effort setting of libjxl compresses down to 11.5 bpp at 427 Mpx/s (so it is 2.7 times as fast and the result is 32.5% smaller).

17 bpp is way outside the area shown in the graph. All the other results would've gotten squished and been harder to read, had QOI been shown.

[phoboslab]

Thanks, I missed that.

I just ran qoibench on the photos they used[1] and QOI does indeed fair pretty badly with a compression ratio of 71.1% vs. 49.3% for PNG.

The photos in the QOI benchmark suite[2] somehow compress a lot better (e.g. photo_kodak/, photo_tecnick/ and photo_wikipedia/). I guess it's the film grain with the high resolution photos used in [1].

[1] https://imagecompression.info/test_images/

[2] https://qoiformat.org/benchmark/