Comment by demetris
17 days ago
I published some benchmarks recently:
https://op111.net/posts/2025/10/png-and-modern-formats-lossl...
I compare PNG and the four modern formats, AVIF, HEIF, WebP, JPEG XL, on tasks/images that PNG was designed for. (Not on photographs or lossy compression.)
It seems like the natural categories are (1) photographs of real things, (2) line art, (3) illustrator images, (4) text content (eg, from a scanned document).
Is there a reason you used only synthetic images, ie, nothing from group 1?
Hey, tasty_freeze!
The motivation behind the benchmarks was to understand what are the options today for optimizing the types of image we use PNG for, so I used the same set of images I had used previously in a comparison of PNG optimizers.
The reason the set does not have photographs: PNG is not good at photographs. It was not designed for that type of image.
Even so, the set could do with a bit more variety, so I want to add a few more images.
Would be nice to also see decompression speed and maybe a photo as a bonus round.
Yeah.
Numbers for decompression speed is one of the two things I want to add.
The other is a few more images, for more variety.
Max memory required during decompression is also important. Thanks for sharing this research.