Oodle Mermaid and Selkie on PS4

The PS4 is a lovely platform to benchmark on because it's standard. It's also very easy to run tests on. Performance of these compressors on the Xbox One is extremely similar, small variatation due to clock rate (1.75 vs 1.6 GHz) and compiler (MSVC vs clang/llvm).

Everything is slow on the PS4 in absolute terms (it's a slow chip and difficult to optimize for). The Oodle compressors do very well, even better in relative terms on PS4 than on typical PC's.

Kraken is usually around ~2X faster than ZStd on PC's, but is 3X faster on PS4. Mermaid is usually just slightly slower than LZ4 on PC's, but is solidly faster than LZ4 on PS4.

lzt99 :

Kraken     : 2.477 to 1 : 390.582 MB/s
Mermaid    : 2.279 to 1 : 749.896 MB/s
Selkie     : 1.937 to 1 : 1159.064 MB/s

zstd       : 2.374 to 1 : 133.498 MB/s
miniz      : 1.883 to 1 : 85.654 MB/s
lz4hc-safe : 1.669 to 1 : 673.616 MB/s
LZSSE8     : 1.626 to 1 : 767.106 MB/s

Mermaid is faster than LZ4 on PS4 !! Wow! And the compression level is in a totally different domain than other super-fast decompressors like LZ4 or LZSSE.

lzt99 is a good case for Selkie & Mermaid. Selkie beats zlib compression ratio while being 75% faster than LZ4.

All compressors here are fuzz-safe, and run in safe mode if they have optional safe/unsafe modes.

Charts : (showing time and size - lower is better!)

lzt99 :

the raw data :

PS4 : Oodle 230 : (-z6)

inName : lzt:/lzt99

reference :

miniz      : 24,700,820 ->13,120,668 =  4.249 bpb =  1.883 to 1
miniz_decompress_time : 288.379 millis, 18.61 c/b, rate= 85.65 mb/s

zstd       : 24,700,820 ->10,403,228 =  3.369 bpb =  2.374 to 1
zstd_decompress_time : 185.028 millis, 11.94 c/b, rate= 133.50 mb/s

lz4hc      : 24,700,820 ->14,801,510 =  4.794 bpb =  1.669 to 1
LZ4_decompress_safe_time : 36.669 millis, 2.37 c/b, rate= 673.62 mb/s

LZSSE8     : 24,700,820 ->15,190,395 =  4.920 bpb =  1.626 to 1
decode_time      : 32.200 millis, 2.08 c/b, rate= 767.11 mb/s

Oodle :

Kraken     : 24,700,820 -> 9,970,882 =  3.229 bpb =  2.477 to 1
decode           : 63.241 millis, 4.08 c/b, rate= 390.58 mb/s

Mermaid    : 24,700,820 ->10,838,455 =  3.510 bpb =  2.279 to 1
decode           : 32.939 millis, 2.13 c/b, rate= 749.90 mb/s

Selkie : 24,700,820 ->12,752,506 =  4.130 bpb =  1.937 to 1
decode           : 21.311 millis, 1.38 c/b, rate= 1159.06 mb/s

BTW for reference, the previous best compressor in Mermaid's domain was LZNIB. Before these new compressors, LZNIB was quite unique in that it got good decode speeds, much faster than the LZ-Huffs of the time (eg. 3X faster than ZStd) but with compression usually better than ZLib. Well, LZNIB is still quite good compared to other competition, but it's just clobbered by the new Oceanic Bestiary compressors. The new compressor in this domain is Mermaid and it creams LZNIB for both size and speed :

LZNIB -z6  : 24,700,820 ->12,015,591 =  3.892 bpb =  2.056 to 1 
decode           : 58.710 millis, 3.79 c/b, rate= 420.73 mb/s

Mermaid    : 24,700,820 ->10,838,455 =  3.510 bpb =  2.279 to 1
decode           : 32.939 millis, 2.13 c/b, rate= 749.90 mb/s

See the index of this series of posts for more information : Introducing Oodle Mermaid and Selkie . For more about Oodle visit RAD Game Tools