Basis Universal 1.16 Released With OpenCL Support, Other Improvements

Version 1.16 of the Basis universal GPU texture codec developed by well known developer Rich Geldreich's Binomial LLC.

Basis has been extremely promising as a "super compressed" GPU texture data interchange system that offers two intermediate data formats either as Basis itself or the Khronos KTX2 standard and can then be transcoded to various other formats. Basis has enjoyed a stellar past few years and enjoying industry success and Binomial continues to push their releases as open-source. Thanks to Google and other partners they have been able to continue developing it while keeping it open-source.

With Basis 1.16 they made available on Friday there is OpenCL support, faster ETC1S encoding, a new "-parallel" option, eliminating most third-party dependencies, and introducing a new PNG reader.

Geldreich has in recent months been praising OpenCL on Twitter in enjoying its performance and multi-platform capabilities. Basis' OpenCL support is working cross-platform and without a mess of external dependencies like with other GPU compute APIs.

Downloads and more details on Basis 1.16 via GitHub.