> The 3x to 4x decompression speedup here is nice, but I can't help but feel a little sad about how poorly this format is taking advantage of available compute

> The 3x to 4x decompression speedup here is nice, but I can't help but feel a little sad about how poorly this format is taking advantage of available compute resources. (The ultimate dream would be a format which is so parallel-friendly that you can just send the binary blob to the GPU and decompress it in a compute shader!) You can't usefully decompress the entire thing on the GPU, but you can do half of it there. You can decompress DEFLATE right before sending the data over the bus and do the PNG prediction (filtering) in a compute shader. I actually implemented this once (PNG prediction is amenable to wavefront parallelism) and it worked fine, though it wasn't any faster than using SIMD on the CPU because the fact that each row can specify a different prediction method means that you end up with a lot of divergence in the shader. Still, it could get some load off the CPU if your loading is CPU-bound.