Fastest PNG decoder for .NET

Question

Our web server needs to process many compositions of large images together before sending the results to web clients. This process is performance critical because the server can

Answer 1

There is another option. And that is, you write your own GPU-based PNG decoder. You could use OpenCL to perform this operation fairly efficiently (and perform your composition using OpenGL which can share resources with OpenCL). It is also possible to interleave transfer and decoding for maximum throughput. If this is a route you can/want to pursue I can provide more information.

Here are some resources related to GPU-based DEFLATE (and INFLATE).

1. Accelerating Lossless compression with GPUs
2. gpu-block-compression using CUDA on Google code.
3. Floating point data-compression at 75 Gb/s on a GPU - note that this doesn't use INFLATE/DEFLATE but a novel parallel compression/decompression scheme that is more GPU-friendly.

Hope this helps!