Compression Algorithm Comparison

Compression Algorithm Comparison#

The table below summarizes the performance and compression achieved across all available VTK compression algorithms and Zstandard using zvtk.

zvtk performed the best with a write speed of 1.8 GB/s with a compression ratio of over 3x.

Write Performance

File Type / Method

Write Speed

Compression Ratio

Notes

Legacy VTK (.vtk)

465 MB/s

0.88

Significant overhead

VTK XML, none

256 MB/s

0.70

Significant overhead

VTK XML, zlib

105 MB/s

2.52

VTK Default

VTK XML, lz4

401 MB/s

1.47

VTK XML, lzma

9.93 MB/s

3.10

VTK HDF (.vtkhdf), lvl0

1733 MB/s

0.93

No compression

VTK HDF (.vtkhdf), lvl4

137 MB/s

2.37

Default compression

zvtk (.zvtk), lvl3

711 MB/s

3.02

Threads = 0

zvtk (.zvtk), lvl3

1845 MB/s

3.02

Threads = 4

zvtk (.zvtk), lvl22

15.8 MB/s

3.79

All threads (-1)

Benchmarks performed on the following environment:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                OS : Linux (NixOS 25.05)
            CPU(s) : 24
           Machine : x86_64
      Architecture : 64bit
               RAM : 188.5 GiB
       Environment : IPython
       File system : ext4
        GPU Vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
      GPU Renderer : NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090/PCIe/SSE2
       GPU Version : 4.5.0 NVIDIA 570.153.02
     Render Window : vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow
  MathText Support : True

  Python 3.12.11 (main, Jun  3 2025, 15:41:47) [GCC 14.2.1 20250322]

           pyvista : 0.47.dev0
               vtk : 9.4.2