Level Up Your Game Dev Journey

Inside PS5’s Kraken: Fabien Giesen on Compression, Patents, and Game I/O

Fabien Giesen (Oodle/RAD) goes deep into how modern game compression really works, from LZ77 and Zstd to Oodle’s highly tuned codecs. He explains why compression patents are a minefield, why most lossless codecs are fundamentally serial and hard to GPU-accelerate, and how Oodle Texture intentionally “worsens” textures to compress them better. The highlight: a behind-the-scenes look at PS5’s hardware Kraken decompressor and Sony’s automatic deduping tools, which quietl...