How can I decrease the amount of time it takes to save a png using QImage?

Question

Using Qt 4.8rc1, I have a QImage that I want to convert to a png file. It seems like it is taking longer than it should to convert to png format: ~70ms for an 800x800 empty png. Is there a way I can make this more efficient, or am I just inherently limited by png/zlib?

Here is the benchmark I am running:

#include <QtGui>
#include <QTimer>


int
main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  int times = 1000;
  QString format("png");

  QByteArray ba;
  QBuffer* buffer = new QBuffer(&ba);
  buffer->open(QIODevice::WriteOnly);

  QTime timer;
  timer.start();

  while(times--) {
    QImage image(800, 800, QImage::Format_RGB32);
    image.save(buffer, format.toAscii(), -1);
  }

  int elapsed = timer.elapsed();

  qDebug() << "Completed 1000 runs in" << elapsed << "ms. (" <<  (elapsed / 1000) << "ms / render )";
}

Answer 1

The third argument of QImage::save(const QString & fileName, const char * format = 0, int quality = -1 ) might help you. The documentation says the following:

The quality factor must be in the range 0 to 100 or -1. Specify 0 to obtain small compressed files, 100 for large uncompressed files, and -1 (the default) to use the default settings.

If you are lucky then by changing the value of quality you can change how much time zlib spends on trying to compress the image data. I would call QImage::save() with various quality values and see if execution time changes or not.

Though the Qt doc says that quality must be in the range 0 to 100 and specify 0 to obtain small compressed files, 100 for large uncompressed files the zlib manual shows different range:

// Compression levels.
#define Z_NO_COMPRESSION         0
#define Z_BEST_SPEED             1
#define Z_BEST_COMPRESSION       9
#define Z_DEFAULT_COMPRESSION  (-1)

Try values based on both ranges.