The Rust PNG crate, image-png, for PNG image encoding and decoding was already claimed to be the fastest PNG decoder in the world for the past year. Now with the latest optimizations, it's even faster.

The Rust PNG create has been seeing use by the likes of Google Chrome/Chromium and the GNOME desktop. These projects picked up Rust PNG for its memory safety guarantees and features while still delivering good performance. Interestingly though the project has a new blog post out today to outline their latest performance optimizations.

Rust PNG is now even faster thanks to performing unfiltering in-place, reducing internal buffer sizes, optimizations around image interlacing, and ecosystem improvements such as for leveraging AVX-512 and NEON intrinsics.

While already leading in performance, according to their own benchmarks, the developers are working on even faster performance via additional SIMD optimizations and other improvements. They have also been working on enhancing the PNG encode performance too.

Those wishing to learn more about Rust PNG performance optimizations can read the post in full at [1]Image-RS.org .



[1] https://blog.image-rs.org/2026/06/18/png-adoption.html