pixtreme

GPU-first image processing for Python, built on CUDA and CuPy.

API reference and documentation — the complete public API (14 modules, 102 operations) with per-function contracts, plus the full performance report.

Why pixtreme

pixtreme keeps image data on the NVIDIA GPU and makes a metadata-bearing Frame the common value passed between operations. A Frame owns an HWC cupy.ndarray together with colorspace, transfer, channel, and YCbCr-matrix claims, so color meaning travels with pixels instead of living in ambient configuration.

• Purpose-built RawKernel implementations and CuPy operations avoid unnecessary host round trips.
• Color conversion, format conversion, channel routing, and affine numeric transforms fuse work into a single pass where their contracts allow it.
• Floating-point working values are not clipped to [0, 1]: negative values, highlights above 1.0, and filter overshoot remain valid scene data until an explicit quantization or clipping boundary.
• The package root exposes 14 focused modules, including core, and __version__. Named tokens match case-insensitively and separator-insensitively (Rec.709, rec 709, and REC_709 name the same token; see the token reference), are validated immediately, and have no environment-dependent defaults.
• Frame is the working currency; device arrays and encoded/file formats cross explicit from_*, to_*, read/write, and decode/encode boundaries.

Performance

The current package requires CUDA 13, NVIDIA driver R580 or newer, and a GPU with compute capability 7.5 or higher. The table below records the earlier CUDA 12.9 baseline; CUDA 13 measurements have not yet been published.

The following measurements are selected from the current 210-case registry, taken from the single full run at commit 260fe6e. GPU cases use at least 1,000 FHD frames and 3 seconds after warmup, while file boundaries use at least 20 iterations and the same 3-second floor. The test system used an NVIDIA RTX A6000, CUDA 12.9, CuPy 14.1.1, and Python 3.12 under WSL2.

These figures describe this system and workload, not a hardware-independent guarantee. File and encoded-byte boundaries have different I/O-inclusive conditions. See the full performance report for every case, distribution statistics, and the complete methodology.

EXR reads support scanline and tiled, single- and multipart files across all ten compression tokens; writes produce single-part scanline files for the same ten tokens. Every path uses a pixtreme-owned implementation, with no OpenEXR runtime dependency or fallback. Routing is fixed in source rather than benchmarked at runtime: NONE uses the native read lane; ZIP, ZIPS, and PXR24 use custom CPU reads; the remaining reads and every write use GPU lanes. A float32 Frame written without dtype stores HALF by default; pass dtype="float32" for explicit FLOAT storage. On the system above, the default ZIP/HALF path measured 40.758 ms to read unchanged and 40.572 ms to write, including temporary-file I/O.

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or newer
• CUDA 13.x
• NVIDIA driver R580 or newer
• An NVIDIA GPU with compute capability 7.5 or higher

WSL2 is supported with the Windows NVIDIA driver and a working CUDA device. Depending on the WSL installation, nvidia-smi may be available at /usr/lib/wsl/lib/nvidia-smi rather than on the default PATH.

Installation

With pip:

python -m pip install pixtreme

With uv:

uv add pixtreme

Upgrading from 0.x? The 1.x series is a ground-up rewrite — see the changelog for the migration summary.

Quickstart

Read an image into GPU memory, work in scene-linear ACEScg, and quantize only at the file boundary:

import pixtreme as px

frame = px.io.read_image("input.png")
working = px.color.rgb_to_rgb(frame, output_colorspace="ACEScg", output_gamma="linear")
working = px.filter.sharpen(working, amount=0.5)
output = px.color.rgb_to_rgb(working, output_colorspace="sRGB", output_gamma="sRGB")
px.io.write_image("output.png", px.values.quantize(output, bit_depth=8))

px.io.read_image returns a px.core.Frame whose pixels already reside on the GPU. Processing remains float32 and unclipped; px.values.quantize is the explicit normalized-float-to-integer boundary required by PNG.

API tour

The package root exposes 14 modules and __version__. Types, helpers, and all 102 operations live under one canonical two-level path; the root does not re-export them, and Frame has no operation methods:

Render the Quickstart's scene-linear working frame through the analytic ACES 2.0 Output Transform:

display = px.color.rgb_to_rgb(
    working,
    output_colorspace="sRGB",
    output_gamma="sRGB",
    tonemap="ACES-2.0",
)

The bytes boundary mirrors the file boundary without inventing a host-array API:

png_bytes = px.io.encode_image(
    px.values.quantize(display, bit_depth=8),
    format="png",
    compression_level=4,
)
round_trip = px.io.decode_image(png_bytes)

Text shaping supports bundled CJK fonts, user OpenType/TrueType fonts through px.draw.Font, and an opt-in 4x supersampled raster path:

captioned = px.draw.text(
    display,
    text="極彩",
    position=(48, 96),
    size=64,
    color=(1.0, 0.8, 0.2),
    supersample=True,
)

Full performance

the full performance report contains the recorded measured cases, including mean, median, FPS, p5, p95, effective bandwidth, parameters, and the 90 cases whose median exceeds 1 ms. It also separates GPU-device throughput from temporary-file and encoded-byte I/O measurements.

Color management

Color processing is explicit, metadata-aware, and designed to preserve scene values until a declared output boundary.

• The closed vocabulary carries 29 colorspace tokens and 36 transfer (gamma) tokens: the sRGB, Rec.709, Rec.2020, P3, SMPTE-C, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, and ACES families plus the Sony, ARRI, Blackmagic Design, DaVinci, RED, Canon, Panasonic, DJI, Fujifilm, Nikon, Leica, Apple, and Samsung camera encodings. Each token is derived from its published specification and documented with its provenance and domain-extension rules in the token reference.
• The analytic ACES 2.0 SDR 100-nit Output Transform evaluates the complete AP1 limit, Hellwig JMh, tone, chroma, gamut-compression, limiting-RGB, reference-range, and display-encoding chain in one fused CUDA pass. Its 363-record hue table is an algorithm parameter, not an RGB-grid output approximation; runtime evaluation uses no LUT interpolation and matches direct OpenColorIO 2.5.2 reference evaluation with rtol=0, atol=2e-4.
• ACES 1.3 is also available as a formula-based one-pass transform. Both ACES generations are exposed only through their analytic tonemap tokens.
• BT.2408 direct mapping places SDR reference white at 203 cd/m2 for Rec.2020 HLG or PQ output.
• RGB/YCbCr conversion, legal/full-range code positions, and chroma siting follow H.273-aligned contracts, with the matrix basis carried in Frame metadata.
• Broadcast test-pattern generation covers ARIB STD-B28, SMPTE RP 219-1, and ITU-R BT.2111-2 HLG/PQ variants, including exact 10-bit code output.

Status & license

The 1.x series is the current release line. It is a ground-up implementation and does not connect to the 0.x codebase. The final 0.x release, 0.9.0, remains available from the v0.9.0 Git tag and the PyPI release history. See the changelog for the 1.0 migration-impact summary.

pixtreme is released under the MIT License.