I heard of pigz in the discussions following my interview of Yann Collet, creator of LZ4 and zstd.
If you'll excuse the plug, here is the LZ4 story:
Yann was bored and working as a project manager. So he started working on a game for his old HP 48 graphing calculator.
Eventually, this hobby led him to revolutionize the field of data compression, releasing LZ4, ZStandard, and Finite State Entropy coders.
His code ended up everywhere: in games, databases, file systems, and the Linux Kernel because Yann built the world's fastest compression algorithms. And he got started just making a fun game for a graphing calculator he'd had since high school.
Fastest open source compression algorithms. RAD game tools have proprietary ones that are faster and have better compression ratios, but since you have to pay for a license, they will never be widespread.
Interesting. Are there any benchmarks you can share? On their website they only compare decompression speed and with zlib and LZMA. It would be interesting to compare to LZ4 HC mode, that unity uses.