Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
The future of GPU texture compression (richg42.blogspot.com)
13 points by potench on Dec 8, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


I guess. The best way to do texture compression would be to use a procedural texture tool like Substance which creates little programs that when run create the texture with all the details the artist needs:

https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer


In terms of image fidelity perhaps - I doubt you'll get a good frame rate if you recreate all textures every frame, and if you want to compute them once and keep them in memory there probably won't be enough memory.


Being able to make the choice dynamically per-material would be valuable.

Graphics is full of this type of "caching problem" where you can make memory vs computation tradeoffs.


So GPU texture formats are in-memory formats that must support quick random access to any texel position. This typically means that the texture is divided into blocks of fixed dimensions and bit size which can be decoded independently.

IIUC, the article is asking for a companion on-disk format for distribution that takes advantage of things the in-memory format can't, like variable bitrate and interblock redundancies, while still being quickly transcodable to the in-memory format.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: