Computational Complexity of Texture Encoding | Hacker News Reader

Computational Complexity of Texture Encoding

fgiesen.wordpress.com

27 pointstodsacerdoti7 comments

Anyone remembering the um 'Stripped'-cracked games coming with only a fifth (or lower) size of the original CDs/DVDs using UHARC and...well some of them came without any graphics (still games, still playable) sometime ...?

(-;

I'm missing some context here. Texture compression is still a big deal in games, but all this stuff seems to reference very specific technology that's quite different from what's used today. Is this some demoscene or retro site, or what?

BCn and ASTC are the most common formats today.

BC1,2,3 are just rebrandings of DXT1,2,3,4,5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

ETC and EAC are the mobile world’s answer to the patent restrictions of DXT.

ASTC formats are the mobile world’s answer to the patent restrictions of BC4,5,6,7.

Oh, within-the-GPU compression for VRAM, not content compression for transmission and storage, which is usually JPEG, JPEG-2000, etc.

RAD Game Tools (now part of Unreal Engine, since bought by Epic) think that game studios encode offline when "baking" the game assets, and there have been game re-releases that have smaller download than the original. See https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/06/oodle-texture-slash...

The PS5 console has a decompressor for their general purpose compression format (Oodle Kraken) in hardware, and the intent is to stream textures from SSD, through general purpose decompressor, to GPU. See https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/06/oodle-texture-bc7pr...

Yep. RAD Game Tools (where the author works) combines "within-the-GPU compression" with content compression to make them work better together. They have a texture compressor that not only has high visual quality, but also sets up the fixed-rate block-compressed file more likely to end up smaller compared to other encoders when the file is additionally put through general purpose DEFLATE/ZSTD file compression. And, then they have a general purpose file compressor that has higher size/speed performance as well. Win + Win.

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