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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

BCn and ASTC are the most common formats today.

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