5 replies to this topic

[Alundra]

Hi,

DDS Texture compression is used a lot by a lot of game to render meshes.

Now, GPU is minimum 1go video ram and become to be 2go video ram.

Does it still needed ?

 

Thanks

[jeffkingdev]

Absolutely!

DDS is just a file format. You can have an uncompressed DDS file. Although DXT compression is really good. Did you compare them? Some textures look just as good compressed as uncompressed.

Jeff.

[Chris_F]

You can never have enough memory. Ever.

[kauna]

Also, there is a slight performance advantage when using the block compressed texture formats (DXT / BC), since each block contains data of several texels and the typical texture access patterns make use of nearby texels. One block has data of 4x4 texels and it is compressed to 1:4 or 1:6 so sampling a compressed texture uses 1/4 or 1/6 of the memory bandwidth compared to non-compressed texture. The block decompression is implemented on the hardware and it is rather simple so it doesn't practically slow down.

Of course you don't need to use DDS as container, but there are already lots of tools for them.

Cheers!

Edited by kauna, 06 January 2013 - 03:47 PM.

[MJP]

You can never have enough memory. Ever.

 

This. You might think it's crazy to use up all of that memory, but then one day you'll work with artists who come over to your desk and ask you why they can't put more than 16 textures on a mesh.

[phantom]

sampling a compressed texture uses 1/4 or 1/6 of the memory bandwidth.

 

It also allows the cache to keep more texels in memory at any given moment as they are taking up less space.