On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Gary Neely <grne...@gmail.com> wrote: > The main win for DDS, at least from a game design point of view, is > the ability to maintain a kind of compression while loaded into the > graphics memory. This is (as far as I know) unique to DDS/DXT.
There is a texture compression extension that is used to allow storing textures compressed in video memory. I don't know the details of compression used (could be vendor specific), or how it compares to dxt compression which gives you 4x or 8x compression levels though. With dds the artist has control of which compression type to use as well as specifying custom mip maps, which makes it the winner in my book. I see the real benefit of dds as the ability to use a much higher resolution for the same (usually less) memory cost, have user defined mip map images, and faster loading in many cases. Even though it is lossy format, it still allows for a much higher overall quality level with better resource usage in most cases. > DDS is relatively fast because it is natively supported by video > cards. But if I remember right, for pure speed of loading it's hard to > beat good-ol' RGB. Loading dds from disk is usually quite quick due to not needing to decompress it into main memory, generate mip maps, etc. I can personally testify that osg/fgfs can load dds textures several magnitudes faster than the png counterpart...not sure about rgb. cheers --Jacob ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
