On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 7:50 AM, Heiko Schulz <aeitsch...@yahoo.de> wrote: > Hello, > >>I just noticed today that the textures folder in scenery growed from 50 >>MB to ~200 MB. But I don’t see that many new textures ? I read once here >>that the benefit from getting DDS is also we get smaller file sizes for >>the textures. But now I see textures like crop (and cropA) DDS files >>that take ~20 MB. Is this for testing purposes only, or do we use the >>space we get by splitting aircrafts in near future for the textures ? ;-) > > > No one said, that the benefit of .dds is smaller file size! > > The benefit of .dds is, that it can be loaded much, much faster into > Video-Ram as mipmaps can be saved directly into the texture. With other > formats it has be done seperatly and that's slow. > So perfomance has even increased with. > > Quality compared with other compressed texture-formats like .png is btw. much > higher. > > And Mipmaps also allow some interesting effects which you can see when you > enable the use of .dds-scenery-texture in FGFS. > > Btw. the size of the texture-folder is compared with the aircraft-folder > really, really small. > > Heiko
Adding to what Heiko mentioned: 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. It uses an interesting technique where data is loaded as tiny unique blocks that are indexed and mapped to locations within the image as needed. The bottom line is that game designers can pack many more textures into large but still limited memory resources. 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. -Gary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
