Texture compression

Texture compression is used in computer graphics, in order to reduce the memory and bandwidth requirements of textures.

Requirements

The requirements for texture compression systems differ from those as fast access is needed to ordinary image compression on random Texel:

  • Fixed compression ratio to simplify address calculations
  • A few indirections due to the long pipelines in graphics chips
  • Compatibility with texture caches, that is, obtaining the locality property
  • Simple, fast, easy -to-implement in hardware decompression algorithm ( on the other hand, the compression algorithm may be very costly )

Systems

In the early days was vector, used especially Indexed color, but this was superseded by other methods because of the indirection occurring. Indexed colors were long used in the embedded systems and were part of OpenGL ES 1.x.

The most widespread on the desktop is taken up into DirectX and supported in OpenGL via an extension S3 Texture Compression ( S3TC ).

In high-end smartphones, the ETC developed by Ericsson is widespread.

FXT1 was a texture compression system of 3Dfx. It is supported today only from Intel.

Vector quantization 3dfx Interactive
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