High quality texture compression demo

[Nom De Guerre]

That reminds me... I did start writing my own experimental compression function. I must get back to it one day.

I hope such "nonchalance" regarding TC isn't the typical attitude of most IHVs. I just hope this wasn't the reason that inspired, or urged, at least one well known ISV personnel to give us really BIG textures!

 

[Ailuros]

I hope such "nonchalance" regarding TC isn't the typical attitude of most IHVs. I just hope this wasn't the reason that inspired, or urged, at least one well known ISV personnel to give us really BIG textures!

PowerVR/IMG (since you are addressing Simon) is mostly concentrating in the past years on the PDA/mobile market. It should be understandable that for such devices memory footprint is critical and more efficient compression ratios are necessary.

Besides compression is by far not a plague; rather a eulogy if you cannot notice a difference in real time between compressed and uncompressed data. Since you're obviously aiming for Carmack's future work, you may start convincing me why I should use ultra instead of high quality in games like Doom3/Quake4.

 

[Nom De Guerre]

PowerVR/IMG (since you are addressing Simon) is mostly concentrating in the past years on the PDA/mobile market. It should be understandable that for such devices memory footprint is critical and more efficient compression ratios are necessary.

I am aware of where Simon's company's (apparent main) business focus lie. However, I feel Simon may provide more insight in answering my question than you did (appreciated, noetheless).

Besides compression is by far not a plague; rather a eulogy if you cannot notice a difference in real time between compressed and uncompressed data.

I was inclined to say the first parts of your comments belongs in some novel but I will instead address the latter part -- I wasn't talking about being able to "notice a difference in real time between compressed and uncompressed data". Did I actually infer that?

Since you're obviously aiming for Carmack's future work, you may start convincing me why I should use ultra instead of high quality in games like Doom3/Quake4.

This last part convinces me that you have either misunderstood my post, or my post (which I thought was simple enough) was simply too cryptic for you, or you don't quite understand the context of my post in this thread.

Or you don't really understand Doom's "ultra" and "HQ" texture settings in relation to this thread or what I posted. I don't know what I need to convince you with when it appears to me that we're on different wavelengths or different agendas. Here's the pertinent part of Humus' original post :

I've uploaded a new demo that implements a 4.5bpp and a 6bpp texture compression by storing YCbCr in ATI1N and ATI2N textures and decoding in the shader.

 

[Simon F]

I hope such "nonchalance" regarding TC isn't the typical attitude of most IHVs. I just hope this wasn't the reason that inspired, or urged, at least one well known ISV personnel to give us really BIG textures!

No, I was talking about a private project for lossless data compression - it's not texture related

 

[Humus]

I've uploaded a new version of this demo with two new modes that should run on all PS2.0 cards, a 4.5bpp and a 6bpp DXT1/DXT5 mode. It has the same performance as 3Dc but looks worse, but it's still better than DXT1.

 

[Dave B(TotalVR)]

Besides compression is by far not a plague; rather a eulogy if you cannot notice a difference in real time between compressed and uncompressed data. Since you're obviously aiming for Carmack's future work, you may start convincing me why I should use ultra instead of high quality in games like Doom3/Quake4.

I never understood the 'ultra' quality modes where you run without TC, it requires what? 4x the texture RAM? why not just use compressed textures that are 4x as big? now THAT will give a notable increase in quality.

It's like the people that whinge about mp3's not giving as good a sound, why not compress the music from a much higher quality source so that your compressed data has the same bitrate as the original uncompressed data?

 

[Xmas]

I never understood the 'ultra' quality modes where you run without TC, it requires what? 4x the texture RAM? why not just use compressed textures that are 4x as big? now THAT will give a notable increase in quality.

Because someone has to create those textures, which means more work. It's not like you get higher resolution textures for free. OTOH, using uncompressed textures might only give you small quality improvements, but if you have the memory space and bandwidth, there's no reason not to do it.

 

[Althornin]

Because someone has to create those textures, which means more work. It's not like you get higher resolution textures for free. OTOH, using uncompressed textures might only give you small quality improvements, but if you have the memory space and bandwidth, there's no reason not to do it.

Yes, but this is one of the crying shames about TC...
It seemed like at first, S3TC was about higher IQ - and it was!
somehow, the focus went to improved speed.
To me, the whole point was the quality increase available - same or even less space usage, but higher quality.

bleh.

 

[Ailuros]

Because someone has to create those textures, which means more work. It's not like you get higher resolution textures for free. OTOH, using uncompressed textures might only give you small quality improvements, but if you have the memory space and bandwidth, there's no reason not to do it.

If I as a gamer have a hard time detecting differences between compressed and uncompressed textures, then I'd rather invest any spare memory space and/or bandwidth in a higher resolution with compression enabled.

 

[stepz]

somehow, the focus went to improved speed.
To me, the whole point was the quality increase available - same or even less space usage, but higher quality.

Any performance increase at equivalent quality can be translated into quality increase at equivalent performance. But that tradeoff can only be made early in the development cycle.

 

[Xmas]

Yes, but this is one of the crying shames about TC...
It seemed like at first, S3TC was about higher IQ - and it was!
somehow, the focus went to improved speed.
To me, the whole point was the quality increase available - same or even less space usage, but higher quality.

Texture compression is - and has always been - as much about speed as it is about quality. Without TC, most GPUs couldn't get anywhere near their peak texturing rates (well, except RV530, maybe).

If I as a gamer have a hard time detecting differences between compressed and uncompressed textures, then I'd rather invest any spare memory space and/or bandwidth in a higher resolution with compression enabled.

But that's not your choice to make. It's like saying that an audio CD that contains a game's MP3 soundtrack in higher quality should have been used for hours of more MP3s, ignoring that the latter would be much more expensive.

 

[Ailuros]

In the case of ultra vs. high quality in games like Doom3/Quake4 it is my choice. I'd also add SS2 to the mix too.

 

[Xmas]

Sorry, misread your post.