Project 1 : DXTC/Range Texture Compression and DXTC Transcode
The idea comes in part from necessity at work and also in part be curiosity. In our engine, we do have a texture streaming mechanism which reads DXTC compressed textures from disk as needed. But especially when dealing with a DVD, bandwidth quickly becomes an issue and our streamer is often hitting limits which in turn causes texture loads to be delayed and visual quality to degrade.
Besides the need for improved bandwidth for our texture, one aspect of the decompress->DXTC transcode approach is the fact that no one is taking advantage of the fact that DXTC compression is a lossy compression to start with. Why can’t this fact be taken advantage of in order to tweak the DCT/Range Coder settings in order to maximize compression? This would require the coder to encode the two DXTC colors per block differently so they are known at decode but I wonder if the extra compression would make up (and hopefully go beyond) the extra bits added for the DXTC colors. So this is also part of the goal of what I wish to experiment with in this project. I will obviously elaborate more once as I make some progress.
- Texture Compression PART 1, Improving DCT/JPEG Performance
- Texture Compression PART 2, Improving DCT/JPEG Performance
- Texture Compression PART 3, VBR Setting Up and Getting Stats
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