Mesa Support For ETC1 Texture Compression

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Support For ETC1 Texture Compression

With commits this afternoon by Intel, there's now support for handling ETC1 texture compression within Mesa...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE0MTQ

[ethana2]

Is ETC1 better than S3TC in any way? Is this something that could eventually be supported by the Nouveau and Radeon drivers?

[Tundra]

Is ETC1 better than S3TC in any way? Is this something that could eventually be supported by the Nouveau and Radeon drivers?

The most notable difference is the lack of alpha channel in ETC1.

When texturing a 3D model with a "skin" texture, ETC1 is good enough for most cases, but for using OpenGL ES 2.0 as a 2D compositing system, like it's done in many interfaces, the lack of alpha channel is a problem. In those cases you have to waste a lot using uncompressed RGBA or use one or more of the out of standard, hardware dependent things like S3TC (Tegra2), PVRTC (PowerVR) or ATITC (Adreno) depending on which hardware you want to run on.

[asdx]

Could this be used instead of S3TC to give users a more "out of the box" experience when running games with the FOSS drivers that use Mesa?

So that users don't have to install the separate S3TC package/library.

I hope Valve will do something about the S3TC problem.

[Kayden]

Is ETC1 better than S3TC in any way? Is this something that could eventually be supported by the Nouveau and Radeon drivers?

They might actually support it already...we actually pulled some of this code out of Gallium into core Mesa. If not, I think all they need to do is turn on the extension. Chad's implementation is purely done in software, as our current hardware doesn't have actual ETC1 or ETC2 support. We just transparently decompress it and upload it to the GPU as RGBA. Not optimal (it uses more memory), but it makes applications that provide us textures in ETC formats work.

Sadly, I think S3TC is still here to stay, at least for the time being.

[89c51]

Sadly, I think S3TC is still here to stay, at least for the time being.

Has anyone tried to approach HTC and ask for this to be resolved??

[AJenbo]

Could this be used instead of S3TC to give users a more "out of the box" experience when running games with the FOSS drivers that use Mesa?

So that users don't have to install the separate S3TC package/library.

Yes if every game developer starts providing there textures in the ETC1 format. It's like saying if JPEG compression can be used to solve IE6 not being able to load PNG-files with transparency.

[curaga]

..and as reads in TFA, the benefit in providing such is zero for Intel hardware. Or actually negative, since it's lossy compression, it's worse quality.