Khronos ASTC: Royalty-Free Next-Gen Texture Compression

[DeepDayze]

Can (legal) OSS software interpreters be built that will pass off S3TC to whatever ASTC processing agent is in place?

And does it require new hardware?

Theoretically it should...S2TC for example is a drop in replacement fo S3TC and no changes required to programs. Hopefully ASTC will be the same way

[del_diablo]

Do it need new hardware?

No, it does not. It only needs a firmware update.

[uid313]

Theoretically it should...S2TC for example is a drop in replacement fo S3TC and no changes required to programs. Hopefully ASTC will be the same way

I am not so sure about that. S2TC was designed especially to be compatible with S3TC.

[bridgman]

No, it does not. It only needs a firmware update.

Which firmware ? I don't think any of the GPU vendors implement TC in firmware.

Did you mean driver update (to decompress in software or possibly transcode) ?

[artivision]

It only needs a driver update like Nvidia OpenGL4.3 beta update. Then it will probably work for games with previous formats like S3TC. If it isn't possible to work, it will easily work with a small update of a game. Texture compression formats are easy and fast to implement them.

[curaga]

If it's sw decompression in the drivers, that renders texture compression as a net negative. Longer loading times + worse quality than uncompressed, and without the bw reduction of hw-supported schemes.

[brent]

ETC2 is a pretty ingenious algorithm. Somewhat better than S3TC, yet almost similarly complex. It uses a clever method to switch between different compression modes for each block, and is backwards compatible to ETC1!

[DeepDayze]

I am not so sure about that. S2TC was designed especially to be compatible with S3TC.

Right, so I meant that hopefully ASTC will be compatible as well so that this compression scheme can replace S3TC like S2TC can. Even if not compatible it should be no trouble to recompress the original textures with ASTC and then decode on the fly with the S3TC functions replaced by ASTC functions within the game code for example

[elanthis]

So basically, this is great news ten years from now, but not terribly useful today.

That's the same with all the graphics API updates.

You can't even use OpenGL 3.2 today thanks to the geniuses at Intel's Windows driver group only supporting GL 3.1 on their D3D 10.1 hardware.

Any new graphics tech coming out can be used by a programmer wanting to release actual products 5-10 years from now.

[MaxToTheMax]

Right, so I meant that hopefully ASTC will be compatible as well so that this compression scheme can replace S3TC like S2TC can. Even if not compatible it should be no trouble to recompress the original textures with ASTC and then decode on the fly with the S3TC functions replaced by ASTC functions within the game code for example

Based on what I know of the two algorithms, ASTC is totally different, except for the basic similarity of both being block-based. They have basically zero chance of being binary compatible. Transcoding to S3TC on the fly is doable, but you lose the image quality benefits of ASTC and introduce a dependency on the S3TC patents as well.