Enlightenment's Evas Adds OpenGL ETC2 Support

The Evas display canvas API to the Enlightenment project now has support for dealing with ETC2 texture compression.

Code landing today for EFL's Evas library provide support for dealing with ETC2 compression, after ETC1 texture format support was added to Evas earlier in the month.

ETC2 is the lossy texture compression scheme developed by Ericsson that is royalty-free and is now mandated as part of the OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3 specifications. For those unfamiliar with this alternative to S3TC, read ETC2 Texture Compression Looks Good For OpenGL.

Support was added to the GL/X11 engine for Evas in situations where the OpenGL driver/hardware supports decoding of compressed ETC2 data. Notable commits today were adding direct copy support for ETC1/ETC2 data, ETC2 support for the GL/X11 engine, and support for ETC2 in the TGV loader.

With Intel's forthcoming Broadwell processors there is native ETC2 support on the desktop while existing GLES 3.0 / GL 4.3 drivers are using software-based ETC2 transcoding support.

Those wishing to learn more about Ericsson Texture Compression can see these PDF slides from a few years ago that go over ETC. Those slides also have comparisons of no compression against S3TC/DXTC, ETC1, and ETC2.