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GPU Texture Compression 2
Sunday, July 6, 2008 | Permalink
This demo is very similar to the first GPU Texture Compression demo. The difference is that this demo compresses to DXT1 or BC1 as it's called in DX10. BC1 textures have a wider range of uses than BC4 because they are color rather than grayscale, but on the other hand they are more complex to compress to. This demo implements a fairly quick and quite decent compression which is good enough for realtime use. The tricky part in DXT1 is to choose the two base colors for a tile. The algorithm basically looks for which channel of RGB has the greatest contrast and uses that as the base. Then it does a least squares fitting of the other two channels against the base channel to find the most suitable values. Once the base colors are chosen it loops over the 16 colors and matches each color to whichever of the two base colors or the two interpolated colors is the closest.
In addition this demo has a more trivial implementation which simply uses the maximum and minimum of all channels as the base colors. It produces surprisingly useful results. I would have expected nasty discolorations, but this appears to not be nearly as much of a problem as one might have thought. Quality is somewhat lower than the above method though, but on the other hand it's somewhat faster as well. You can toggle between the two with F6.
This demo should run on the Radeon HD 3000 series and up. Since this demo uses Direct3D 10.1 you need to have Windows Vista SP1 installed.
Executable