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RealTimeDXTCompression

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Ignacio edited this page Mar 16, 2020 · 2 revisions

Real-Time DXT Compression

The compressors available in the NVIDIA Texture Tools are not designed for real-time compression. If you need to compress textures in real-time, I'd recommend to look at the following sources:

J.M.P. van Waveren was the first one to describe a real-time DXT compressor. This compressor is part of the real-time texture streaming pipeline used in some id Software games. He obtains the following results with his SSE2 optimized implementation:

CPU DXT1 DXT5
Intel 2.8 GHz Dual Core Xeon 112.05 MP/s 66.43 MP/s
Intel 2.9 GHz Core 2 Extreme 200.62 MP/s 127.55 MP/s

The same algorithm described by Waveren can also be adapted easily to the GPU. This is what Simon Green did in this OpenGL SDK example. The performance on the GPU is much more impressive:

GPU DXT1 DXT5
GeForce 8800 GTX 1,547 MP/s -
GeForce 8600 GTS 461 MP/s -

A later whitepaper by Waveren and Ignacio Castaño provides even higher results on the GPU:

GPU DXT1 YCoCg-DXT5
GeForce 8800 GTX 1,690 MP/s 939 MP/s
GeForce 8600 GTS 520 MP/s 279 MP/s

Peter Uliciansky optimized Waveren's algorithm further and published his results in this pdf: Extreme DXT Compression, New algorithm for real-time DXT compression.

CPU DXT1 DXT5
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz 241.2 MP/s 206.5 MP/s
Intel Core 2 3.0 GHz 910.0 MP/s 620.4 MP/s

These numbers are very impressive and start to get closer to the results of the GPU implementation. However, as pointed by Charles Bloom this implementation has some errors.

Moreover, the latest GPU implementation also offers higher performance.

GPU DXT1 YCoCg-DXT5 BC5 DXT5n
GeForce 8800 GTX 3450 MP/s 1880 MP/s 5665 MP/s 5804 MP/s
GeForce GTX 280 9920 MP/s 7900 MP/s 12850 MP/s 13150 MP/s

A more recent implementation is available from Intel, but I haven't benchmarked it:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/fast-cpu-dxt-compression

Other links:

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