Convert normal maps to RGTC?

[stgatilov]

22 hours ago, duzenko said:

You mean there's no more driver compression, only ours or none

Yes.

[nbohr1more]

It really cannot be stressed enough how insane of an achievement this is:

1) Let's pre-compress normal maps so that we can lower load times due to slow mipmap generation

2) Nah, instead I'll write a compressor and mipmap generator that is better and more optimized than "Nvidia", "AMD", "Intel", and "id Software's" designs

[stgatilov]

5 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

2) Nah, instead I'll write a compressor and mipmap generator that is better and more optimized than "Nvidia", "AMD", "Intel", and "id Software's" designs

Note that:

1. We don't know yet if it is "better" in terms of quality. Everyone is encouraged to test
2. Any OpenGL driver developer has tons of features to implement, myriads of formats and corner cases. Given that usually game developers precompress their textures, driver developers have little incentive to write optimized code for every format.

I thought about doing the same for usual textures (i.e. write DXT1 compressor). It won't be hard to write a fast compressor, but I think quality difference will be really visible. RGTC has very good quality by itself: it has only 2:1 compression ratio. DXT1 has 6:1 compression ratio --- that's a lot more information lost!