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Mesa Support For ETC1 Texture Compression

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  • Mesa Support For ETC1 Texture Compression

    Phoronix: Mesa Support For ETC1 Texture Compression

    With commits this afternoon by Intel, there's now support for handling ETC1 texture compression within Mesa...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Is ETC1 better than S3TC in any way? Is this something that could eventually be supported by the Nouveau and Radeon drivers?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by ethana2 View Post
      Is ETC1 better than S3TC in any way? Is this something that could eventually be supported by the Nouveau and Radeon drivers?
      The most notable difference is the lack of alpha channel in ETC1.

      When texturing a 3D model with a "skin" texture, ETC1 is good enough for most cases, but for using OpenGL ES 2.0 as a 2D compositing system, like it's done in many interfaces, the lack of alpha channel is a problem. In those cases you have to waste a lot using uncompressed RGBA or use one or more of the out of standard, hardware dependent things like S3TC (Tegra2), PVRTC (PowerVR) or ATITC (Adreno) depending on which hardware you want to run on.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by ethana2 View Post
        Is ETC1 better than S3TC in any way? Is this something that could eventually be supported by the Nouveau and Radeon drivers?
        They might actually support it already...we actually pulled some of this code out of Gallium into core Mesa. If not, I think all they need to do is turn on the extension. Chad's implementation is purely done in software, as our current hardware doesn't have actual ETC1 or ETC2 support. We just transparently decompress it and upload it to the GPU as RGBA. Not optimal (it uses more memory), but it makes applications that provide us textures in ETC formats work.

        Sadly, I think S3TC is still here to stay, at least for the time being.
        Free Software Developer .:. Mesa and Xorg
        Opinions expressed in these forum posts are my own.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Kayden View Post
          Sadly, I think S3TC is still here to stay, at least for the time being.
          Has anyone tried to approach HTC and ask for this to be resolved??

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          • #6
            Originally posted by asdx
            Could this be used instead of S3TC to give users a more "out of the box" experience when running games with the FOSS drivers that use Mesa?

            So that users don't have to install the separate S3TC package/library.
            Yes if every game developer starts providing there textures in the ETC1 format. It's like saying if JPEG compression can be used to solve IE6 not being able to load PNG-files with transparency.

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            • #7
              ..and as reads in TFA, the benefit in providing such is zero for Intel hardware. Or actually negative, since it's lossy compression, it's worse quality.

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