Intel Skylake Adds ASTC Texture Compression, Open-Source Support Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Skylake Handles ASTC Texture Compression, Open-Source Support Coming

S3TC remains the most common form of texture compression relied upon by video game developers and others, but it remains a legal mess for open-source graphics drivers. ETC2 texture compression isn't faced by legal issues but was only mandated by OpenGL ES 3.0 / OpenGL 4.3, which makes it less well adopted. Meanwhile, in looking forward to the future, ASTC is the royalty-free next-gen texture compression solution that's backed by the Khronos Group. Intel's forthcoming Skylake hardware will make ASTC a much more widespread reality...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ASTC-Skylake-Intel-Mesa

[Remdul]

ASTC is very very cool. It has very high quality at small footprint, and is very flexible and covers all common use cases (1/2/3/4 channels, including HDR and 3D formats!). Just look at these slides: https://www.opengl.org/discussion_bo...=1#post1263807

For more details, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oerz8SR9x8

The only bad part about ASTC is that is isn't implemented widely enough (yet). Hopefully NV and AMD will follow Intel and ARM.

[Grogan]

It's silly the way S3TC is handled now. It's provided, and turned on, but a tiny bit of it is abstracted out into a library which is used if present. But nope! You have no right to use that library... nudge nudge wink wink.

P.S. Similar silliness with Freetype and subpixel hinting that they used to call "ClearType". There are still distros that don't enable that and you have to recompile Freetype, even though the patent is no longer enforceable.

[Remdul]

Indeed. And only in USA or JP are those patents valid, typically. Or were, I think they are expired by now.

That's another good thing about ASTC, regarding IP status, the extension spec states "No known issues". So patents are no excuse not to adopt it.

By the way, does anyone know where one can find anything about texture compression formats in Vulkan? Or are those details still under wraps?

[smitty3268]

How does this compare with BPTC, which is wider spread than ASTC (since it came with DX11 instead of 11.2)? Isn't ASTC more of a mobile-centric format?

Edit: Watched the youtube video above. Looks like ASTC is way more flexible in terms of choosing bitrates. BPTC is more limited to the high-end rates, where it performs better.

[Ancurio]

By the way, does anyone know where one can find anything about texture compression formats in Vulkan? Or are those details still under wraps?

Mantle supports BC1 through 7, so that will probably carry over. Not sure what else they're gonna add on top.

[caligula]

P.S. Similar silliness with Freetype and subpixel hinting that they used to call "ClearType". There are still distros that don't enable that and you have to recompile Freetype, even though the patent is no longer enforceable.

You're wrong. The earlier bytecode patents already expired. ClearType is totally different technology. ClearType patents will expire in 2023. For example http://www.google.com/patents/US6624828

[caligula]

Indeed. And only in USA or JP are those patents valid, typically. Or were, I think they are expired by now.

That's another good thing about ASTC, regarding IP status, the extension spec states "No known issues". So patents are no excuse not to adopt it.

By the way, does anyone know where one can find anything about texture compression formats in Vulkan? Or are those details still under wraps?

USA is negotiating new free trade agreements with Europe as we speak. If they win, the sw patents might be soon enforceable in EU. S3TC will expire in 2019 anyways. See http://www.google.com/patents/US5956431

[Remdul]

USA is negotiating new free trade agreements with Europe as we speak. If they win, the sw patents might be soon enforceable in EU. S3TC will expire in 2019 anyways. See http://www.google.com/patents/US5956431

Right, and that's why software patents should be ignored by all developers, especially those USA based. The whole concept should be utterly rejected. Software patents are immoral and anti-social. If TPP passes, all software development would inevitably end worldwide because just about every programming language construct is patented somehow, somewhere. Which of course is absurd, the only rational response is to laugh it off and ignore patents, TPP and other legal garbage. exit(0);

AFAIK, S3TC can be freely implemented in software now, but hardware implementation (probably) requires a license from the current patent holder (I forget who).

[carewolf]

TPP stands for trans-pacific pact, it is for countries around the pacific Ocean. It doesn't involve Europe.