AMD Polaris Doesn't Support ETC2 Texture Compression

[Veto]

If people cared about what's best, PNG would be in the most widespread use today. Why isn't it? Because people used JPEG. Why? Just because... (It was the default format of some programs and camera devices)... yada yada yada

You seem to miss the point completely: PNG is a lossless format good for artificial images. JPEG is a lossy format good for natural images (from cameras etc.). It is like comparing FLAC and AAC/MP3 or moving GIFs and MPEG; they both have their uses.

However, back to the subject...

[kilobug]

Why is it unfortunate? As long as they support ASTC everything is fine.

In my understanding, if a game (or other program) is made using ETC2, and the card doesn't support it, it won't run (or in degraded mode). So perhaps game developpers should only use ASTC and never ETC2, but as long as there is one game using ETC2 around, if your card doesn't support it, you can't play it (or perhaps in degraded mode), so everything is not fine.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Why is it unfortunate? As long as they support ASTC everything is fine.

Exactly. They're supporting the standard they co-developed with ARM, ATSC. Duh.

[smitty3268]

Yeah try conveying that to every single game developer that currently has games relying on ETC2...

Which is nobody, except some mobile app developers. And for those, what does it matter if you decompress the textures - a desktop card is going to be more than fast enough.

[vortex]

Phoronix: AMD Polaris Doesn't Support ETC2 Texture Compression

Well this is surprising and unfortunate: it appears that AMD's next-generation Polaris GPUs don't support the royalty-free ETC2 texture compression...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...olaris-No-ETC2

More like yet another unsurprising, and still unfortunate post in this game Michael is playing with AMD.
Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is supported, and THAT is what game devs are using. It is on the PS4, Xbox, Nintendo's gear and desktops.
heck, the press release even states:

“ASTC is the most important new standard in hardware texture compression technology in many years, satisfying developer demands for a high quality, highly compressed texture format with an alpha channel,” said Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA and president of the Khronos Group. “A universally supported compressed texture format will reduce authoring costs, and enable compact, unified 3D content to be transported and processed efficiently on diverse platforms, including mobile devices and a wide variety of WebGL-enabled browsers.”

While ETC2 would be a nice bonus, in by no way is that a required spec for anything at this time (except some mobile support), and quite frankly, ASTC is better.

[peppercats]

Which is nobody, except some mobile app developers. And for those, what does it matter if you decompress the textures - a desktop card is going to be more than fast enough.

this, I think a lot of people are confused about who actually uses ETC2

[przemoli]

In my understanding, if a game (or other program) is made using ETC2, and the card doesn't support it, it won't run (or in degraded mode). So perhaps game developpers should only use ASTC and never ETC2, but as long as there is one game using ETC2 around, if your card doesn't support it, you can't play it (or perhaps in degraded mode), so everything is not fine.

GPU vendors knows that and:
a) Support a lot of formats
b) Support a lot more formats in driver, where driver will reencode assets into formats GPU understands

So no support for ETC2 in hw, is not deal breaker.

[marek]

Hi,

ETC2 is supported by all Mesa/Gallium drivers (R300-R500, R600-R700, Evergreen, Cayman, SI, CI, VI, Polaris).

Only AMD Stoney can do ETC2 in hardware, but for other chips the drivers convert ETC2 into other supported formats.

The bottom line is ETC2 is supported by the drivers and applications can use it freely. (the article should be corrected, or otherwise it may really suppress adoption of ETC2)

[Nille_kungen]

Hi,

ETC2 is supported by all Mesa/Gallium drivers (R300-R500, R600-R700, Evergreen, Cayman, SI, CI, VI, Polaris).

Only AMD Stoney can do ETC2 in hardware, but for other chips the drivers convert ETC2 into other supported formats.

The bottom line is ETC2 is supported by the drivers and applications can use it freely. (the article should be corrected, or otherwise it may really suppress adoption of ETC2)

Why is it only supported in hw in stoney and not polaris?
Is there no win to do it in hw opposed to software or does it make you compromise on other functions?

[blackshard]

In my understanding, if a game (or other program) is made using ETC2, and the card doesn't support it, it won't run (or in degraded mode). So perhaps game developpers should only use ASTC and never ETC2, but as long as there is one game using ETC2 around, if your card doesn't support it, you can't play it (or perhaps in degraded mode), so everything is not fine.

Don't think so... I guess that, more probably, textures are compressed/recompressed on the fly while they are fetched into VRAM and, depending on the video card, the best algorithm available is used. Otherwise a game that sticks with a particular texture compression would have horrid textures (or use tons of VRAM) for all the cards of the previous age that doesn't support the newest texture algorithm required by the game.