Raspberry Pi V3D Driver Adds Native ASTC Texture Compression Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi V3D Driver Adds Native ASTC Texture Compression Support

The V3D Gallium3D driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers has landed support in mainline Mesa for native ASTC texture compression support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/V3D-Native-ASTC-Compression

[bobdvb]

While we hopefully all appreciate that hardware acceleration is good, I think the article fails to explain what this means in real world terms. Perhaps there are no benchmarks available but as someone who's not deep in rendering tech it would be nice to know what effect this will have on anything?

[QwertyChouskie]

Anything that lets SuperTuxKart run faster on the Raspberry Pi 4 is a win in my book.

[stormcrow]

While we hopefully all appreciate that hardware acceleration is good, I think the article fails to explain what this means in real world terms. Perhaps there are no benchmarks available but as someone who's not deep in rendering tech it would be nice to know what effect this will have on anything?

Long story short: If your game uses compressed textures, hardware acceleration will speed up the associated paths, but it won't help much if your game uses more VRAM than is available even with compressed textures. If your game doesn't use compressed textures at all or uses a different scheme, you won't notice any difference in performance. Depending on how the textures are compressed, doing so can add artifacts that range from distorted color reproduction or reduced color palette range to blocky artifacts similar to JPGs (some games allow the option of toggling compression because the assets themselves aren't compressed). A lot of mods for games concentrate on mitigating the effects of poorly designed or unoptimized, precompressed, or unfortunate low resolution textures, especially for people with GPUs that have 8 GB+ VRAM cards who like older games (like Skyrim, Fallout, etc). There's a lot that goes into game textures that can affect frame rates in either direction as well as the visual quality of the game experience and at the center is what kind of compression is used, if any.

[Myownfriend]

While we hopefully all appreciate that hardware acceleration is good, I think the article fails to explain what this means in real world terms. Perhaps there are no benchmarks available but as someone who's not deep in rendering tech it would be nice to know what effect this will have on anything?

There are certain compressed, lossy texture formats that GPUs support in order to use less VRAM and memory bandwidth. The most widely used compressed texture format is S3TC (DXT in Windows) because it's been around for over 20 years. S3TC has a few modes that reduce a texture down to 4 or 8 bits per pixel. ASTC is a much new compressed texture format with a lot more modes that reduces the textures down anywhere from 8 bpp to 0.89 bpp. More compressed modes will have more obvious artifacts but, in general, a 3.56 bpp will be visual similar to or better than a 4bpp S3TC texture.

It's important to note that if a game doesn't ship with ASTC textures then support for them doesn't matter.

[smitty3268]

While we hopefully all appreciate that hardware acceleration is good, I think the article fails to explain what this means in real world terms. Perhaps there are no benchmarks available but as someone who's not deep in rendering tech it would be nice to know what effect this will have on anything?

It's mostly used by Android games i think. Not much native linux/windows support for it.

Benefit would be increased performance of the apps that do use it, potentially by quite a bit, or only a little, depending on what kind of fallbacks the app has.

[Myownfriend]

It's mostly used by Android games i think. Not much native linux/windows support for it.

Benefit would be increased performance of the apps that do use it, potentially by quite a bit, or only a little, depending on what kind of fallbacks the app has.

Android games and Switch games are the only things I know that use it.

[brent]

ASTC is hardly used, which is pretty sad. I guess that's because desktop GPUs do not have hardware support. I do not understand why that is, it is obviously much better than the existing DXTC etc. formats. ASTC is pretty complex, but if complexity is the issue, then it makes even less sense to include ASTC in mobile chips, but not desktop GPUs.

[Myownfriend]

ASTC is hardly used, which is pretty sad. I guess that's because desktop GPUs do not have hardware support. I do not understand why that is, it is obviously much better than the existing DXTC etc. formats. ASTC is pretty complex, but if complexity is the issue, then it makes even less sense to include ASTC in mobile chips, but not desktop GPUs.

Using ASTC tends to save on power because it requires less memory bandwidth. I really don't get why it's not supported on newer desktop GPUs. All albedo textures would be at least 12% smaller.