ETC2 Texture Compression Looks Good For OpenGL

[renox]

Never

This is good but, when will wayland will full suport OpenGL so we can use it in he future?

Wayland is about sharing buffers between a client and a server, you can use whatever you want in the client to draw the buffer so Wayland is irrelevant here.
I repeat Wayland has *no* drawing API, and the article is about an improvement to a drawing API..

[ptall]

Michael, I don't think you can say royalty free is the same as not patented. Ericsson probably has it completely covered but has been nice enough to let Khronos use it in their APIs.

[MaxToTheMax]

I realize the Intel driver department and hardware department may not communicate at this level, so you may not know this, but it's worth a shot: are you going to be prioritizing hardware ASTC or hardware ECT2 or both for future chipsets? It makes a difference for me personally in my work on Alien Arena, knowing what will and won't be hardware accelerated in the future.

[Kayden]

interesting reading, i would like to know if Sandy/Ivy Bridge will support it soon?

None of our currently shipping hardware has native support for ETC2, which means we have to implement it in software. That means that textures are uploaded and stored to the GPU in an uncompressed format, which isn't terribly efficient, but there's not much else we can do. That will at least make applications using ETC2 compressed textures work. (I believe Chad's volunteered to write the software decoder, unless someone beats him to it.)

[elanthis]

If only games were developed for PCs and not ported from aging consoles...

The tide is ebbing, no worries.

[FourDMusic]

Here's a link to the slides without the Phoronix watermark: http://www.khronos.org/assets/upload...RAPH_Aug12.pdf

Is it even legal to have the watermark on the slides since it's copyrighted by Ericsson International??? Unless Michael received permission...

[MaxToTheMax]

AFAIK, while ETC2 must be supported by the OpenGL implementation, most major desktop graphics vendors will implement it in software. (I know for a fact that nVidia is doing it this way and plans to continue doing it this way for future hardware as well.) This allows them to be "OpenGL compliant," but without actually making ETC2 a viable usable choice.

This quote from the article is wrong:

Graphics texture compression reduces memory usage and avoids congesting the bus, thereby trying to avoid a performance bottleneck.

It should say:

Hardware-accelerated graphics texture compression reduces memory usage and avoids congesting the bus, thereby trying to avoid a performance bottleneck. When implemented in software, all it does is add another decoding step which the OpenGL driver must implement, wasting memory and not doing anything at all for bus congestion; this is similar to the reasons why you should always use GL_RGBA instead of GL_RGB, even when you're not using the alpha channel.

If we're going to wait for a texture compression scheme to get widespread and implemented commonly in hardware, we might as well wait for ASTC. From what I know it's better than ETC2.

[ShadowBane]

Is it so hard to clear GLX from X11 depencies or rewrite a lib that gives full OpenGL support?

The real problem is manpower, Making libGL work without GLX would be nice, and will happen at some point in the future, but right now there isn't enough intrest for this to be a major push.

[Thaodan]

This is also required by the new openGL ES spec, which Wayland uses. Also, the only reason Wayland uses openGL ES is that the only available full openGL implementation at the moment is GLX which has a dependency on X.

Is it so hard to clear GLX from X11 depencies or rewrite a lib that gives full OpenGL support?

[bug77]

You can see that WinXP is under 15% of users (and see that most of those have older hardware), and hence D3D10/11 are finally viable to use as your sole graphics API for high-sales-volume games.

If only games were developed for PCs and not ported from aging consoles...