Intel Enables ASTC Texture Compression In Mesa For Skylake

As of today in Mesa Git, the royalty-free Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is now supported in Mesa Git for Skylake graphics hardware.

ASTC is the lossy block-based texture compression developed by ARM and since adopted by The Khronos Group for OpenGL / OpenGL ES and has also found its way into Direct3D 11.3/12. ASTC is the means of texture compression that will hopefully one day replace the patented S3TC usage within games and other applications.

The ASTC code in Mesa started getting into shape a few days ago while tonight is the first commit advertising the ASTC OpenGL extensions, which for Intel hardware is supported with Skylake "Gen9" and newer. The extensions are KHR_texture_compression_astc_ldr and KHR_texture_compression_astc_hdr.

There's also a patch on the Mesa mailing list for implementing ASTC support for Intel Cherryview hardware.