Nouveau Support For ETC2/ASTC Texture Compression

Prolific Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin has published a Gallium3D driver patch for implementing ETC2 and ASTC support on hardware supporting these texture compression methods.

On NVIDIA hardware, Mirkin notes that ETC2 and ASTC patch works for the GK20A (the Kepler-based GPU in the Tegra K1 SoC) and the GM107 Maxwell GeForce GTX 750 series.

ETC2 and ASTC are two popular texture compression alternatives to the patent-troubled S3TC. Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) has been an extension for OpenGL and OpenGL ES since 2012 and is also found in the Direct3D world too. Ericsson Texture Compression 2 is mandated by OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3.

The Nouveau patch for ETC2/ASTC on supported hardware can currently be found on the Nouveau mailing list but will hopefully be found in Mesa Git soon enough.