nvidia-texture-tools

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The compressors available in the NVIDIA Texture Tools are not designed for real-time compression. If you need to compress textures in real-time, I'd recommend to look at the following sources:

J.M.P. van Waveren was the first one to describe a real-time DXT compressor. This compressor is part of the of real-time texture streaming pipeline used in some id Software games. He obtains the following results with his SSE2 optimized implementation:

CPU	DXT1	DXT5
Intel 2.8 GHz Dual Core Xeon	112.05 MP/s	66.43 MP/s
Intel 2.9 GHz Core 2 Extreme	200.62 MP/s	127.55 MP/s

The same algorithm described by Waveren can also be adapted easily to the GPU. This is what Simon Green did in this OpenGL SDK example. The performance on the GPU is much more impressive:

GPU	DXT1	DXT5
GeForce 8800 GTX	1,547 MP/s	-
GeForce 8600 GTS	461 MP/s	-

A later whitepaper by Waveren and Ignacio Castaño provides even higher results on the GPU:

GPU	DXT1	YCoCg-DXT5
GeForce 8800 GTX	1,690 MP/s	939 MP/s
GeForce 8600 GTS	520 MP/s	279 MP/s

Peter Uliciansky optimized Waveren's algorithm further and published his results in this thread: Extreme DXT Compression, New algorithm for real-time DXT compression.

CPU	DXT1	DXT5
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz	241.2 MP/s	206.5 MP/s
Intel Core 2 3.0 GHz	910.0 MP/s	620.4 MP/s

These numbers are very impressive and start to get closer to the results of the GPU implementation. However, as pointed by Charles Bloom this implementation has some errors.

Moreover, the latest GPU implementation also offers higher performance.

GPU	DXT1	YCoCg-DXT5	BC5	DXT5n
GeForce 8800 GTX	3450 MP/s	1880 MP/s	5665 MP/s	5804 MP/s
GeForce GTX 280	9920 MP/s	7900 MP/s	12850 MP/s	13150 MP/s

3.0 KiB Raw Blame History

3.0 KiB

Raw Blame History