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Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal

(gamesbymason.com)
148 points ibobev | 2 comments | 06 Sep 25 20:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.502s | source
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Stevvo ◴[06 Sep 25 22:11 UTC] No.45153352[source]▶
Any modern engine does this automatically on PNG import, or as part of material/shader setup. You want different formats for different things, e.g AO, normals, bcs different formats have different compression artifacts.
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pimlottc ◴[06 Sep 25 23:50 UTC] No.45153957[source]▶
How much extra time does it add for startup? For a single texture it’s probably negotiable but for a modern game, we’re talking about thousands of textures, so maybe it adds up?
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midnightclubbed ◴[07 Sep 25 02:49 UTC] No.45154958[source]▶
If you’re compressing at load-time it can be a lot. You can do a quick and dirty compress to BC1-3 (assuming you are on PC) in a few tens of milliseconds but quality will be suboptimal, higher quality will likely take a few seconds per texture and going to BC6 takes even longer but will look much better.
replies(1): >>45155440 #
Dylan16807 ◴[07 Sep 25 04:38 UTC] No.45155440[source]▶
> higher quality will likely take a few seconds per texture

It takes that long to do a good compression on the format that interpolates 2 colors for each 4x4 block? Huh.

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1. exDM69 ◴[08 Sep 25 08:43 UTC] No.45165972[source]▶
It's an open ended optimization problem. You can get bad results very quickly but on high quality settings it can take minutes or hours to compress large textures.

And the newer compression formats have larger block sizes from 8x8 to even 12x12 pixels. ASTC and BC7 are a different beast to the early texture compression formats. You can get pretty awesome image quality at 2 bits per pixel (and slightly less awesome at less than a bit per pixel).

replies(1): >>45166623 #
2. ◴[08 Sep 25 10:31 UTC] No.45166623[source]▶