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Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal

142 points by ibobev

by jms55

3 subcomments

by LexiMax

0 subcomment

> Unfortunately, AFAICT most people end up rolling their own exporters.
Aside from the closed-source NVIDIA texture tool, I'm also aware of AMD's Compressonator, and Microsoft's DirectXTex implementation of texconv. Intel also used to maintain the ISPC texture compressor, but afaik it's also abandoned.

by Stevvo

1 subcomments

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.

by smallstepforman

3 subcomments

I’ve been using bc7 since 2012, and even have a video codec using bc7 keyframes (we needed alpha videos, even have a patent for it). Our emphasis is not file size, but playback speed. Bc7 renders 20-40% faster than raw rgba32, and we overlay 5-7 videos on screen simultanously, so every boost helps.
We also have custom encoders for the custom video format.

by drak0n1c

0 subcomment

Similarly in mobile apps where install size is key, designed image assets are better exported as SVG or platform draw code. There are tools to do this conversion easily and the benefit of draw code is that it is crisp at all sizes and can be dynamically colored and animated. Whether or not an app does this is often the reason why some relatively basic apps are 1 mb while others are 100+ mb.

by declan_roberts

0 subcomment

It sucks to get to the "better" option and there actually is no better option other than bespoke export tools.

by rudedogg

3 subcomments

Do you still want to do this for SDF font textures? Or is the lossiness an issue?

by jam

0 subcomment

Are there good texture generators that export in KTX2? I use iliad.ai mainly, but for PNGs.

by pmarreck

0 subcomment

by cubefox

1 subcomments

Soon this will all be outdated again because neural texture compression is on its way to replace block compression, with substantially higher compression ratios both on disk and in VRAM.

by cshores

2 subcomments

Developers should revisit using indexed color formats so they only map the colors that they are using within the texture rather than an entire 32bit color space. This coupled with compression would greatly reduce the amount of ram and disk space that each texture consumes.

by shmerl

0 subcomment

Surprisingly I don't see ktx tools in Debian.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/KTX-Software

by lisp2240

9 subcomments

by gmueckl

3 subcomments

This advice is only practical if you have proper import tooling that can transparently do this conversion for your engine and preserves import settings per asset. Otherwise, this just adds a ton of fragile manual steps to asset creation.