Direct Draw Surface (DDS)? - Page 2

Direct Draw Surface (DDS)?

Requests for features in the spring code.

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Agon
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Post by Agon »

rattle wrote:Look at the right side, you probably see the hard border yourself.

If you want to use DDS I'd use the format with the least loss in color/alpha information (DXT3?).
No I haven´t seen it, because I saw it only with black or transparent background and where you would not found it because the border is black, thanks. I have only seen the small lines that goes away from the explosion line.
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KDR_11k
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Post by KDR_11k »

AFAIK DXT1 is recommended for no alpha, DXT3 for on/off alpha and DXT5 for full alpha. Also DXT2 and 4 are fail and noone uses them.
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Agon
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Post by Agon »

KDR_11k wrote:AFAIK DXT1 is recommended for no alpha, DXT3 for on/off alpha and DXT5 for full alpha. Also DXT2 and 4 are fail and noone uses them.
Thanks that will help me a lot.
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LathanStanley
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Post by LathanStanley »

I never said the filesize was greater or less... just the renderer fps....

:P

but yeah, when argh converted all the .tga textures on all my models to .dds, he 1/4th'd the number of pixels on each file, after I re-.dds'd them to the same size images, not x/2,y/2 the filesize was relatively close, allbeit the tga was bigger, but the tga out performed the dds....

as argh said, something is effin wrong with the dds support... I've done some explicit reading on dds, how to render an image into dds and well, maintain the correct image quality etc, mostly by adding a very small noize factor and blushing the image with green before converting.... that helps to reduce the dds artifacts that an image looses from compression...
and frankly, dds is FAR superior to tga, in "theory" anyways...
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KDR_11k
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Post by KDR_11k »

DDS with an actual DXT should result in a filesize roughly 1/6th of TGA's. Are you sure you applied DXT and didn't just save it to DDS with RGBA?
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Peet
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EEEYYYYYYY!

Post by Peet »

Haven't tested performance or anything, but...
tga (uncompressed)-full quality- 1.0MB
dxt1-low quality-alpha mask (on or off) 170kb
dxt3-reasonable quality-lowered colour depth and alpha bit depth 341kb
dxt5-good quality- 341kb
Not sure why the dxt3 and 5 are the same size, they're definitely of different qualities...dxtbmp (program I use) might be strange.

edit: alright, I did a few tests with regards to performance.

The dxt5 dds (not the posted one as it was non-square and crashed spring and upspring) gave me 2 more fps (40->42, all settings maxed + 8192x8192 shadowmaps, no dyn water on EE-Waterways on 101 simbase commanders) than the tga...not really a noteworthy difference.

On an unrelated note, I noticed that non-square non-power of 2 textures work fine except for .dds.

Conclusion: dds is way smaller, and a tiny bit faster...use dxt5, it doesn't make the fonz look like crap.
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rattle
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Post by rattle »

DXT1 = more colors, alphatest
DXT3 = more colors, reduced alpha
DXT5 = less colors, full alpha

It was something like that.

DXT2 and 4 were somewhere inbetween, no idea what they are good for.
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KDR_11k
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Post by KDR_11k »

You don't see performance increases with compressed textures until you're saturating the bandwidth or memory. Set Doom 3 to Ultra detail and then to High for a comparison, that game uses a lot more texture memory. DXT might be more useful to have higher resolution map textures without nuking the video memory.
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smoth
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Post by smoth »

sure tga is hueg but what about png?
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Dragon45
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Post by Dragon45 »

uncompressed file formats are hueg liek xbox
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rattle
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Post by rattle »

PNG is zlib compressed so only the filesize is smaller. Should use the same amount of video memory if I got this right.
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KDR_11k
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Post by KDR_11k »

smoth wrote:sure tga is hueg but what about png?
It's hueg in tex mem and takes longer to load I'd assume.
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Agon
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Post by Agon »

If we look at the commercial game industries they are using .dds. I remember FarCry is using dds. And if a game company is using dds and with a good result it can not be bad to use it.

Some informations about .dds:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051 ... e_01.shtml

I decided for me to use .dds for Spring in the feature. And if we could get full support for dds it would be fantastic.[/url]
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