I love this quote from Ivan-Assen Ivanov about the NVIDIA Texture Tools:
We switched to CUDA nvcompress in our pipeline and totally forgot
about it. Until yesterday, when an artist had to work on a 7600 for a
while, and raised hell about how slow the export has become.
:-)
Even thought the DXT compression format is widely adopted, most of the hardware implementations use a slightly different decompression algorithm.
The problem is that there never was a specification that described the preferred implementation. The DXT format was first documented by S3 in US patent 5956431. However, in order to cover all possible implementations the description [...]
Charles has some interesting posts on DXT compression:
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
I think I’ll have to try out the k-means algorithm. He does not say whether it’s faster than squish, but even if it were faster, I think it would not parallelize as well as Simon’s cluster fit algorithm.
On the other side, simulated annealing should be [...]
I just created a google project for the NVIDIA texture tools. So far, the code in the repository is the same as the code released officially by NVIDIA, but I’ll have a nice update in a few days. In the meantime, if you would like to ask for new features or report bugs, you can [...]
NVIDIA has released a new version of its texture tools. These have been written entirely by me and they are being distributed with source code under the MIT license. The code is portable and should work on Linux and OSX out of the box. You will have to install cmake in order to compile it [...]