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Someone mentioned environment maps. Anything that's done with framebuffers or render-to-texture might benefit. e.g. Water reflections and refractions, metal sur
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 7mo ago
Someone mentioned environment maps. Anything that's done with framebuffers or render-to-texture might benefit. e.g. Water reflections and refractions, metal surfaces reflecting the world, mirrors in bathrooms, panini distortion for high-FOV cameras, TV screens like the Breencasts in Half-Life 2
- cubefox 7mo agoWhy would they benefit from hardware compression?
- castano-ludicon 7mo agoThe most immediate benefit is reduced memory use. Many devices are memory limited and with skyrocketing RAM prices this is becoming more problematic. Oversubscription drops performance catastrophically, but even without running into memory limits, compression reduces bandwidth which increases performance and lowers power use. This results in better experiences and longer battery life.
- cubefox 7mo agoBut in order to be compressed, don't we have to load the image into memory first, uncompressed? I don't quite see how this could result in reduced memory usage.
- castano-ludicon 7mo agoIt needs to be decompressed, but it does not stay uncompressed. That memory is only used temporarily. Games usually have a pinned staging buffer to upload data to the GPU. This memory is reused and does not contribute significantly to the total memory use.