

Mipmapping also now uses mathematically correct filtering – so color images are processed using linear-space, premultiplied alpha colors, while normal maps use slope-space filtering to correctly filter height map features.

If you’re generating mipmaps at runtime, you can save time by using the NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter to generate mipmaps instead. It’s even possible to load block-compressed textures faster than many other formats, as their data can be copied almost directly into GPU memory and then used from there. Using GPU-accelerated block compression, you can reduce the size of your textures – whether it’s to make a game download faster, or to ship a title on a fewer number of disks, or to be able to fit more materials and objects into memory in a ray tracer.īut on top of that, GPUs can render from these textures while storing them compressed – meaning a ray tracer could use this to fit more textures and materials into memory, or a game engine could use this to render larger worlds than otherwise. This all-new release adds support for modern, CUDA-accelerated Texture Tools 3.0 compression (including ASTC, BC7, and BC6s), support for more than 130 DXGI and ASTC formats, linear-space, slope-space, and premultiplied alpha mipmapping, command-line and Photoshop automation, and a unified user interface. However, the format provides fast load times since most computer video cards natively support the S3TC/DXTn compression method.Today, we’re releasing the free NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter, the new version of our DDS texture compression tool, available both as a standalone application and as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop. The compression is a lossy compression, which means some quality is lost during the compression. However, the format typically stores texture data compressed with an S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) algorithm, which may be referred to as a DXTn texture. Since DDS is a container format, it can store various data types.

Some of these improvements include support for volume textures in DirectX 8.0, arrays of textures in DirectX 10, new Direct3D texture formats in DirectX 11, and variable rate shading (VRS) in DirectX 12. Users often utilize the format to store model textures, mipmap levels, and cubemaps in 3D video games.ĭDS was introduced in Microsoft DirectX 7.0 in March 2000, and subsequent versions introduced various improvements.

Microsoft developed the DDS format to be used with the DirectX SDK to develop real-time rendering applications, mainly 3D games.
