Celestia Forums

What is the difference between using a DDS texture and specifing "CompressTexture true" in your config?

Can anyone provide a good expaination of "CompressTexture true", is it as simple as specifying it for each object to compress all their textures?

I haven't looked at this for a very long time, but DDS textures are precompressed to a format that graphics cards can read very quickly. Thus if you can get a texture into DDS format, it is very small to store and takes no time at all to decompress.

CompressTexture True I can only guess tries to compress jpg or png textures further in video memory, but this will take a short time to do, meaning textures pause even longer whilst loading/unloading them.

Now for someone to come along and tell the real story!

You are right in that DDS is in a format that the graphics card can natively deal with. Basically...all the time spent "loading" the DDS texture is reading it off the hard drive and into video memory...where the video card can read nearly instantly.

CompressTexture true will convert a non-DDS texture to a hardware compressed format at load time. As people who have worked with large DDS textures know, this process can take a long time. If you want to compressed textures you're much better off creating a DDS file, as it will load a lot faster.

--Chris