dark10x said:
I'll be curious to see how much that helps...
Obviously, this next-generation is going to focus on many different texture layers in order to achieve a variety of results.
I'm not sure how accurate this would be, but let's take a look at Doom 3. D3 used three different layers per surface (diffuse, specular, normal). The textures required quite a bit of disk space for storage and also used a ton of video memory. If you were to compress all three layers, the end result was a rather muddy looking texture. Just compressing the specular and diffuse layers gives you much better results, but still requires a at least 256mb of video ram.
Thing is, these textures do not appear particularly sharp or high-res when playing. They certainly aren't blurry, but they lack the razor sharp appearance of less complex surfaces in many other PC games. If textures this gen use a similar technique, but with higher resolution base assets, the storage space and ram requirements seem as if they will jump up.
Yes, DXTC can be a problem with multiple layers. It doesn't seem a very good compression method to me, from the few images I've seen (some time ago I found on the net a free program to compress images with DXTC and I've tried it with a few images just because I was curious about the results).
But I forgot we are talking about methods to save space on DVD, not necessarily on main memory.
They can use any kind of compression they want to store the textures on DVD, unpacking the data in main memory.
The devs will have to do a little work to save space. Something like this, from top to bottom:
- if the quality of the texture is not critical, use for it DXTC/3Dc compression (space saved both on DVD and on main RAM, less bandwidth used to transfer the data around the system)
- if the results with DXTC/3Dc is poor, try other compression methods, like JPEG. Unpack the data in main memory (saving space on DVD)
- if the texture quality is really critical, use a lossless compression method (just a little DVD space saved)
I'm pretty sure they already do this sometimes, at least for some GC games and PC games on CDs.
Of course the big question is: will all this be enough to fit a big next-gen game on a DVD? We'll see, I suppose
It seems that UE3 uses a similar method for texturing. If Epic can cram it onto one DVD9, I think that might be a good sign for other X360 games. I'll be curious to see just how all of the textures end up looking when I'm playing it on an actual 360.
We need GoW at launch.
