Improving the compression of block-compressed textures

ADD: the best solution for this now is our new product Oodle Texture

I'm leaving this post for historical reference, but it is now obsolete and you should look at the Oodle Texture results instead.

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I'm often asked how to get more compression on block-compressed textures. (and was asked again today, hence writing this)

If you're working from existing BCn data (not RGB originals), there's not a lot you can do. One small thing you can do is to de-interleave the end points and indexes.

In BC1/DXT1 for example each block is 4 bytes of end points then 4 bytes of index data. You can take each alternating 4 bytes out and instead put all the end points together, then all the index data together. Sometimes this improves compression, sometimes it doesn't, it depends on the compressor and the data. When it does help it's in the 5-10% range.

If you're using mips, then you can convert the BCn endpoint colors into deltas from the parent mip. (that will only be a good idea if your BCn encoder is one that is *not* aggressive about finding endpoints outside of the original image colors)

If you have original RGB data, you can make new BCn data that's designed to be more compressible. This opens up a whole new world of powerful possibilities : R/D decisions in the BCn encoding.

There are some obvious basic ideas, like - instead of aggressive end point searches, only choose end points that occur or are near the colors in the block; try to reuse previous index dwords rather than make new ones; try to use completely flat color blocks with the whole index dword = 0, etc.

See for example Jon Olick's articles on doing this .

But unless you really need to do it manually for some reason you should probably just use Rich Geldreich's cool tool crunch .

Crunch can make its own "crn" compressed texture format, which you would need to load with the crn-lib. crn-lib would decode the crn file back to BC1 at load time. That may be an awesome thing to do, I really can't comment because I haven't looked into it in detail.

Let's assume for the moment that you don't want to use the "crn" custom compressed format. You just want DDS or raw BCn data that you will run through your normal compression pipeline (Oodle or whatever). Crunch can also make BCn data that's more compressible by reducing its complexity, choosing encodings that are lower quality but less complex.

You tell it to make BCn and output DDS and you can specify a "quality". Then when you run it through your back-end compressor you get smaller files :

lena 512x512 RGB (absolutely terrible as a representative game texture)

DXT1 DDS quality 255

 rmse : 7.6352 psnr : 30.5086

Oodle LZNA   :   131,200 ->   102,888 =  6.274 bpb =  1.275 to 1
Oodle Kraken :   131,200 ->   107,960 =  6.583 bpb =  1.215 to 1

DXT1 DDS quality 200

 rmse : 8.2322 psnr : 29.8547

Oodle LZNA   :   131,200 ->    80,264 =  4.894 bpb =  1.635 to 1
Oodle Kraken :   131,200 ->    85,268 =  5.199 bpb =  1.539 to 1

CRN quality 255

 rmse : 8.2699 psnr : 29.8150
   crunched.crn                74,294

DXT1 DDS quality 128

 rmse : 9.0698 psnr : 29.0131

Oodle LZNA   :   131,200 ->    62,960 =  3.839 bpb =  2.084 to 1
Oodle Kraken :   131,200 ->    66,628 =  4.063 bpb =  1.969 to 1

CRN quality 160

rmse : 9.0277 psnr : 29.0535

crunched.crn                53,574

DXT1 DDS quality 80

 rmse : 10.2521 psnr : 27.9488

Oodle LZNA   :   131,200 ->    50,983 =  3.109 bpb =  2.573 to 1
Oodle Kraken :   131,200 ->    54,096 =  3.299 bpb =  2.425 to 1

CRN quality 100

 rmse : 10.1770 psnr : 28.0126

 crunched.crn               41,533

So going from rmse 7.64 to 10.26 we reduced the Oodle-compressed DDS files to about half their size! Pretty cool.

The CRN format files are even smaller at equal error. (unfortunately the -quality setting is not a direct comparison, you have to hunt around to find qualities that give equal rmse to do a comparison).

For my reference :

@echo test.bat [file] [quality]
@echo quality in 1-255 optional 128 default
set file=%1
if "%file%"=="" end.bat 
set q=%2
if "%q%"=="" set q=128
crunch_x64.exe -DXT1 -fileformat dds -file %file% -maxmips 1 -quality %q% -out crunched.dds
@REM -forceprimaryencoding ??

@REM verified same :
@REM radbitmaptest64 copy crunched.dds crunched_dds_un.bmp
crunch_x64.exe -R8G8B8 -file crunched.dds -out crunched_dds_un.bmp -fileformat bmp

crunch_x64.exe -DXT1 -file %file% -maxmips 1 -quality %q% -out crunched.crn

crunch_x64.exe -R8G8B8 -file crunched.crn -out crunched_crn_un.bmp -fileformat bmp

call bmp mse %file% crunched_dds_un.bmp
@echo --------------------------

call ooz crunched.dds -zc7 -zl8
call ooz crunched.dds -zc8 -zl8

call bmp mse %file% crunched_crn_un.bmp
@echo --------------------------

call d crunched.crn