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Technology Stocks : S3 (A LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockroach who wrote (11429)	7/8/1998 4:47:00 PM
From: Mike Boiko	Respond to of 14577

With Microsoft DX6 and Savage 3D's texture compression you really don't need more then 8MB on the card. This is why there will only be 4MB and 8MB cards available...you really don't need anymore with DX6. This will keep card prices VERY low compared to the competition... Read this... One of the "big deals" about the Savage 3D is the texture compression technology. The compression scheme used is very efficient, giving 4:1 compression for 16bit textures and 6:1 for 24bit textures. Because it works so well, looks so good, a is very cheap and easy to implement in hardware, this is the compression scheme chosen by Microsoft for DirectX 6. They showed me a demonstration of this technology, where a 24-bit photo of a cityscape was loaded. The file was about 295 kilobytes. Then it was compressed, and the final size was 49 kilobytes. A third "difference image" was loaded up to show exactly what was lost in the conversion, since the two looked nearly identical side-by-side. At first, it looked completely black, but upon close inspection you could see little tiny points of color. If this image was never loaded, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the two. The demo was performed with a few other pictures as well, with the same results. Then they showed a screen where they loded 40 completely different 256x256 24bit textures into 2MB of RAM, then scaled and rotated them. No wonder there are no plans for more than an 8MB card at this time...with that kind of compression and image quality, who needs it? I would think that all vendors will start using some type of texture compression in the future. -mike-