Graphics technology company S3 Inc has some good news at last, with Microsoft Corp agreeing to take its S3TC texture compression algorithm as the preferred compression technique for the Microsoft DirectX APIs. The deal, announced at this week’s WinHEC show in Orlando, Florida, won’t translate into money for S3, which announced re-structuring and a 15% cut in its workforce earlier this year (CI No 3,330), but gives it a head start in graphics compression and some technology leadership credibility. S3’s Texture Compression will appear first with DirectX 6.0 due out at the same time as NT 5.0 – later this year or early next, by all accounts. Before that, S3 itself will have products incorporating the algorithm, which it’s been working on for three years. It says texture compression will be a critical feature in 3D graphics accelerators, increasing available texture storage and read bandwidth by a factor of between four and six without compromising image quality and without being too expensive. Typical image compression algorithms like JPEG aren’t suitable for this, says S3, as the technology needs to have a fixed compression ratio and to be cheap to implement in hardware. A few years ago, all textures had to be stored in the frame buffer, and video memory was expensive. Graphics quality had to be compromised. So graphics companies began looking at ways of maximizing the performance of texturing out of system memory. Intel Corp solved some of the problem with its Advanced Graphics Port, which theoretically quadruples the speed that data can read from system memory compared with PCI. In combination with AGP, S3 says that texture compression can increase the effective bandwidth by between 16 and 24 times. Microsoft has licensed the technology, and plans to make it available to developers through the DirectX API set, aimed mostly at games developers.
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