[Nuke]

i converted my skybox textures to dds and it literally doubled my framerate. im using bobboau's latest test build. ive decided to convert all my tga textures to dds, its gonna be cool.

[Lightspeed]

its gonna be ugly compression artifacts on some of them.

Test carefully - Some look okay, others don't.

I'll still have to try that DX SDK coverter though.

[Nuke]

i used the nividia photoshop plugin and saved to a dxt1 format. ive yet to see a compression artifact. those may be caused by the mipmaping code. the pluggin i used gives many options of how to generate mipmaps.

[RandomTiger]

Dont generate mipmaps, it will take up more memory, Im fairly sure OGL cant use them and D3D will ignore them and generate its own anyway. I suppose this may change though.

Never use mipmaps for background bitmaps ever.

[KARMA]

RT, what happen if a GPU doesn't support DDS?
and how many GPUs support em?

[Nuke]

even with mipmaps their faster and use less memory than the tgas did. iv'e had a 2x framerate increase and the game loads faster than it did with tga textures. the degradation in the texture quality is minimal but the performance increase certainly justifies it. however if there are other compressed formats that *do not* get decompressed in video memory then by all means let me know. i like to keep my options open.

also let me know if removing the mipmaps would adversly increase performance. seeing that my framerate never drops pelow my monitor's pathetc refresh rate im not too sure removing the mips is a good idea.

and as far as i know dxt1 has been around for some time (sence the voodoo days if i recal). id figure any card that supports htl would also support dds.

[RandomTiger]

Nuke: If you make mipmaps currently they wont be used because the code will only load the top layer, then it will make them itself.

However this could change and it wont waste any memory ingame to have them there so I guess leave them if you want. It will just make the file sizes a little bigger.

Karma: Most GPU's seem to support them, I did a poll somewhere dig that up to get an idea. If your card doesnt support them D3D will convert it as it loads into an uncompressed bitmap.

This means it will load OK but will take up a lot of memory again. Im not sure what OGL does.

[Nuke]

i will leave them in there for now in the event that they will someday get used.

*edit*

i use theese:

there is a photoshop plugin by nvidia, which works pretty good.

you can get the plugin here  and you also need theese  dll files in your system dir. i also recomend this  to let you preview dds textures in explorer as well as photoshop's file browser.