Originally posted by Lightspeed
Hmm, I thought PCX is, ANI not.
Right, ANI is still restricted to it's 8-bit palette and never goes 16-bit. It's the only acception to the rule... almost. For OpenGL at least everything is 16-bit or higher when it's sent to the video card. This is a change from the icculus.org code and I don't know who did it but I haven't figured out how to change it back and still have things work. So basically the video memory usage for an ANI is the same as a 16-bit PCX, nearly twice what it would be as a DDS.
Memory usage of DXT5 is about the same as an ANI of the same dimensions. The real benefit of DDS in this case is that it's sent as is to the video card. ANI, like PCX and everything else, has extra processing done on it so that it's properly setup for the video card. That extra processing obviously slows things down.
I'm not going step in and blindly advocate DDS over ANI since both still have their place. It just needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis: a lot of frames would probably work better as a DDS but that depends on the quality sacrifice, smaller number of frames would still work ok for ANI but the difference of footprint in system memory and video memory need to ba taken into account. Remember that more people have a lot of system memory but maybe only 128 megs of video memory. There are missions now, with everybody's graphics in use, that need over 200 megs of system memory for textures and a bit more than that of video memory.
