Texture compression conversion to BC7 ?

Hello

Texture quality is something I try to be very reasonable about around here so it's not on any of my top wishlists, but the whole move to PBR/deferred shading was unexpected and plesantly surprised to me, so I was wondering if the whole game will get an texture compression conversion overhaul not necessairly in upping the texture quality by increasing the resolution or adjusting LODs (a little bit wouldn't hurt me either hehe), but simply reconverting the original lossless sources into BC7 texture compression instead of DXT1,3,5 which is currently used.

Since DCS is a DX11 game not DX9 anymore, and BC7 is a DX11 thing and so if almost everyone has the hardware to run DCS with the newer API then, they would be able to run BC7 textures as well. Either way, DX11 is stated as a minimal requirement for the core and all the modules anyway.

I and others were pushing such a move recently for the Dolphin Emu, which got implemented without much effort, that might not be so for DCS but still most of the time would be spent waiting for "re-"compression it self, rather than engine support imo.

EDIT: You need to click expand or open image in new tab.

Source: https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/10409

+1

Also, I don't mind 2.5 getting delayed a bit more just to get this in as well, it's kind of a milestone change, and making the change at 2.5 makes most sense, such a patch would be huge, so why not do it when you reinstall to 2.5 anyway.

The support for BC7 is already available in the engine of DCS: I've tried converting some DXT1 to BC7 and the texures are perfectly rendered in the Model Viewer.

The main problem is that memory requirements are doubled:

DXT1+mipmaps: 10,7M (worst quality but the standard here...)

BC7+Mipmaps:21,6M (the same of DXT5+mipmaps but with a much better quality)

So, yes, using all BC7 textures can improve dramatically the visual quality, but at a cost: you must have at least a TitanX to play decently...

+1

Quality nice... unfortunately now is not enough video card that has 6Gb vram. Rather, it is the future need to optimize the size of the textures.

Actually, it might be more worth it to skip BC7 and go straight to ASTC. Considering when started, when all the re-encoding, testing, etc will be complete it'll be another year or so and by that time surely the rest of the people would probably get along with the GPUs that were too old.

I mentioned this memory-increase in the current thread around the (appropriately) high system requirements that are now posted on the official DCS 2.5 download page, and also researched a bit and found nvidia has an ASTC intro page which says a lot of hardware supporting ASTC has already reached considerable market share.

https://developer.nvidia.com/astc-texture-compression-for-game-assets#_Toc398571911

Nvidia:

Hardware supporting ASTC has achieved sufficient enough market share that developers should seriously consider how to leverage it in their titles: to improve quality, decrease storage size, or both. This is especially true in titles that require a high enough level of graphics hardware such that ASTC is a given.

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The support for BC7 is already available in the engine of DCS: I've tried converting some DXT1 to BC7 and the texures are perfectly rendered in the Model Viewer.

Interesting ofcourse, that should be a good bonus for modders, who make new skins from scratch, but only them, engine support is one thing, the uncompressed internal source has to be used when building new BC7 or ASTC textures, the community can't do it properly by themselfs using the released DXT, it wouldn't look much better.

The main problem is that memory requirements are doubled:

 

DXT1+mipmaps: 10,7M (worst quality but the standard here...)

BC7+Mipmaps:21,6M (the same of DXT5+mipmaps but with a much better quality)

 

So, yes, using all BC7 textures can improve dramatically the visual quality, but at a cost: you must have at least a TitanX to play decently...

Yeah, there has to be some tradeoffs, but I'm not sure myself about that, didn't look into it yet, also, now that I came back to this thread with an updated thought of just skipping to ASTC, then do you also think/know ASTC has that same memory increase over DXT ?

2019 Update:

Oh Oh I just clicked! The Black Shark and A-10C cockpit updates could be justified for BC7 texture compression since if it's true it uses more VRAM, that would mean a lot more steeper requirements if the whole game would be in BC7, but the cockpit is the point where things are looked in up close and that be quite a visible improvement when zooming to all the text, all the gauges, it would look great.