I really am going to revisit this, I just have to find an evening this week to devote to it. Thanks a ton Eric/whargoul/malcolm/pixelrambo. I'll be incorporating this new info and making a better example image.
Nice thread Ben. I always wanted something like this. Glad to see you putting it together. I found dxt3 better when the alpha had islands of black and white that were antialiased, like interface or font bitmaps. If I had gradients bigger than 4 pixels across, then dxt5 was always better. Here's a poor example. Nvidia is…
Sorry Ben my bad you are correct dxt3 and 5 are the same file size! Not sure why I remember this being different? Yeah some normal map examples would be perfect as they are they hardest thing to compress I would imagine.
Good one. Poop, when you get a chance to work on this some more, I found some good image examples to build off of. UDN chose images that are both typical and atypical, to highlight exactly what's going on with the compression. I thought they did a great job. Also shows their "bright" format, same basic thing as DDS' 8bit…