Texture file size shrunk by 70%...

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-10-06 12:38pm

One of the most interesting talks at London’s GDC (Games Developers Conference) this week came form one of the lesser known companies called Allegorithmic, who claim they will be able to reduce texture file sizes in games by up to 70%.

Their new programs, that they hope development artists will soon be using as an industry standard, are called ProFX and MaP Zone 2. Their ambition is to keep the graphical quality of game textures at the same standards as current games, whilst dramatically reducing the amount of data required for the game to work.

The implications of such a technology would be far reaching. As the current trend of digital distribution gains momentum a huge emphasis is being placed on games being made smaller and thus downloadable quicker. Their claim is that the current tool of choice for most games artists, Adobe Photoshop, is not ideally suited to making textures for games.

I was doubtful of this technology; however the company ran a demo that persuaded me otherwise. In the demo they had a bathroom full of beautiful textures, then with the flick of a button the bathroom took a more hellish look – all the while the textures looked the equal of Half Life 2.

The next demo was of a game that is due to come out for the XBOX Live Arcade called ‘Roboblitz’. Due to the requirement to get the game under 50MB, the developers needed to keep the textures as small in filesize as possible. Using the new texture system the overall size for all the textures was less than 280KB – watching the game (which runs on the Unreal 3 engine) I was amazed.

Confused by the fact that I hadn’t heard about this technology before, I spoke to one of the men behind it directly - Dr Sébastien Deguy. He assured me that there were no catches with his system, that if a game contained 1GB of textures he would be able to reduce that to 300MB and lose no quality. When I asked why everyone wasn’t using the program at the moment he explained it was due to people needing to be retrained in learning a new system. He was optimistic however, that soon all games companies will be using their new texture tools.

So what are the implications for you and I? In terms of traditionally packaged games that come in boxes, there probably won’t be much difference. Dr Deguy argues that if textures are smaller in file size and easier to create, then next-generation companies will be able to create even more textures for the games. We may then see a big leap forward in how richly detailed games are in the future as they triple the variety of textures the game includes.

The biggest impact however will be the benefits this will have to digital distribution. Games with texture quality and diversity matching Half Life 2 may soon be available in minutes of downloading rather than hours – for gamers this can only be a good thing.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2006-10-06 01:17pm

This means that i´ll have to learn a new program. GRRRRR!!!

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-10-06 01:55pm

At first I was a bit confused and thought I would have to make some corrections because I read the title as "Text file size shrunk by 70%", which is unimpressive. Funny how the mind works sometimes.

Anyway, on topic, this could be very cool if driver support/hardware support appears that allows it all the way to the graphics card - it would give enormeus temporary headroom on gfx memory - that is until games come out that explicitly count on this algorithm.

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2006-10-06 04:53pm

Uhm, is this compared to uncompressed files or compared to something like PNG or JPEG? Because if the former, well, it frankly isn't very revolutionary. I'm more interested in how it helps create textures.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2006-10-06 07:48pm

It probably looks like ass when you look at it closely. Losing 70% of the data has to come from SOMEWHERE, not out of your own ass.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-10-06 07:59pm

Hilariously, there are such things as 'lossless compression' and the article itself mentions high-quality textures. A *real* complaint might be the amount of processing required for whatever process they use - some texture formats are better than others, on a quality:size:speed comparison.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-10-06 08:00pm

MKSheppard wrote:It probably looks like ass when you look at it closely. Losing 70% of the data has to come from SOMEWHERE, not out of your own ass.

You realise that most of the detail you see in a modern FPS game is decompressed?

Models which seem to ooze fine details are basicly flat polygons, bumps and ridged are simulated in real time. Textures are also compressed and much of their look is with the help of light maps.

I personally doubt they will get consistent 70% size saving, but if there are games being released on XBLA using it, I'm not going to doubt it works in some fashion.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2006-10-06 08:04pm

Stark wrote:Hilariously, there are such things as 'lossless compression'

Good old ZIP. Too bad we don't have the CPU power to spare.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-10-06 08:06pm

There are various methods of lossless compression for textures, but yeah the processing overhead is too much for something you'll only notice if you jam the camera right in there. It's not really necessary though: even games that use 2048x2048 textures don't use 'lossless', just 'very good'.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-10-06 08:09pm

MKSheppard wrote:
Stark wrote:Hilariously, there are such things as 'lossless compression'
Good old ZIP. Too bad we don't have the CPU power to spare.

Oh really? I suppose thats why we have dual core nowdays.
So we can throw a bunch of those tasks at another core.

Or that must be why a CPU nowdays isn't the real bottleneck in games, rather a GPU. I guess thats because theres no CPU power to spare.

EDIT: not to mention, practicly every game today uses compression on some basis. Otherwise the 2048x2048 textures that comprise a ground texture in many games would be gigantic in size.

Mad · Post by **Mad** » 2006-10-06 11:21pm

Also, just because it's 70% smaller on disk doesn't mean it's 70% smaller in memory. If it's too CPU-intensive to decompress in real-time, then it could be decompressed as it's read from disk. It'd take the same amount space in RAM, but take up much less disk space and would be much faster to download.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-10-07 01:34am

MKSheppard wrote:Good old ZIP. Too bad we don't have the CPU power to spare.

Actually, compression (done right) is often a performance win since the extra time decompressing to memory is less than reading in the uncompressed data from the HD. I/O is a killer.