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openglcompressiontexturesimage-compressionlossless-compression

Lossless texture compression for OpenGL

I have several 32-bit(with alpha channel) bitmap images which I'm using as essential information in my game. Slightest change in RGBA values breaks everything, so I can't use lossy compression methods like S3TC.

Is there any feasible lossless compression algorithms I can use with OpenGL? I'm using fragment shaders and I want to use the glCompressedTexImage2D() method to define the texture. I haven't tried compressing the texture with OpenGL using GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA parameter, is there any chance I can get lossless compression that way?

Solution

  • Texture compression, as opposed to regular image compression, is designed for one specific purpose: being a texture. And that means fast random access of data.

    Lossless compression formats do not tend to do well when it comes to random access patterns. The major lossless compression formats are some form of RLE or table-based encoding. These are adequate for decompressing the entire dataset at once, but they're terrible at being able to know in which memory location the value for texel (U,V) is.

    And that question gets asked a lot when accessing textures.

    As such, there are no lossless hardware texture compression formats.

    Your options are limited to the following:

    1. Use texture memory as a kind of cache. That is, when you determine that you will need a particular image in this frame, decompress it. This could be done on the CPU or GPU (via compute shaders or the like). Note that for fast GPU decompression, you will have to come up with a compression scheme that takes advantage of parallel execution. Most lossless compression formats are not particularly parallel.

      If a particular image has not been used in some time, you put it in a "subject to be reused" pile. And if you need to decompress a new image, you can take the least-recently-used image off of that pile, rather than constantly creating/destroying OpenGL texture objects.

    2. Build your own lossless compression scheme, designed for your specific needs. If you absolutely need exact texel values from the texture, I assume that you aren't using linear filtering when accessing these textures. So these aren't really colors; they're arbitrary information about a texel.

      I might suggest field compression (improved packing of your bits in the available space). But without knowing what your data actually is or means, I can't say whether your particular use case is amenable to it.