ASTC Compression Gets a CUDA Boost

[Stefan]

NVIDIA is using CUDA and the power of GeForce to accelerate Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) along multiple axes!

Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is a new standard for texture compression that provides development teams and art directors with the ability to balance texture quality and texture size. Texture compression is not new, but ASTC provides a far greater number of options than older standards. It has a wide spectrum of bit-rate selections, from 8bits/texel (4x4 tiles) to 0.89bits/texel (12x12 tiles). For more information on ASTC generally and how to best use it for different texture assets, check out NVIDIA's ASTC usage guide.
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We still have a lot of work ahead of us to achieve two axis parallelism but we are progressing nicely. The current implementation with data-parallelism is a huge leap from the CPU based encoder and should assist developers in their testing and usage of ASTC. To that end, we have posted an alpha version of our encoder in the Download Center.