Real-Time YCoCg-DXT Compression

A high performance texture compression technique is introduced, which exploits the DXT5 format available on today's graphics cards. The compression technique provides a very good middle ground between DXT1 compression and no compression. Using the DXT5 format, textures consume twice the amount of memory of DXT1-compressed textures (a 4:1 compression ratio instead of 8:1). In return, however, the technique provides a significant gain in quality, and for most images, there is almost no noticeable loss in quality. In particular there is a consistent gain in RGB-PSNR of 6 dB or more for the Kodak Lossless True Color Image Suite. Furthermore, the technique allows for both real-time texture decompression during rasterization on current graphics cards, and high quality realtime compression on the CPU and GPU.