Monthly Archive: February 2012

Understanding BCn Texture Compression Formats

The current state of the art in GPU-supported texture compression is a set of seven formats called BC1 through BC7. These formats are used by almost all realistic 3D games to reduce the memory footprint of their texture maps. In this article, I’m going to get under the hood of each of the seven BCn formats, explain how they work, and show how their features make them effective for compressing different kinds of images. Read more…