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%…
source:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/10/04/Game_file_sizes_could_soon_be_70_smaller/ :o
That means much faster and better performance even on slower systems powered by some older models of video cards… heaven for gamers and of course revolution in game/multimedia development. Wonderful news ! I trully hope this will become a standard one day.
Well, I wouldn’t be very optimistic (as usually, with similar claims). They say that the quality is the same after the size reduction, but other people might have different opinions. There may be additional CPU power needed to uncompress the reduced textures, you’ll need to update the game engines, “train people to use the new system” (whatever it means)… let’s wait with judgement until somebody uses it for real 