PC.IGN brengt het nieuws dat 3dfx een eigen texture compressie technologie heeft geïntroduceerd. FXT1 heet het grapje, en het moet gaan concurreren met S3TC:
3dfx has announced that it is making a new compression technology, FXT1, available to the public – making future Voodoo cards able to compete with other cards offering 32-bit texture support and texture compression. The technology can be used on Windows, Macintosh, BeOS, Linux and other platforms, and is built for cross-platform pollination, in order to support the multiple OS development of games such as Quake III and the upcoming Halo.The key to the texture technology works by treating each texture as a multiple 4 x 4 or 4 x 8 texel block. Four different compression algorithms are applied to the texel block, and the one with the highest results is then used to display the block. This allows for a compression ratio of up to 8:1 says the company, with 32-bit texture images of 256 x 256 going from 256 Kbytes of storage to 32 Kbytes.
By offering the technology free of cost, 3dfx hopes to cause support for the technology which will be utilized on all future 3dfx chipsets. This, on top of the T-Buffer digital effects engine which was recently announced, means that 3dfx now has a well-placed answer to S3's question.
Bungie has already spoken out about having used the new technology for its games Halo and Oni, as well as Loki entertainment (which ports games to Linux) and Flatland Rover, a 3DML web application. More companies will certainly make announcements in the future regarding support of the free technology. For more information, or to download the FXT1 Encode/Decode Binaries and Source Code, browse the 3dfx's developer page. [break] Blijkbaar wil 3dfx hiermee de bestaande S3TC standaard uit de weg rossen. Volgens Extreme Hardware schijnt dit ook nog nut te hebben:[/break] The main benefit to FXT1 Texture Compression is that it is a completely open-source technology. Furthermore, it has cross-platform and cross-API support. Thus, developers aren't limited to using Direct X 6 if they want to use texture compression. Additionally, since FXT1 is open-source, any hardware can support it provided that proper driver adaptation is done.
