hjs schrijft dat Bjorn 3D wat meer info heeft over de S3 Texture Compression support die in de nieuwe Detonator drivers zullen worden geïmplementeerd, vanaf versie 5.08. Een nVidia developer stuurde wat benchmarks op waaruit blijkt dat de performance met S3TC enabled ongeveer even snel is als in standaard 16-bit. Aan de bijgeleverde Quake III screenshot hebben we weinig omdat die niet geschoten is van S3TC enhanced textures.
"Hi Bjorn! Here is couple screenshots from Q3 demo using pre-release GeForce drivers that have s3tc enabled in opengl.Resolution of these textures are same but I drawed couple arrows to point the difference between normal and s3tc textures. To me it looksgreat, not much detail lost and frame rate seems to be increased.Sky texture is mayby only texture that suffers when using s3tc.. PS. I am registered developer (NVIDIA) so I won't spread drivers aroundbut you can publish these pictures and comments, but to be safe, I wouldlike to remain anonymous :-)" I quickly mailed back to him to get him to do some benchmarkings at the higher resolutions to see how much it helps: "I did quick test with 1600*1200 (P2-400, AsusV6600 120/150, detonator 5.08) 32bit screen, 32bit texture(w/o s3tc): 8.0fps
32bit screen, 16bit texture(w/o s3tc): 14.6.0fps
32bit screen, 16&32bit texture( s3tc): 16.1fps So, speedwice s3tc is about 16bit level,.."