nVidia heeft bekend gemaakt dat Microsoft een licentie heeft genomen op haar Volume Texture Compression technologie waarmee drie dimensionale textures in filesize geplet kunnen worden. VTC zal dankzij deze deal geïntegreerd worden in toekomstige versies van DirectX:
March 23, 2000 — In a move that will help bring stunning 3D graphics to internet users, NVIDIA™ Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) and Microsoft® Corp. today announced the adoption of NVIDIA's technology for Volume Texture Compression Format (VTC) for Microsoft DirectX APIs. Today's 3D internet sites are plagued with inadequate image quality due to bandwidth constraints of transmitting high-resolution textures over standard communications systems. Even for high-performance PCs, the limited amount of texture storage forces game developers to use lower-resolution textures, resulting in imagery that lacks detail. Scheduled for release in 2000, NVIDIA's VTC format enables a superior level of image quality that allows web and content developers to produce 3D objects that depict their natural characteristics.[...] Limited texture storage has historically been a problem for game application developers, forcing compromises in image quality and performance. The texture-storage problem is exacerbated by volume textures, which are truly 3D data, unlike traditional 2D textures. Volume textures are so much larger than 2D textures that the texture compression format becomes extremely important. NVIDIA's volume texture compression format organizes 3D volume-texture data to take advantage of the 3D nature of the data, which increases the effective texture bandwidth by an enormous factor. NVIDIA has developed a proprietary method to reorder the 3D data within a volumetric image cube to account for the linear accessing required for the optimal use of the memory system of a typical computer system.
