[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 00/27] intel: Add ETC2 compressed textures support

[Ian Romanick]

On 10/19/2012 11:32 PM, Philipp Klaus Krause wrote:
> On 20.10.2012 01:28, Anuj Phogat wrote:
>> This series lives on my etc2-v9 branch (https://github.com/aphogat/mesa).
>>
>> This series enables 8 out of 10 ETC2 texture formats for all Intel
>> hardware by simply decoding the ETC2 data into RGBX data at the time
>> of glCompressedTexImage2D. These patches can be tested using piglit
>> test case i have added for etc2 textures. Patches for the test are under
>> review on piglit mailing list.
>>
>> I'll soon post the patches for remaining 2 etc2 formats as well.
>>
>
> What's the purpose of this? Applications typically want a trade-off
> between graphics memory and bandwidth usage and quality, i.e. they offer
> a low-quality setting for users with slower hardware that uses texture
> compression and a higher quality setting for users with high-end
> hardware that can use uncompressed textures.
> Your patch gives them the worst of both: The quality of compressed
> textures at the memory and bandwidth usage of uncompressed textures.

Like Anuj said... this is a required feature of GLES3, and we're only 
going to enable it there.  It seems like an interesting EvoC project to 
look at transcoding ETC or ETC2 formats to other compressed formats.  It 
won't be conformant, but it may be better for some apps.