Gamers might not really appreciate the texture work that goes into video games, but they will instantly notice texture pop-in or low resolution textures. This can be caused by bad texture compression, which can be a difficult task for developers. Google is here to help with this particular problem.
Colt McAnlis from Google gave a GDC talk last week that spoke on the problem of texture compression and how to compress even more. This would allow games to use more memory for other features with textures taking up less memory.
The talk, which lasts a little over 30 minutes, gives tips on how to compress textures up to 50 percent. This technology was used in id Software’s release of Rage last year. While some people complained about low res textures, it’s important to realize that Rage was streaming a lot of textures at once which kept the instance of texture pop-in at a lower rate than on other engines like Unreal Engine 3.
You can check out the entire talk below. If you are a developer, you will want to pay attention. It’s pretty exciting to see Google talking at length about game development. It will also be interesting to see if this is indicative of Google getting serious into game development.
