The Half-Life and Unreal teams, despite all the limitations they faced still produced games with excellent eye candy. Still, no matter how good Half-Life, Unreal, or Final Fantasy VII looks today, it could even be better if it were not for texture limitations. Diligent artists and programmers making 3D games always need to consider texture limitations in their work and their artistic dream is often compromised. Texture Compression DirectX v6 has introduced a new trick that might help cure the problem, texture compression. Texture compression is not only important because it increases the amount of textures one can store, but also because as textures and resolution increase in size, the bandwidth needed increases.
Texture compression is another method of reducing bandwidth.
The S3 Savage3D has an excellent implementation of texture compression. One of the features exclusive to the Savage3D is its Auto Texture Compression. This feature automatically compresses textures for games that were not directly programmed to do so. Thus, S3's texture compression works with all games, DirectX 6 or not. As the game is being loaded, your host CPU compresses the textures before sending it to the chip.