Game Sizes could soon be smaller...

**Trooper** · 10-05-2006, 03:34 PM

One of the most interesting talks at London’s GDC (Games Developers Conference) this week came form one of the lesser known companies called Allegorithmic, who claim they will be able to reduce texture file sizes in games by up to 70%.

Their new programs, that they hope development artists will soon be using as an industry standard, are called ProFX and MaP Zone 2. Their ambition is to keep the graphical quality of game textures at the same standards as current games, whilst dramatically reducing the amount of data required for the game to work.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/10...be_70_smaller/

very interesting....maybe its time to stock up on floppys again..lol

**BHack** · 10-05-2006, 03:41 PM

I'm more interested in the effect this would have on actual game speed. If the textures are smaller then I don't need 512 megs of ram on my vdieo card, not to mention the texture can be transferred over the system BUS much quicker and thus giving me better framerates.

They don't mention that at all in the report though, so maybe I'm off.

**Maus** · 10-05-2006, 04:43 PM

Presumably though the processor would have to work harder doing its decompression magic on the smaller files.

**tau_neutrino** · 10-05-2006, 05:30 PM

Originally Posted by Maus

Presumably though the processor would have to work harder doing its decompression magic on the smaller files.

Maybe decompressing could be done when the game loads or sometime before the textures need to be loaded, and then stored in memory / virtual mem. I'm sure many games use this approach.

**Maus** · 10-05-2006, 06:09 PM

Either way, the benefits of a smaller file size will have to be offset by something, whether it's increased processor use, longer load times, greater RAM requirements, or whatever.

**Dick Blonov** · 10-05-2006, 07:25 PM

Originally Posted by tau_neutrino

Maybe decompressing could be done when the game loads or sometime before the textures need to be loaded, and then stored in memory / virtual mem. I'm sure many games use this approach.

Most compressed texture formats are uncompressed by the GPU. Some info here.

DB

**jaymind** · 10-05-2006, 08:10 PM

Sounds a bit like procedural textures - bult on the fly using algorithms.

**phaze** · 10-11-2006, 07:43 AM

The Sooner the better as far as im concerned.

Dark Messiah - Might and Magic is now available for preload and prepurchase on Steam. But it is nearly 10gig to Download.

That's gonna take days!