Friday, March 30, 2018

BC7 endpoint search using endpoint extrapolation

Convection Texture Tools is now roughly equal quality-wise with NVTT at compressing BC7 textures despite being about 140 times faster, making it one of the fastest and highest-quality BC7 compressors.

How this was accomplished turned out to be simpler than expected.  Recall that Squish became the gold standard of S3TC compressors by implementing a "cluster fit" algorithm that ordered all of the input colors on a line and tried every possible grouping of them to least-squares fit them.

Unfortunately, using this technique isn't practical in BC7 because the number of orderings has rather extreme scaling characteristics.  While 2-bit indices have a few hundred possible orderings, 4-bit indices have millions, most BC7 mode indices are 3 bits, and some have 4.

With that option gone, most BC7 compressors until now have tried to solve endpoints using various types of endpoint perturbation, which tends to require a lot of iterations.

Convection just uses 2 rounds of K-means clustering and a much simpler technique based on a guess about why Squish's cluster fit algorithm is actually useful: It can create endpoint mappings that don't use some of the terminal ends of the endpoint line, causing the endpoint to be extrapolated out, possibly to a point that loses less accuracy to quantization.

Convection just tries cutting off 1 index at each end, then 1 index at both ends.  That turned out to be enough to place it near the top of the quality benchmarks.

Now I just need to add color weighting and alpha weighting and it'll be time to move on to other formats.

1 comment:

  1. This approach (of creating unused endpoint mappings that causes extrapolation) is what the crunch lib does in DXT1. It does all sorts of stuff to get quality up, because each individual endpoint can be shared by dozens/hundreds of blocks.

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