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ASTC Texture Compression

8bit
Protege
I know with the Note 4 and Adreno GPU we were encouraged to use ETC2. Much of the documentation still says to use ETC2. For example this page:
https://developer.oculus.com/documentat ... -hardware/

In regards to the S6, I have been reading about Mali GPUs (Mali T-760 MP8), and have seen this guide recommend using ASTC compression over ETC2.

The guide is here (see Section 4.2.3 ASTC texture compression):
http://www.malideveloper.com/documentat ... ile-games/

The excerpt says this:
If your device supports ASTC, use it to compress the textures in your 3D content. If your device does not support ASTC, try using ETC2.


ASTC offers texture compression with high quality, low bitrate and has many control options. It includes the following features: • Bit rates range from 8 bits per pixel (bpp) to less than 1bpp. This enables you to fine-tune the tradeoff of file size against quality. • Support for 1 to 4 color channels. • Support for both low dynamic range (LDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) images. • Support for 2D and 3D images. • Support for selecting different combinations of features.


This leads me to two questions:
1. Does the Mali T-760 MP8 support ASTC compression?
2. Where would I go to find that info?

I can, and probably will, just try out the different options to see what works but what I'm interested in more is getting documentation that would help point me to the right answer. Thanks.
2 REPLIES 2

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
Hello!

All variants of the Gear VR support ASTC. The correct place to check is in the GL_EXTENSIONS string returned by the EGL context. ASTC is a good format and it's definitely worth using on this platform. ETC2 is also supported.

Note that, under Unity 4.x, ASTC and ETC2 are (inappropriately) runtime decoded if you target OpenGL ES 2.

8bit
Protege
Thanks @chrispruett for the detailed response.
Yeah I'm leaning toward native app but thanks for the warning about Unity 4/GLES2.