I haven’t tried it yet, but i’d like to gather some opinions on this:
I’m generating a set of textures on the GPU. These are generated once, and then reused for thousands of frames (so it’s not dynamically updated every frame). Yesterday i discovered that i was using more than 500 Mb of textures… so i’d better compress them.
Now i’m wondering, we all know that decompression is hardware-accelerated… but is compression accelerated too ?
Typically, i’ll render my texture in the color buffer or in a PBuffer, and use glCopyTexSubImage2D to a texture created with a compressed internal format.
What i’d like to know is, will i loose performance by doing that ? Will the driver have to read back the color buffer, compress the texture on the CPU, and upload the result back… ?
Y.