Texture Compression Existing Methods

Most currently used options for DXT texture compression, for newbies:

First, what is DXT?
- It's a compressed GPU format, one of many. We want to end up with this format on our GPU, because the GPU has hardware that makes reading and decoding this very efficient. It's a family of basic formats for desktop GPU's-- so this doesn't cover Android, iOS, or higher-end (better quality) desktop formats.

JPEG->DXT
- This option starts with the image saved as a JPEG, which stores the image in about the fourth of the space DXT does-- huge! It then decodes the JPEG and encodes DXT in realtime.

Losslessly compressed DXT
- This technique involves losslessly compressing the already-compressed DXT file, and then decoding before sending to the GPU.

Crunch
- In this technique, we use crunch to compress the image to a special .crn format, and then transcode it directly to DXT.

Our new compressor
- It'll be similar to crunch, but faster and will support more than just DXT

Why not benchmark other formats like PVRTC (iOS) and ETC/ASTC (Android)?
- We can and probably will! For this round, we're curious how our compressor will compare to existing methods, and crunch will be similar in technique (but only supports DXT).