Civilization V texture compression revealed

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:19:56 -0400

Yesterday, at the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering in Prague, Dan Baker of Firaxis Games presented the paper "Variable bit rate GPU texture decompression" paper.

This is work started by Dr. Marc Olano (director of the UMBC Computer Science game development track) while on sabbatical at Firaxis, and being continued by graduate student Wesley Griffin for his PhD dissertation. The paper was written by Dr. Olano, Dan Baker, Wesley Griffin, and Firaxis graphics programmer (and UMBC graduate) Joshua Barczak. It details how Civilization V can use the newest graphics cards to reduce the size of data that it stores and speed the transition between scenes in the game.

One of the Civilization V "benchmark modes" also runs the algorithm described in this paper. This benchmark has been used by several graphics industry reporters to compare the computational capabilities of different graphics cards.