Texture Compression And Its Recent Trends . * Mrs . Archana

Texture compression is a specialized form of image compression designed for storing texture maps in 3D computer graphics rendering systems. Texture compression is an important technique in graphics processing units (GPUs) for saving memory bandwidth. Unlike conventional image compression algorithms, texture compression algorithms are optimized for random access. Therefore, the variable-rate sequential coding used in many image compression systems cannot be employed, whereas lossy, fixed-rate block-based approaches are mainly used for texture compression algorithms. Secondly it is highly desirable to be able to render directly from the compressed texture data. Therefore in order not to impact rendering performance, decompression must be fast. Along with these requirements high image quality and compression ratio both are needed. This paper gives an overview and comparison between different types of 3-D graphics texture compression standards and algorithms available.