Any of you familiar with S3TC may have seen countless shots of modified versions of Unreal using S3TC levels (those cool Egyptian levels by Mark Hirsch). Whilst the S3TC texture compression scheme is more advanced than the other forms of compression such as vector quantized techniques and palletized textures, its usage/acceptance has been low to date. Despite its semi-inclusion in DirectX6.0, game developers have yet to move forward and implement S3TC into their games out-of-the-box. Shame… For a full list of titles head over to S3's site. Probably our pick from that list of games supporting S3TC that we're likely going to play over the next few months will be Quake III: Arena, Unreal Tournament and Soldier of Fortune (notice a disturbing trend here?).

The technique has been made available to game developers for almost 18months now, thus S3TC's last chance of wide acceptance rests with Xmas (can Ernest save them?). But there is 'another hope'… The Savage4 Xtreme lists AGP 4X support and providing this support is more than just 'sidebanding', the increased memory bandwidth available from AGP 4X will allow for even greater amounts of textures to be stored (AGP texturing) after being compressed in run-time via DirectX7.. Perhaps with AGP 2X's current memory bandwidth constraints game developers haven't deemed S3TC to be efficient enough? Clearly Camino can't come soon enough. And when it does, the technology will be available and the jury will finally be out on S3TC. Evangelize, evangelize, and evangelize! And if at first you don't succeed then try um... 'Re-evangelizing' and 're-assimilating' game artists away from incessantly using palletized textures…

Table shows S3TC's 6:1 compression capability, which can expand upon the amount of texture space available on CD Media.

Texture Size 2048x2048 1024x1024 512x512 256x256 128x128 64x64

24-bit 12,289KB 3,073KB 769KB 193KB 49KB 13KB

16-bit 8,193KB 2,049KB 513KB 129KB 33KB 9KB

8-bit 4,098KB 1,026KB 258KB 66KB 18KB 6KB

S3TC 2,097KB 524KB 131KB 32KB 8KB 2KB

S3TC with Mip-Maps 2,796KB 683KB 171KB 43KB 11KB 3KB