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fatslob-:O on 04 September 2017
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Pemalite said:

Delta Colour Compression does reduce bandwidth demands though, which means there is more room for say... Texturing.

Correct you can compress normal maps with texture compression, depending on compression algorithm of course, not all texture compression schemes do compress normal maps.

Lightmaps are probably going to stay for the immediate future.

Shadow map compression is already happening in 3dc+

Technically you can compress normal maps with just about any compression algorithms that support RGB channels ... (Which is just about every commercially available hardware accelerated texture compression algorithm's on GPUs, although quality may be variable.) 

Lightmaps probably will be staying for the immediate future ...

Shadow map compression may very well be a real thing since shadow map texels are generated but we're already applying some sort of shadow LOD optimization by doing cascaded shadow mapping ... 

Shadow mapping in general is a dumb idea. What we probably want are solutions based on methods for hardware accelerated conservative rasterization like Nvidia's research frustum traced raster shadows or SDF based shadows (bonus is proper penumbra widening for more realistic soft shadowing and it comes with ambient occlusion as well) ... 

Or even filterable shadow maps like non-linearly quantized moment shadow maps ... 

Pemalite said:

Well. There are caveats like with any technology.
AMD does have hardware support for Partially Resident Textures and the concept is sound.

*snip*

Even the latest doom game used Partially Resident Textures... And that game not only looked fantastic... But it ran silky smooth even on average hardware.

The last line is not true, what Doom uses is a texture atlas like many other modern games ... 

Partially resident textures was a good idea at first but there was no way to update the tile mappings from the GPU so you had to do it from the CPU and do that roundtrip causes a lot of overhead which can stall the game ...