Odd name, what is it?
"Oodle Texture is an SDK for encoding of GPU textures to BC1-BC7 formats that can be compressed dramatically smaller. Oodle Texture can make maximum quality BCN encodings that are 5-15% smaller after compression. With rate distortion optimization, Oodle Texture can make high visual quality encodings that are 20-50% smaller. Most usage requires no runtime processing at all."
"At RAD, we previously developed Oodle Kraken, part of Oodle Data Compression, which provides super fast decompression with good compression ratios, which makes Kraken great for game data loading where you need high speed. But Kraken is generic, it works on all types of data and doesn't try to figure out data-specific optimizations. Oodle Texture is able to greatly decrease the size that a following Kraken compression gets by preparing the textures in ways that make them more compressible."
So Kraken is great for general compression, but Oodle Texture compression, is better when its about reduceing the size of textures.
"For an example of what Oodle Texture can do, on a real game data test set :
127 MB block compressed GPU textures, mix of BC1-7
78 MB with zip/zlib/deflate
70 MB with Oodle Kraken
40 MB with Oodle Texture + Kraken"
Chris1515's take on it :
"It means the compression ratio for texture can go up to 3,17 to 1. It means here the SSD can go up to 17,4 GB/s. But games are not done only of textures but mostly..., so this is insane."
So how much of a game's size is from textures?
"Modern games use a huge amount of BCN texture data. Many games are reaching 100+ GB, and ~80% or more of that size is in BCN textures. Shrinking the BCN textures to half their previous compressed size will make a dramatic difference in game sizes."
So smaller games sizes! Sweet!
Does the Xbox have something like this?
Answear: Yes.
Xbox: Zlib (data compression) + BCPack (texture compression)
PS5: Kraken (data compression) + Oodle Texture (texture compression).
So both are useing compression both for general data, and also for their textures.
This begs the question... what differnces are there in the methodes?
"Oodle Kraken is a standard in the industry. The compression ratio is a bit better than Zlib but it decodes much faster than Zlib. On PS4 decode on the CPU was faster than use the hardware Zlib decompressor sometimes." - Chris 1515
So Kraken is slightly better at compression than Zlib, and is decoded alot faster (which could lead to small performance gains for the PS5).
The PS4 apparently also had Zlib compression, and the fixed funktion hardware for decodeing wasnt great on it. Maybe why they went a differnt route with something newer, that is faster decoded?
What else is there to this story?
Well apparently Sony aquired a blanket wide, license for developers, that want to make a game on a PS5.
Something like this doesnt really matter too much for larger studios (they can easily afford licenseing fee's), however for smaller indie studios, haveing access to stuff like this can ease their financial burdens abit.
What does this mean for us, as gamers?
Smaller game size (if you can shrink 80%+ of a game size, down by half....)
Widespread usage
Reduced memory size usage
Reduced memory bandwidth usage
So texture compression can help with performance and storage at the same time.
"Cool what they’re saying about PS5 hardware decompressor pulling textures from storage and putting straight into vram, no processing overhead at all. Definitely buying them at least some performance back overall making their 10TF go a bit further." - DavidDesu
The PS5 is will slightly weaker (17%+) than the XSX, in terms of GPU compute, but theres small things here and there,
which might reduce the actual real world performance differnce between the two.
Thoughts?
The PS5 SSD is even faster than those 8-9 GB/s compressed, they spoke about, because that was without factoring in the Oodle Texture compression aspect. If its mainly loading textures, the SSD could reach upwards of 17,4 GB/s.
Thats a huge jump from what the Xbox Series X is supposedly capable of doing.
Its gonna be intresting to see if theres any real world differnce from this, apart from just load times in games.
