Microsoft DirectX 8.0 (C++) |
Texture maps are digitized images drawn on three-dimensional shapes to add visual detail. They are mapped onto these shapes during rasterization, and the process can consume large amounts of both the system bus and memory. To reduce the amount of memory consumed by textures, Microsoft® Direct3D® supports the compression of texture surfaces. Some Direct3D devices support compressed texture surfaces natively. On such devices, once you have created a compressed surface and loaded the data into it, the surface can be used in Direct3D like any other texture surface. Direct3D handles decompression when the texture is mapped to a 3-D object.