Efficient High Dynamic Range Texture Compression.pdf

Efficient High Dynamic Range Texture Compression ¨ Kimmo Roimela, Tomi Aarnio and Joonas Itaranta Nokia Research Center∗ Figure 1: Artifacts resulting from high contrast diagonal edges. Left to right: original, Roimela et al. [2006], our method, and Munkberg et al. [2007]. The method of Roimela et al. exhibits luminance distortion at the edge, whereas the latter two images are lossless for all practical purposes. Image courtesy of OpenEXR ( Tree.exr). Abstract 1 Introduction We present a novel compression method for high dynamic range Texturing is a key feature in real-time rendering, and texture band- (HDR) textures, targeted for future graphics hardware. Identifying width is one of the most common bottlenecks in graphics perfor- that the existing solutions provide either very high image quality mance. With the transition towards full high-dynamic-range (HDR) or very simple hardware implementation, we aim to achieve both processing in modern graphics accelerators, HDR texturing is be- features in a single solution. coming increasingly attractive. This typically means even more tex- ture data and even higher bandwidth requirements. Our approach improves upon an existing technique by incorporat- While texture compression is a standard bandwidth-saving fea- ing a simple chrominance coding that allows overall image quality