Allegorithmic has during the Games Developer Conference released information about a new technology, which will makes life a lot easier for both gamers and game developers. It has namely developed applications for game developers that will make it possible to compress textures in games a lot more efficient than previously. The applications are called ProFX and MaP Zone 2 and will be able to reduce the size of a texture with up to 70%. The compression is completely lossless, which means that they will look just as good as the uncompressed textures. With a game using 1GB of textures you would be able to shrink it down to 300MB.
This makes it possible for game developers to continue developing games with bigger and more detailed textures without having to worry about the space required. An example they brought up was the game Robolitz which will be launched for Xbox Live and only had to be 50MB. By using Allegorithmic’s compresstion they managed to reduced the size of the textures to less than 280KB and this was with a game using the Unreal 3 engine. Pressumably it’s mainly games and media that is distributed over the Internet that will be affected byt this technology, but since Xbox 360 is often criticized for its relatively low storage capacity, since it uses DVD discs, we can clearly see a market there as well.
”The biggest impact however will be the benefits this will have to digital distribution. Games with texture quality and diversity matching Half Life 2 may soon be available in minutes of downloading rather than hours – for gamers this can only be a good thing.”
