Slime wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression
> 
> I'm mostly pointing this out as a point of interest; I'm not sure how useful
> it would be in software (considering the speed loss you mention). You can
> use it to store an n by n image in the amount of memory that an n/2 by n/2
> image would take, with a small but noticeable loss in quality. Naturally, a
> cache can help improve speed.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that is a hardware-assisted algorithm that
is designed to trade access time for memory consumption. As such, it would
actually be slower to use is sufficient memory is available. Naturally, on a
graphics card this may _not_ be the case, and compression can help. The
trade off is that at least four times as much memory bandwidth is required
to access a pixel, due to interpolation...

	Thorsten

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