+- XBMC Community Forum (http://forum.xbmc.org)
+-- Forum: Help and Support (/forumdisplay.php?fid=33)
+--- Forum: XBMC General Help and Support (/forumdisplay.php?fid=111)
+--- Thread: Compressed textures for FanArt - testing here with XBMC 2009-10-05 (r23431) or newer (/showthread.php?tid=59115)
- Geeba - 2009-10-05 21:49
Thanks Spiff/AnalogKid - better than I was expecting
- jmarshall - 2009-10-06 02:15
Great, 10 posts and zero testing
NPOT issues are taken care of. If the card doesn't support NPOT compressed textures (eg my ATI card under directx - seems ok under GL, but the driver may be taking care of it) then we already expand to a POT texture. This does have a large effect memory-wise ofcourse (1920x1080 -> 2048x2048) but it's still about a quarter of the memory, and that's assuming that a linear texture would be NPOT.
As for quality, there's some trickery we can do with DXT5 (double the size of DXT1) that'll get miles better picture quality than DXT1 gives, at the cost of twice the memory. Note that DXT5 offers zero benefit over DXT1 if there's no alpha involved. (For the curious, convert to YCoCg and store the Y in the alpha channel, with the Co and Cg in the R, G and B channels. The conversion from YCoCg to RGB is done in a shader on the GPU).
Now, I'd really appreciate some testing on this.
Thanks,
Jonathan
- AnalogKid - 2009-10-06 08:45
As soon as 23421 comes downstream to me (Via the Windows Auto Update tool). I'll give it a blast on OpenGL and DirectX builds.
Incidentally, the tool you provided needs the SGL libraries included with it for it to work.
- Geeba - 2009-10-06 09:03
Yep my windows box is needing an update - I'll try for this weekend.
- hotlobster - 2009-10-06 10:52
I'll test this after next svn update so.
Quick question, does fanarts are compressed in DXT1 automatically when the scrapper grab some jpg fanarts and <useddsfanart> is set to true ?
Or do we have to cron a daily compression in the fanarts directory ?
- spiff - 2009-10-06 13:04
obviously we won't be requiring a cron job if this goes golden! but currently, it does not convert them.
Results so far: - AnalogKid - 2009-10-06 18:05
OK...
Tested, and it works :-)
Findings:
1) Could see no obvious compression artefacts at 720p or 1080p (for photo style art)
2) Could see some very minor artefacts with some geographic art around, but cannot detect once nose no longer touches the screen
3) Could see no performance improvement (or degradation) using GMA945 and GMA950 in DX or GL modes.
4) Could see dramatic increase in image cache size (as mentioned in earlier posts)
Additional issues:
-The DDS converter (tbn to dds) is slow. It took 3 hours to convert my fanarts.
-The DDS converter has SxS issues on some PC's (definitely didn't like a virginal Vista SP2 pc)
-I wonder if it would be useful to have 'tbn' as a fallback (if the dds doesn't exist), or might this complicate testing with folks THINKING they're using DDS and aren't?
-Is it fanart only for a reason?... just because those are the largest images, or because it's a quick and dirty test?
-Regarding the NPOT issue... if the image is somehow 'adjusted' (read distorted) to 2048x2048, are we then asking the GPU to downscale it and distort it back to 1920x1080?...mute issue I suppose, since I couldn't visually tell. Would be curious to see if 1024x1024 upscaled to 1920 would be noticeable!
-Do we NEED the advanced settings?.. why not just see if the DDS exists, if so, use it... or is that check considered too much of a speed penalty?
-Where a DDS file doesn't exist for a movie, the home page fanart is momentarily seen (then overlayed via white rectangle). Not sure if this is a skin issue, but curious as to why there are two image draws (homescreen fanart, then movie/tvshow fanart).
- spiff - 2009-10-06 18:09
this is a test. if it works and there's no artifacts we will change. please ignore the advancedsetting and pretend its not there if it bugs you guys so much. 'la la la' and all that.
Uh oh... - AnalogKid - 2009-10-06 18:25
Update:
About 2% of the fanart has issues....
On the DX build, the fanart is considerably oversized (definitely width ways, and I think height too)
On the GL build, the very same fanarts are corrupted (and not recognisable).. a little like interlaced, then garbled!)
Will try to ascertain if this the DDS converter or XBMC, BUT, my logic says it must be XBMC since there's a difference in behaviour between the builds
oh and that 3 hours is gonna p**s folks of when doing a library scan!
Build is: 23436 for DX and GL
- hotlobster - 2009-10-06 19:21
I've tested it so.
No visible speed improvement or noticeable cpu difference on a C2D 3ghz.
But a HUGE difference of size. My Thumbnails folder was around 700 mo.
Now it's a 5 Go directory.