On November 18, 2020, WebGL held an engaging and informative virtual WebGL Meetup. Co-organizer of the event, Damon Hernandez, led the discussion and kicked off the meeting by having the Chair of WebGL, Ken Russell, giving an update on the latest WebGL progress along with some “Cool WebGL Stuff.” After the update, the guest speakers addressed several topics.
Create ASTC textures faster with the new astcenc 2.0 open source compression tool
Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is an advanced lossy texture compression format, developed by Arm and AMD and released as royalty-free open standard by the Khronos Group. It supports a wide range of 2D and 3D color formats with a flexible choice of bitrates, enabling content creators to compress almost any texture asset, using a level of compression appropriate to their quality and performance requirements.
ASTC is increasingly becom
Arm has released a new comprehensive ASTC Guide to help developers who wish to use ASTC technology to compress textures for 3D games and applications. The new guide contains a detailed ASTC algorithm overview, explains ASTC benefits, provides developers advice for achieving best compression results, and contains information on popular encoding tools -- as well as usage with game engines.
Game Developer Adoption and Attitudes Towards ASTC Texture Compression
ASTC (Adaptable Scalable Texture Compression) is an exceptionally efficient compression technology, which allows encoding of a wide variety of texture formats at bit-rates of 8 bits per pixel to below 1 bit per pixel. ASTC was contributed by Arm, developed under the cooperative process at Khronos® and is royalty-free when used with Khronos’ OpenGL® ES and Vulkan® APIs. ASTC enables the size of textures used in 3D games and applications to be significantly reduced while being downloaded and stored – saving memory size, access bandwidth and reducing overall application size while retaining high image quality. These benefits are especially valuable on mobile platforms leading to ASTC becoming the most widely used texture compression format for Vulkan and OpenGL ES applications on Android.
SIGGRAPH Highlights: OpenGL’s 25th, BOF Blitz Party, and News
In early August the team was at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, where we celebrated OpenGL’s 25th anniversary at the BOF Blitz Party. We also announced a new website, as well as OpenGL 4.6, a growing glTF ecosystem, and the Vulkan Portability Initiative.
After the Khronos BOF Blitz at Siggraph, there’s the Khronos After-Party; Don’t Miss It!
If you are going to be at the 44th SIGGRAPH, the largest conference and exhibition in computer graphics and exhibition techniques, from July 30 – August 3, 2017 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, don’t miss the opportunity to eat, drink, and learn about all things Khronos!
WebGL 2.0 is a long-awaited feature upgrade which delivers the OpenGL ES 3.0 feature set, bringing the browser’s graphical capabilities closer to the state of the art. WebGL 2.0 is shipping now in the Firefox and Chrome browsers, and all WebGL implementers have declared intent to support it.