#GIMP DDS PLUGIN DXT5 SERIES#

I use DXT5 for normal maps, in my case, for STALKER normal maps which are unorthodox (Red Channel is the Specular/Roughness Channel, Green is the Z channel, Blue is Y- and Alpha is the Red Channel itself, X.) and sadly GIMP's compression with DXT5 is rather poor. The presence of that 'green slime' is also rather minimal.Īlso, to the left of the grip, you will see some small parts of the weapon, you will notice that Compressonator, while still having issues, kept the 'integrity' of the pixels better than GIMP. In GIMP, the contrast and gamma got compromised and you'll notice the 'green slime' that DXT1 is fond of appear more often.Ĭompressonator has it made a bit 'flat', but the contrast and gamma is still kept fairly well. To further my details, please observe the bottom-right, that is the gun's grip. tga) with Compressonator, default settings for DXT1 except for Quality which is set to 1.0 and these are the results:Īnd this is both textures merged into 'Difference' 'Refine Steps' is yet another special case, but more useful when doing Channel Weighting, so it's an optional addition as well.įor comparisons, I have saved a 1024x1024 weapon texture in GIMP and did the same (by using the uncompressed source texture and saving as. It also has support for 'DXT1 Alpha', this is more for 'special cases' though, if you'd like to add it, go ahead, but it's completely optional.

#GIMP DDS PLUGIN DXT5 SERIES#

It also has support for Channel Weighting, this is for those that want to manually change how the compression works, extremely useful for games that use unorthodox normal map formats (such as all the STALKER series games, Spellforce 3.), presets could even be made in GIMP but it's not necessary.

I propose the plugin to be updated, if not, completely replaced/overhauled through the use of a tool made by GPUOpen-Tools, named Compressonator, the link is here: įor further details, Compressonator has a much better compression algorithm for DXT1, in which if you set the 'Quality' option to 1.0 in it, it will be exactly like DXT5 but at much lower space, this is good for much older games. It also has low support for BC4 and BC5, meanwhile, no support at all for BC6 or BC7.

GIMP's DDS plugin is rather weak, it uses an old ugly algorithm for DXT1 and DXT5 compression which causes a lot of jaggies to appear. For All operating systems but preferably Windows.

Gimp dds plugin dxt5